His dad's "colored" remark is typical of earlier Southern generations. It may get your dander up, but let me assure you, my friend is lucky his dad's "that kind" of old folk. The please-let-me-evaporate-now mortification is much worse when, say, your maternal grandfather launches into his "white monkeys / black monkeys" monologue. Trust me.My maternal grandfather was a puzzle to me. He was a kind and generous man, if outspoken and opinionated. He would stop and help anyone--black or white--who needed it. He routinely took in needy stray dogs. He was gentle and funny with us grandchildren. I loved him.
But as I aged, I became aware of his racist beliefs, and they chafed. He threw me out of his house once, when I was fifteen, for disagreeing with him. That was the last time I engaged him in meaningful conversation; after that, I joined my mother, father, and every other sane adult who spent time with him, in just listening quietly for a few minutes before finding a reason to leave the room. ("Tricky bladder. Gotta go!")
If my maternal grandfather was a vocal racist, my paternal grandmother was a thoughtless one. Someone who just grew up with segregation and never thought much about it one way or another. She used to call the 40-year-old black man who took care of her yard "that nice colored boy." She didn't mean it badly (in contrast to my N-word-using maternal grandfather). She was no oppressor, but she wasn't an agent of change, either.
I carry the legacy of being a Southern girl around with me everywhere. Its tendrils even reach me here in Holland. For a while, we had a client of my husband's company over for dinner whenever he was in town. The first time Joe walked in, I felt my heritage looming up. Decided not to say I came from the South, lest this educated black man from New Jersey immediately judge me to be some dumb, prissy, racist white girl.
It only got worse when my Dutch husband, fuzzy on the finer points of the gaping Mason-Dixon chasm that is the American past, helpfully divulged my North Carolina roots. Joe chimed in with a charming anecdote about the backwards state of life in South Carolina, where his grandparents now live. How he felt the stares of the coon-huntin' locals bore into his ebony back. How he couldn't wait to get out of the cesspool of inbred racism and back to sanity.Well, he didn't say it quite like that, but I figured that's what he meant.
Once the damage was done, I figured the only way to redeem myself, the evening, and my husband's business relationship was to point out exactly how non-racist I was. I did this by describing my grandfather. (Some readers will recognize the onset of Poorly Timed, Sadly Unfortunate Verbal Diarrhea.) And then my grandmother. And then showing Joe the pictures of both, hanging on our family photo wall in the downstairs bathroom. Yeah.
Fortunately, Joe seemed to understand what I was so desperately trying to convey, and the evening was long and enjoyable. Though I don't think he went to the restroom even once.
3 comments:
Great post Kisa. I remember in the 70s here there was a programme on tv that would be considered un-airable today as it did countenance racist views. I had many a heated debate with my father who seemed to don his rascist hat every time it was on. Thankfully, the world has and is still moving on, though I feel sure that in the heartlands there are still some very stagnant race ideas. But you know Obama may just help change it. More people than ever before got up off their bums and voted. Hopefully, the future may be brighter.... Fx
My Dutch mum could say the most unfortunate things - about everything, incl. 'foreigners' of all kinds. Thouhg she was kind and warmhearted she reularly made my toes curl.
I try to avoid it, but sometimes that is difficult. I always forget which description is insulting (coloured is wrong, black is allrigt, but can I say brown too?) and if someone really is a lot darker than I it often seems weird and contried to avoid the subject, as if you are very consiously not noticing a very visible fact.
With kids that is hard in any case... I remember when a white girlfriend brought her very dark boyfriend and at a certain point he pulled up is trouserleg because his sock had succumbed to gravity. My middle son looked very suprised and said: "but you are brown *under* your cloths too!!". Fortunately said friend fancied guys with a sense of humor...
Same son remarked about a schoolmate that she was a nice friend but that he couldn't fall in love with her because brown was not his colour. I was completely embarrassed and shocked so asked about other colours. According to him he really just felt that shade of brown wouldn't suit him. Black was fine, red was fine, but with yellow he first had to see what kind of yellow it was... How do you respond to that?
Two of my cousins are married to people of colour, both have kids, and my kids never made a remark about their colour at all. I'm not even sure they actually consiously register it.
Fi - I'm still so incredibly psyched that America's finally ready for a black president. Finally over that artificial divide. Change takes so, so long, but in my 40 years I've seen so much progress. That really gives one hope that the world may someday be a place of enjoyable diversity instead of a world of "scary" differences.
DM - The right description depends on to whom you're talking. Colored is now very passé (and was originally the polite *white* term, so never very "in" with blacks themselves, though the NAACP organization *is* still called National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). I'm sure there are folks who don't like my use of "black" and prefer "African American." I don't like that, as it implies I should be called "Irish-English-Dutch-Native American American" :-) .
Black, like white, is short, sweet, relatively accurate (hey, we're not milk-colored either, so the inaccuracy goes both ways) and essentially neutral, so it has my preference.
Funny stories about your son, but I understand your mortification. Kids say things that make us sound like flaming ogres, racists, and discriminators extraordinaire to random strangers. After all, the stranger can't know if the kid is parroting your belief system or not. And people often do assume they are.
Children are lovely that way; they say things that mortify us, but only because we'd mean bad things if *we* said them. The kids don't mean anything bad at all. If you think about it, not liking someone's skin color (in the aesthetic sense, not the historically-charged sense) is as good a reason for not choosing to date them as not liking their sense of humor or the way they dress. :)
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