Roger Ebert's Voice

[filkertom]

Over the past several years, writer and film critic has lost the ability to speak. However, he still has his voice... the written word. His most recent column, on racism, is amazing.

How did you "know" about people of races different from your own? I had a math teacher in 2nd grade, a soft-spoken gentleman ironically named Mr. Brown, whom all the kids loved, but who had to leave the school because the parents were freaked out by him. We cried on his last day, and threw him as much of a party as second-graders can muster.

Comments

[virtualvirtue.livejournal.com]

Went to school with people of all different races, colors, and religions from kindergarten on. Even living in white bread suburbia, we lived near enough to Chicago to have a great deal of diversity in our schools.

[fair-witness.livejournal.com]

First person of color I can remember being a semi-regular presence in my life was the Rev. Brown, a colleague of my father's. (My father, btw, is a Methodist pastor who did his seminary as well as his doctoral work in the South during the 60s and 70s.) I'm not sure I remember when I first met him; it seems like he was always a friend of the family.

He was a very joyous man, great with kids, who didn't just walk with his God--he danced, metaphorically speaking. I remember him as a very vigorous, vital, energetic person. Years later, when I saw a photo of him with our family towards the end of his life, I was shocked at how small and old he appeared. He was one of those people who could never truly be captured via still photography.

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't know.

I grew up in a town with so few non-white people that I don't think I ever noticed one till I was in my teens. Like you, I had a teacher come to my school, a Nigerian man named Vivian Pinto. I remember a group of the girls in my class made fun of his accent, and their parody became a sort of private language for them, which I thought was stupid and unpleasant, but I don't remember feeling anything one way or the other about him. He was a teacher, someone in authority, one of the many in the world outside my head who merited respect and obedience, and I accepted that.

Obliviousness and self-obsession. It worked for me, folks. Of course the downside is my tendency to think only in terms of white characters and cultures when writing...but it would never have occurred to me that non-white people couldn't be allowed to be anywhere (on a picture, in a school or a restaurant), or to do anything (teach school, heal the sick, run for office). And my parents never once tried to communicate any prejudice to me, whatever they might have felt about it themselves.

[ladystarblade.livejournal.com]

I grew up standard Irish-Scottish-Swedish-German Caucasian in inner-city Indianapolis, attending a public elementary school that was 79% non-white at the time. My sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Layne, was a towering 6ft, 6in tall VERY black man born in Barbados. My music teacher/choir director, Ms. McFarland, was a larger-than life boisterous black woman. A friend of my paternal grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee. A co-worker of my father's who came around a lot was born to 1st-generation Chinese immigrants. Another soldier in his office hailed from Morocco, and in fact gave my father a gift of a Qur'an in Arabic.

Hell, I grew up AS the minority, and it really wasn't until I moved to Southern Indiana and went into a school with three black students *total* and where the upper-class, white, self-described 'hicks' still told ni***er jokes that I got severe culture shock. As in, "holy crap, if you talked like that where I grew up, you might not be dead, but you'd wish you were!"

Between that first environment and basically growing up in the inclusive atmosphere of conventions, I would like to think that I've always seen the peoples of the world as a fascinating rainbow of diversity rather than something 'different' to be feared.

And Ebert has been, and continues to be, my favorite 'critic' and one of my favorite writers. He (and his amazing wife) never cease to amaze me.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

In elementary school, we had one black kid, and one black teacher. And then midyear an Indian girl joined us. But we were taught about her same as everybody else: "This is a person, treat her with respect." And we did.

Fast forward a decade or so, my junior year in high school. The high school was about 10% black. Some of them got along with us; some of them, by their own choice AFAICT, did not. Those that did were the most popular kids in school... and I remember when, Homecoming night, they called the name of that one black kid I'd gone to grade school with.. and I held my breath for half a second, thinking, oh, *expletive*, what are all these white parents gonna think? And then the stands went nuts like they usually do, and I breathed a sigh of relief...

And I realized decades later that us kids had all *talked* about her to our parents, and they knew who she was and that we liked her... she was not just an object, but a person...

And what made us kids different from most was we were taught to treat *everybody* that way. Not that I always got it right... but that's what I learned.

As for Roger Ebert... *damn*. Not just his take on understanding those being discriminated against, but taking the next step and trying - and admitting failure, but taking a stab at it anyway - to understand those doing the shouting....

yeah. I do believe that guy is doing his best work now... with no other voice than fingers on keys.

[alymid.livejournal.com]

When I was young (ages 4-11 or so) my family lived in our first home. I grew up on the "North Shore" - northern suburbs of Chicago (upper middle-class to upper class). In general the north shore had a statistically large community of jews, small to middling amount of asian and sub-contitent families, and very few african american families.

But the neighborhood our first house was in, was probably one of the more integrated in a very very white land. I hadn't though much of it, or really noticed much, there were a number of kids in our neighborhood that were my age and we all went to school together.

But I remember when we sold our house. I was listening in to a conversation that the adults didn't know I was hearing. My parents talking to the realtor about why they were having such a hard time selling the house. Apparently in our largely white suburb, it was harder to find families willing to move into the "black" neighborhood.

So growing up in that neighborhood, I suppose you could say I always "knew", and I knew from history classes in school, and my parents talking about their experiences in the '60s, but I didn't really think about it as a NOW thing until then.

Got curious and looked up the demographics (http://bit.ly/apx4X9) - it is now far far whiter than I remember it being, but it was a long long time ago.

[aiela.livejournal.com]

Until I was six, I grew up in the little small towns along the St. Clair River, where there weren't any people of color whatsoever. When I was three or four I was visiting my dad, who had moved back down to Detroit after my parents broke up. We were in line at a party store for something or other (cigarettes for my dad, I suspect), and there was a black guy in line next to us. I exclaimed "Look daddy, a n--!"

I had never seen a person of color other than on TV, and had apparently picked up the term from my teenaged siblings. (From my mom's first marriage) My dad was shocked and horrified, and apologized to the man, who laughed it off and they got into a discussion about ex-wives and kids, and all was fine.

I don't actively remember this story - it was told to me later in life - but I went to live with my dad in Detroit shortly after that, living in a neighborhood full of people of all colors - my best friend was Arab-American and I went to a private Christian school full of kids of all colors of the rainbow, and it never even seemed worth remarking on after that.

My daughter's first boyfriend was African-American, and I kept waiting for my (still racist) siblings to remark upon it, but at least they know better than to talk that shit around me.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Oh, that was beautiful.

I grew up in a part of a pretty diverse city full of young families, so the first time I remember noticing other races is kindergarten - really it might have been before that, but further back than that I don't remember the faces of anyone but my family and my one best friend. I didn't really think anything of it. There was a girl whose name was something like Zakisha, and I wished I could do the little braids she could. I remember her wearing a pink ruffled dress. There was a boy named Mario, who was friendly and fun to play with, which in five year old boys is not all that common. I wasn't really conscious of race as such, it was just how people looked.

I do remember one day when a group of us wanted to play house, and Mario said he'd play with us. When you are five, and there is a boy who is willing to play house, you get excited because it means nobody has to be the dad. (We could go wander around the land of alternative families and stuff here, but let's not, it was 1980. Reagan had been elected but wasn't even i office yet.) Anyway, one of the girls said he couldn't be the dad, because black people and white people can't get married. Now, in Washington state I don't think that has ever actually been true, but we didn't know the history, we just thought it didn't make any sense. We asked her why; she said she wasn't sure. We all sat there in the playground and had a think, and nobody could come up with any good reason why, so we decided it must be a mistake and we all played house together.

I was slow on the uptake even after that. One of my three besties all through grade school was native American (another term that's changed; she just called herself an Indian at the time, but I like accuracy and now live in Britain so Indian means people from India) and I really...didn't even really get it. She was Marjorie. I was totally confused, and a little bereft, when she got moved to the tribal school. I had friends of all different races as a kid - I wasn't popular after about 8 and frankly could not be picky - and neither I nor my parents ever thought anything of it, but in retrospect sometimes I wonder if some of their parents ever thought it odd. I remember one friend, we played dolls together and again, in retrospect, her mom was a single mother with a crappy apartment working as a waitress and this was so different from my frame of reference and I didn't even notice. Why would I? My friend had toys I didn't have, and got to watch TV, so I thought it was all awesome. I think little kids don't learn this stuff on their own, or maybe I just lived in a dreamworld all the time anyway, who knows. But we were all just people, and racism was obviously Wrong and something that happened long ago and far away and we learned about in school, up until the painful and frustrating realisation that no, it wasn't, and why is that anyway?

[skemono.livejournal.com]

Anyway, one of the girls said he couldn't be the dad, because black people and white people can't get married. Now, in Washington state I don't think that has ever actually been true

It did, from 1855-1868. Of course, it wasn't a state then, it was still a territory. So I guess your statement might be technically correct.

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

Yeah, pre-statehood doesn't count, but really, even if it did, we were five. I'm pretty sure I thought we were in Canada. ;)

[wiliqueen.livejournal.com]

I spent my childhood on Air Force bases, firmly convinced that overt racism was something that happened on TV and in the movies, and used to happen in real life, because people had believed stupid things before they learned better. Kids and parents of every ethnicity and combination thereof, not to mention foreign-born parents, were present and normal at all times.

I think I was eleven when a cousin (born and raised in metro Detroit) made a racist comment that shocked me speechless. I had figured out by then that some people in the real world still thought that way, but the idea that the same could be true of someone I knew, let alone was related to, just Did Not Compute. (And I'm happy to report he outgrew the attitude -- absorbed from toxic influences in his public school environment -- before his biracial boyfriend would have had to kick his ass for it.)

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

...before his biracial boyfriend would have had to kick his ass for it.

There is something innately gorgeous about that statement. ;)

[mimiheart.livejournal.com]

Sesame Street was my first real exposure to other races.

Well, not exactly. I grew up in Arizona. I went to a Jewish elementary school. I knew about Mexicans before I knew about black people. My first grade teacher was a Jewish, white, South African. So when people started talking about "African American" (and that's just about the time when that term was starting to take hold as more mainstream) people I always thought they were talking about people with the accent my first grade teacher had.

My aunt was from China, though. And I never thought anything odd about that.

When I started going to public school a few years later, there were a few black kids. We were friends, that was that. (I remember doing a Salt N Pepa song/dance at a talent show in fourth or fifth grade with a black friend of mine. Yikes.)

In seventh grade my mother moved, and I switched to a different school in South Phoenix. At this school I was one of three white kids. I was also the only Jew. Seventh grade is an insane grade anyhow. People would tag my desk with swastikas. I was burned with a cigarette on my way in to school. I was harassed on the bus. It was not a pleasant experience at all. I'm not sure how much was race-based because I was white, or how much because I was Jewish or how much was because I was new to the area. (I was studying for my bat mitzvah at the time. And I have never hidden my Judaism, even if I don't "look" Jewish.)

I was homeschooled for the second half of that year and went to eighth grade in my father's neighborhood. (Snottsdale.) There were a few black kids there -- one who was my best friend throughout high school.

So I guess Sesame Street is the real answer... that's when I first "knew".

[zellion.livejournal.com]

Gosh I'm so glad I'm not the only person who said Sesame Street!

[sffilk.livejournal.com]

In my case, I didn't run into people of a different race until I hit senior high school in New York. Those I knew didn't like me. I didn't judge them because of their race, but because of their attitudes towards me.

[crwilley.livejournal.com]

My neighborhood as a kid was what passed for "mixed" in Troy, Michigan in the '70s: mostly white, with a few families that originated somewhere in Asia or the Middle East. In elementary school, I don't remember much in the way of insensitivity - the only incident that sticks out in my mind involved a boy I already thought of as a bully teasing a girl of Chinese ancestry about her eyes, and maybe calling her an ethnic slur. We all knew "Bernice is Chinese, and Salomi is Pakistani," but it didn't really mean much.

On the other hand - it would surprise me to learn there was ever more than one African-American student in my grade before we got to middle school, and we had one of those high school cafeterias where the African-American students (probably still only around 50 in a school with 1800 people) all sat together - I would like to think it was by their own choice, but I'm sure the reality was somewhat more complicated than that - while everyone else seemed to me to socialize on a more or less even footing. (OTOH, I suspect there was a little more trouble going on than I was aware of - a couple years after I graduated there was an incident that was described to me as a "race riot". This was pre-World Wide Web, so I can't find any reports, but I remember it involving two minority groups rather than "white kids versus black kids"...)

[zellion.livejournal.com]

I also grew up in a 97% white, small midwest town. I don't remember race being something that was discussed but I know my parents also both went through their teenage years and young adulthood- "came of age", as it were- during the civil rights movement, and they both had lived elsewhere and seen more of the world than just Smalltown, USA. I believe my parents used a lot of Sesame Street and Mr, Rogers etc as teaching moments. I remember when I started watch old Star Trek my mom told me about how having a racially diverse crew was a HUGE deal at the time. I think my dad also told me about his estranged father, who was half Native American, and some of the prejudice he faced.

So we had the one black girl in our grade/middle school, then there were maybe two more black students in our high school, that was it. Since it was a small town, at that point of course we all knew everyone so everyone just kind of got "included" as white by most people. (the, "oh well I know THIS person so they're ok" syndrome, I think.) Oh and obviously interracial dating was ok because really who ELSE were they going to date.

The main effect I've noticed since growing up and moving elsewhere? Other than the N-word, I never learned any racial slurs. I literally had no idea until I hit 17-18 that there were pejorative, just-as-offensive names for people of Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Irish, Polish, etc you name it descent. The first time I heard the term "cracker" I couldn't stop giggling. There are some drawbacks to this. I sometimes totally miss things that are offensive to other people because I have no idea of the history behind them.

Now I'm living in a huge metropolitan area and the neighborhood is pretty well split Hispanic/Somali. Oh, and the neighbor behind us is Vietnamese, and has a grandkid my son's age, so bonus!

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

I remember taking a bus into the downtown portion of the city we lived in; I would have been about five, as my sister was along in a stroller. I sat next to a black man, the first I remember ever seeing, and thinking, "Wow, they really do exist," or something to that effect. I remember kind of talking to him, and my mom being really nervous (but better a seat than not-a-seat at that point), but otherwise it being a non-event.

Mostly, where I lived in semi-rural Michigan, I didn't encounter many people-not-like-us until I was about eight, and we moved to the Detroit suburbs. That was enlightening! Lots of people I thought were part of history - people who spoke Spanish, Jews, Chinese, ad infinitum - were now classmates. What a concept.

Lots of what my parents hoped to be my core beliefs were now in question. To some extent, we're still recovering from that. :-) (What, English-speaking white men aren't *supposed to* and aren't *predestined to* rule the world? Shocking, simply shocking...)

[realinterrobang.livejournal.com]

When I was a little girl (this would have had to have been before I turned four and a half, because we moved from Edmonton then), my mom and dad used to take me to a local Chinese restaurant that was owned and run by a Chinese family. I sort of got to know the son of the owner, who was more or less my age, and I sort of had a crush on him in the way that a very young child can.

Apparently when I was very small, I pointed to a very large black man and said "Daddy!", which embarrassed my openly racist mother. The man had a beard and moustache and a bald head like my dad's. I never have been good with details of people's appearances.

I was totally shocked several years ago when my mother was complaining about Somali-Canadians and I said, "You talk as though you think white people are better than everyone else, or something," and she said, "Well, yeah, I do think white people are better than everyone else." Me: *blink blink blink* *gears grinding in head* *facepalm*

[pandoradeloeste.livejournal.com]

I was lucky enough to go to public school, where our school was about half Caucasian, half African-American, and a handful of kids from other ethnicities (counting myself I can count them on one hand). The school's idea of multicultural education/acknowledgment/etc. was pretty much solely African-American, which meant that most of us grew up thinking of race as a binary: black or white. Most of my friends were black, and I think I developed some independent understanding that they were different from me because I went through a period of trying to imitate their hairstyles and being stymied by my annoyingly straight hair. (I might have called it "floppy" at some point, because I couldn't get it to be "puffy" like theirs.)

I was also an endless mystery to myself and other students, because I clearly wasn't black, but I was too dark to be white. (The other Hispanic kids in school were fairly light-skinned, and I'm not sure what was made of their ethnicity. My skin tone is quite a bit darker - see icon for illustration.) There was a period where at least once a month someone asked me whether I was black or white, and I honestly had no idea what to do with that question. At home we identified pretty strongly as Latin-American (we spoke Spanish, tortillas were always around in the fridge, my dad played CDs of mariachi music on the weekend, we visited my grandparents who immigrated from Latin America) but I had no understanding of Hispanic as a larger cultural category or determinant, if that makes sense. My father is very dark and my mother is very light, which probably confused me further. I didn't grok for several years that I could be Hispanic without also having to be either black or white.

At some point in middle school we started learning about the colonization of the Americas (outside of the sanitized first Thanksgiving story) and I started owning the colonization of Mexico and South America as my history. It was probably similar to what other classmates felt during Black History Month. For a few years I did my history projects on Mexican/Chicano/Argentine/Paraguayan topics in an attempt to educate myself on my history, because I was clearly not going to get it from the formal curriculum.

(side note: I just noticed that I chose to answer it from the perspective of "how did I come to an understanding of my own race", rather than "how did I come to an understanding of people who weren't Hispanic". It's probably closely related to how I came to understand my own ethnicity, but I think it could also say a lot about how the default race in Tom's original question is understood to be Caucasian. Not Tom's fault necessarily, we live in a culture where white is the default - see: flesh-colored crayons, nude pantyhose, band-aids, etc - but it's interesting nonetheless. If there are other POC reading this, I'd like to hear your perspectives as well.)

[ldyerzsie.livejournal.com]

I guess I saw other races on Sesame Street, but they weren't "real" until I went to Kindergarten. That's when I had a black teacher. Within the first week I had a turn to be next to her for some circle dance, hold hands and sing thing we did in class. Afterward, I looked at my hand to see if the "color" had rubbed off, like an old aunties' makeup. When it didn't, I guess I must of figured she was ok. Beyond that, there were only a handful of kids who were of any other ethnicity in the town I lived in. Of course, those were always the kids I wanted to be friends with, as they were way cooler than everyone else.

[smoooom.livejournal.com]

They painted the students to be all "white" I can not fathom that things like that happen in this day and age. It is beyond what I can understand, it really really is. Skin colour is of such little importance that I often don't notice. What I do notice is accents, that can trigger notice of race, but it's not negative. I'm just really bad with accents.

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

We had a Colored Lady [that was the polite term in the middle 1950's on the Texas Gulf Coast] who cooked and kept house for us from when my brother was born until I forget exactly when. My mom drove to the Colored Neighborhood every morning to fetch her, and took her home in late afternoon.

more later; Morris needs the computer.

[msminlr.livejournal.com]

okay; I'm on my own machine now.

I did not go to school with any Blacks until I was in college; I'm pretty sure my brother DID; the year after I graduated high school was when the all-Black schools were closed and the rest of the district got Integrated. Ralph is 6 years younger than me, so he would have had Black classmates from junior-high on. The side of town we lived on shaded out into the countryside, and there were Black farming families in the catchment area for Sterling High.

There was also a Mexican neighborhood in Baytown, with its own elementary school. I don't recall which of the other junior high schools the students from DeZavala would have attended. I didn't encounter them until high school.

[tommytoony.livejournal.com]

I had an encounter myself this past weekend with a full-blown admitted racist...you can read about it on my LJ.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Ew. I say, ew.

[tommytoony.livejournal.com]

Yeah...I felt the extreme urge to bathe after that encounter.

[robin-june.livejournal.com]

My apologies -- you seem to have met some of my in-laws.

[wildcard9.livejournal.com]

I grew up in Winthrop, MA, the only thing east of Boston other than the harbor. My school years were all of the 70's to 1982. Dispite south Boston's segrigation problem, we had no black students in the entire time I was in school with one exception. During 7th or 8th grade, we had an exchange student. While her skin was darker than mine, none of the students could convince me she was black (she was a lighter skin tone). To me, black people were really dark skinned her skin color just struck me as deeply tanned). It took until college for me to meet anyone who was not caucasian. Mind you, Winthrop was about one third jewish at the time I grew up, so the town had religious diversity but not racial for whatever reason.

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

I grew up and went to school on military bases all around the US and around the world. I honestly don't remember not having friends, neighbors, playmates and teachers of different races.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

I grew up in a neighborhood that was in the process of changing from mostly white to mostly black. From K-2 my classes were integrated about 50/50. I remember that of my 3 best friends, 2 were black (their fathers were doctors) and one was named Herrera and his mother made the most wonderful tortillas. At that time in my life, I was Jewish and no one made a big deal about it. I heard kids using the n-word, but I don't think they knew what it was they were saying - they probably picked it up from their parents. If a teacher caught them saying that word, they were in big, big trouble.

When we moved out to the 'burbs in the middle of 2nd grade, suddenly everyone was white. And I got singled out - I remember the art teacher having all the other kids make Xmas tree ornaments, and she assigned me to make a dreydel. I think that (plus the realization that religion was a crock) was my first step toward becoming an atheist. Then in Junior High, there was busing for integration, and I started meeting kids who grew up in poverty, which was pretty much a new thing for me. I think a lot of people confuse race and social class in our society, but my experience as a child took me in a different direction.

So anyhow - watch out for the sharp turn coming - I have a question: where do you draw the line on people's opinions on legal/illegal immigrants, who is a racist, and who is not? I have friends here on LJ whose opinions differ greatly from my own on that subject. Also, I've encountered some anti-Israel sentiment here on LJ recently - does that automatically qualify someone as a racist, or not?

[smparadox.livejournal.com]

When my parents were looking for a house, the Realtor tried to steer them to a white neighborhood, and they got stubborn about it, dug in their heels and insisted on one in the "wrong neighborhood" that they liked. So I "knew" about people of different races before I was old enough to understand the concept...