The Bigotry Threshold

Not too long ago, my school made national news as part of an altercation at a basketball game which culminated in anti-Semitic chants. The other team began chanting “You killed Jesus” in response to my school’s yelling “Sausage fest” and “Where are your girls?” (That school is Catholic and all-boys; mine is largely Jewish.) Since then, there has been an outbreak of graffiti, mainly swastikas, in our school bathrooms, that has the administration up in arms. Although I’ve heard that fans and players at the game did not take this particularly seriously, the news media has seized upon it and the students here (and at the other high school) are receiving daily lectures and entreaties to crack down on this behavior. Some people judge it not as big a deal as it has been made out to be, while others insist that the Catholic school “crossed a line” when its fans threw an anti-Semitic insult.

The interesting thing about lines and who crosses them and how dastardly that is is that it’s entirely subjective, of course--but not only do lines mean different things for different people, the lines drawn by different people garner different amounts of credibility and respect. People insist that “sausage fest” was not meant to have homophobic connotations, but even if that’s so, my school has a troubling record of shouting highly problematic chants at sports games, usually racist. At matches against schools with mostly students of color, my school reportedly began chanting “Build a wall” at one game and “Go back to Africa” at another. How many lines do those chants cross? We can’t suppose that the schools victimized by our bigotry were not drawing lines that we crossed blithely. But our racist transgressions warranted no PSA announcements, no special meetings or  class discussions. Sports games aside, there were viciously sexist and violent graffiti and online responses to projects run by the feminism club at my school, and racist comments appeared online in relation both to yet another sports game and also to the Black Culture Day my school hosts. There is also a seething undercurrent of Islamophobia, and earlier this year some students made enormously offensive posts online about a girl who wears full Islamic face and head coverings.

None of this made national media. It didn’t even result in soul-searching or lectures on our behavior and the strength and tolerance levels of our school community. But when anti-Semitism joins the fray, it’s a five-alarm fire. It’s unacceptable bigotry all of a sudden. Perhaps it’s good that we are (purportedly) tackling our prejudice issues openly, but that it took this long raises uncomfortable questions about whose right to feel safe and valued is most prized, and about whether this upsurge of discussion about our Problems will yield any permanent or institutional change. My experience with the public school system here is that cosmetic reforms are usually considered adequate, if that. By state law we are mandated to talk about and supposedly address bullying, but certainly I have not noticed that either the students or school administration actually respond particularly well to incidents of bullying. And racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, etc.--are these not just bullying on a massive, systemic scale, both internalized and externalized?

There's also the possibility that steps are being taken now (if they truly are) to address this mostly because our reputation suddenly seems marred, as we at once rise to prominence as the victims and perpetrators of anti-Semitism. When the spotlight turns towards us and finds we might look bad--and, clearly,  when white people fall under fire--then and only then does the school open up a conversation about bigotry.

A student in my Italian class--the only class where we had a comprehensive (and very interesting) conversation about these recent going-ons--suggested that the anti-Semitism raises such an uproar because for many students here, it is literally the only identity they possess that could fall under attack, and they are unused to feeling in the minority. As one classmate said, “They aren’t exactly going to yell ‘your school cost $200 million’ or ‘you all drive Mercedes.’” Our wealth and privilege insulate many of us from ever experiencing discrimination or hatred, and also provide a buffer between us and the consequences of our actions when it is we who are shouting obscenities and giving offense.

The lines we draw, because we have the privilege and the power to sound alarms when they are crossed, stand out starkly while the lines other schools must draw when my school shouts “build a wall” are not granted any visibility or respect. The power to judge wrongdoing--though rarely our own--is yet another privilege restricted to certain social strata. We reserve the right both to cross lines with impunity and to scream when ours are crossed.

Of course, one final component that ought not to  be left out of this conversation is the uncomfortable reality that anti-Semitism, above all other forms of bigotry, has the potential to strike up far more fervor and outrage in my community because defensiveness runs so very high around any issues that pertain to criticisms of Judaism. Pro-Israel Zionists have largely hijacked the concept of anti-Semitism to mean any possible slight towards not just Jews but Israel as well, rendering the word so highly charged that any accusations of it strike a different and much more responsive nerve than accusations of racism or sexism or homophobia or Islamophobia. This has less to do with the gravity of the hatred that people experience due to any of these “ism”--since I am not making the argument that one form of oppression or prejudice hurts worse than another--than with the conditioned responses that are embedded in my community when it comes to issues that could possibly invoke the specter of Israel. It is an alarming phenomenon that the entrenched bigotry in our schools is brought to light only when the seethe of prejudice coincides both with white privilege and one of our political hair-trigger issues. If we have to wait for wealthy and white people to feel threatened or hurt before they acknowledge that the bigotry thresholds have long been crossed, before we can hope to see any institutional soul-searching or change, then we won’t likely be seeing a great deal of either.

A Responsibility of Privilege

There is a component to combating subtle or well-intentioned manifestations of prejudice--microaggressions--which doesn’t seem to come up in dialogue so often. Most of the conversations I’ve had about microaggressions--especially with my family, most of whom will never experience any kind of “ism” or microaggression stemming from it--end on a more sour note than I would appreciate, but it is these interactions that are crucial, in their way. Since microaggressions, as my brother points out, are micro, they are easier to dismiss as a sort of unfortunate but insignificant side effect of the bigger problems we should be spending our time on. Implicit in this analysis is the idea that dealing with microaggressions is the sole domain of the people at whom microaggressions are directed, and not really anyone else’s problem. But I would argue that it is the responsibility as well of allies and people whose identity is not questioned or misrepresented or misunderstood to stand up to even the small comments, the ones we think we can let slide.

Simply speaking, many microaggressions are not even addressed to the people whom they hurt and about whom they make assumptions. Many are spoken between members of privileged social groups, and if these people do not make an effort to call out prejudiced language when they hear it, they are quietly condoning the way of thinking for which microaggressions represent the tip of the iceberg. That in itself spawns more aggression, because if microaggressions aren’t challenged by anyone but the people they directly hurt, then the aggressor--even an unintentional and usually not bigoted one--may not be convinced that there is sufficient pushback to really examine their words and actions.

Privileged voices may be among the most powerful factors in swaying the behavior of other privileged people. And such activism, within circles of privilege, is critical for being more than a passive ally--being an accomplice instead, as Nakisha Lewis of New York City Black Lives Matter said at an assembly at my school recently (accomplices being more active and deeply invested than allies, who never put themselves on the line and have less of a stake in the struggle). To weed out bigotry, you must make the effort to extirpate wherever you can the attitudes that make life more difficult, restricted, and dangerous for people less privileged than you. Since privileged groups are the ones who commit microaggressions, by and large, it is up to the members of those groups to regulate their language and actions and be aware of others’, not only in direct interactions with people in a minority group but also in conversations in privileged spaces.

It can be hard to know what to say. It’s hard to criticize or call out or even gently nudge someone who has said something that you know is predicated on false assumptions, stereotypes, fear, or ignorance. There are times when I didn’t step in during situations when I could have--when I’ve overheard casual homophobia, for example, or when a girl I know described someone she knew as “ghetto.” Sometimes it’s just our own inertia or apathy standing in the way of speaking up; sometimes it’s other obstacles. It’s hard especially if you are not the person with the most authority or who stands to lose from pointing out their prejudice. For example, it’s harder to explain why my parents or my doctor or an adult has said something problematic than it is to do so with someone of my own age, in general.

But there are always conversations to have, always points to make, always awareness you can bring. When my mother mentioned to my doctor that I had been walking around Roxbury and Dorchester--largely working-class areas of greater Boston  inhabited by people of color--I cringed as she and the doctor expressed their incredulity and shock, laughed uncomfortably, and seemed to imply that I was either stupid or brave to have dared to walk in neighborhoods outside my privileged one. I didn’t know what to say to them, and I was deeply uncomfortable with the implications of their reactions. I could have said, “Wait, slow down. What are you implying? I think you’re operating on stereotypes and it’s not fair to the people who live in Roxbury and Dorchester to believe that I would be automatically be unsafe there…” or something to that effect. To not accuse, but to try to first understand what they really are saying and then guide the conversation towards less offensive territory.

Other times, I have tried to stand up. At a political event in Boston, one of my adult activist friends watched a woman walk by wearing both a hijab and niqab--only her eyes uncovered--and then said she was fine with the headscarf, but disapproved of Muslim women wearing the burqa or niqab. I took a breath and said that I supported any woman’s choice to wear what she wanted. I wasn’t sure my friend believed that wearing religious coverings was a choice--the all-Muslim-women-must-be-oppressed narrative--but she humphed and said, “Well, fine, but you wouldn’t catch me wearing one.” I said, “Well, no one’s asking you to.” It’s not her experience to ever live, so it’s not her place to criticize how others choose to live it.

The strange concept that other people’s choices with which we don’t agree somehow threaten us can be, often, the impetus behind prejudiced behavior. The corollary to that, of course, is that those of us whom society validates as correct and moral and superior may express that privilege--the privilege of being the default--as refusing to accept other backgrounds and ways of life, and feel that different lifestyles represent an attack on ours. It seems absurd, that my queerness could threaten your straightness, that women’s rights could subjugate men, or that someone’s religion could make you react defensively as if you were in danger of oppression. The irony, of course, is that people who are othered by the Western world and corporatist society are not the ones with the power to oppress those people who benefit from the status quo, yet some still fear its demise.

It’s hard to know if people with privilege calling out other people with privilege makes serious inroads into dismantling oppressive institutions. But we do know that if we aren’t willing to take up the mantle of activism everywhere we go, whether we are interacting with people of similar or different experiences, in places where we need to sit down and listen or places where we need to stand up and speak out--then it is akin to only cutting down a plant without trying to dig up the roots, which will keep producing new shoots of bigotry. Fighting racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, ableism, classism, etc. does not stop when you return to your privilege bubble. Indeed, it festers there deeply, perhaps with the veneer of progressive respectability, and it is there that it warrants a more concentrated attack than it usually receives. And that attack has to come from the privileged people. Because the microaggressions that look so small don’t affect them, they don’t feel they have to engage. But it’s not up to people who are victimized by prejudices to be the ones to call them out every single time. It must be part of the work of activists with privilege to identify and tackle bigotry--macroaggressive and microaggressive--in their own communities, relationships, and lives.

The School System's War on Thinking

For the last several weeks of my English class, the subject of our learning and analysis has been school itself: how we are educated and how we are not, how schooling is destructive--from the very ideological foundations on which it rests to the privilege echo chamber of elite colleges.

All of the suspicions or beliefs I have long held were reconfirmed, though in all honesty the institutional conspiracy of the US educational system is wider than I’d even realized. I wrote back in September on this blog that “the institutions that should be guiding and preparing us for what is really out there are instead programming us to react like trained seals, to balance on our noses the balls of standardized testing and whitewashed, watered-down US history, and the everyday inanity of attendance and dress codes. Our public schools are not safe places, and they are not teaching us all we need to learn.” What I’ve always chafed against in the school system is more expansive than I knew. What I was writing about is neither new nor unique, and, though I did not know it, already the target of shrewd reformers.

Paolo Freire, a Brazilian reformer whose essay, “The Banking Concept of Education,” was one of the texts read in my English class, touches upon a phenomenon I noticed: as I put it, “We are taught to sit still and swallow information, keep it down just long enough to regurgitate it for standardized tests. We are fill-in-the-bubble children, prefabricated for a world far less predictable than we are being readied for.” Freire contends that this style of teaching is predicated on a theory, a concept of education that takes students and “turns them into ‘containers,’ into ‘receptacles’ to be ‘filled’ by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.” This method of education as “an act of depositing” makes reality “motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable”--thus rendering it impossible to teach history with nuance or context. Perhaps, when my teachers teach history as if it were suspended in formaldehyde, with no connection to the present or future, they are suffering less from personal ignorance than unchallenged deep allegiance to a dehumanizing and dysfunctional method of so-called education.

One of the questions I posed in September is particularly telling: “Why do we delay the time when we will have to really think?” I tended to place the blame on students who chose not to think, who chose to obey. I would like to amend that. What is more important to realize is that thinking is not the point of school. We delay the time when--if ever--we will have to really think because the entire educational system is designed to keep us from thinking.  

John Taylor Gatto, in another of the essays we read, “Against School,” traces the genesis of the hyper-controlled, dehumanized educational system to the model taken from militaristic Prussia in the early 20th century. The goals of educating children within a militaristic machine are many, and alarming: mainly, to subvert the potential democracy and unity of the poorer classes of US society (part of the many efforts to keep that mass of people from enlightenment and uprising, to stunt their social consciousness and activism so as to protect the power of the elite--job quite well done). Gatto also references Alexander Inglis’s concept of school as a six-pronged machine with various “functions,” among which are developing habits of submission to authority, cultivating conformity, and funneling different kids to different career paths or lack of them. It’s all in the interest of creating a mass labor force for the corporatocracy, and keeping education to a minimum. As Gatto puts it, our schools are “laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands.”

No wonder teenagers are faced constantly with disparagement. I have had teachers who call the students boneheads or who remark flippantly that “there is nothing any of you could say that would interest me,” but beyond obvious disregard for our intelligence, there is what YA fiction author A.S. King calls “systemic psychological hazing” which teenagers undergo in our “laboratories of experimentation,” our schools. We are trained through humiliation and disrespect that we are immature and pathetic, and as soon as we scurry up to the next level of almost-adulthood, we had better start looking down at the kids below us and ridiculing them. King says, “It’s in the mindset now—in our DNA. I see college students rolling their eyes at high school students, and graduates of both rolling their eyes at all beneath them. It’s a cycle of condescension and alienation. It didn’t always used to be like this. We’re eating ourselves.”

Why this internalized ageism? One reason, I believe, is the bizarre hierarchical importance age has been given in the educational system. Instead of teaching children as a group and allowing them to learn from each other regardless of age, as many non-Western cultures might or even the US did in the days of one-room schoolhouses, kids are cordoned into grades based on age, and largely seem to not cross those borders. Kids even one year older seem like towering giants, and the younger ones are just so little and pathetic and immature. It gives legitimacy to the work of the machine and its functions, dividing us and molding us, because if we believe that where and how we are now is wrong, we will gladly scurry along and look down at whoever we are told to look down on. It helps enforce a hierarchy instead of a mindset in which seeking help or even company from someone of a different assigned rank than you is discouraged. It helps entrench in us a dog-eat-dog mindset in which lateral cooperation is repudiated in favor of climbing social and power ladders. It’s a side effect of the production-line mentality, assembling children as fodder for the corporatocracy. Given the tolls this takes and the ways we are breaking, the surreality of our bomb-threatened and doublespeak-laden schools, but do we even comprehend what this system is really producing?

I wrote earlier that mine is “a school system from and for a specific social stratosphere, and it is excellent at churning out shiny graduates ready for a shiny career path.” But that same system operates on all socioeconomic levels, just with varying levels of gilding and militarism. The functions of school to produce phalanxes of identical products ready for use become clearer and more brutal the greater the distance from the softly glowing privilege bubble.

Farther down the privilege ladder, the idea of social mobility becomes more and more a bitter farce. One of Inglis’s functions states that schools serve to sift through their students and determine just how far they will be allowed to progress. The majority of kids, above all inner-city minorities, are groomed for menial labor in the same social stratum they came from. As Jonathan Kozol’s essay, “Still Separate, Still Unequal,” examines, segregated schools have entrenched themselves ever deeper while white liberal society wants to consider itself postracial, and the kids in these still-segregated, still-neglected schools are being trained with appallingly militaristic methods of discipline to never exceed their social station or threaten the corporate status quo. These crumbling schools are not places for education, but are rather assembly lines, which break apart and rebuild children as effective robots, where somewhere far above, their wealthier counterparts are trained in a vastly different style, for a different purpose.

Since both history and the present are narrated by those with the power and the airwaves, the work of deliberate inequality remains out of sight and out of mind. The amount of freedom allotted to kids in schools increases in proportion to their wealth. This isn’t to say that privileged schools truly foster an environment in which thinking is encouraged or real knowledge gained, but the function of education according to Inglis for people like me, in higher socioeconomic strata, skews more towards grooming us to assume the reins of this massive corporate matrix.

This takes its toll. We may be high-value banks entrusted with larger denominations of bills, but we are still fundamentally not people in the eyes of the educational system. Perhaps the goal is to train us to act enough like people that by the time we graduate we will be very good candidates for jobs in which humanity is questionable but power is a necessity--politics, corporate officialdom, etc. I have the requisite academic intelligence, excellent memory, and more or less neurotypical ways of processing information and regurgitating it, so I have learned to play this system perfectly. The farther I get and the more honors classes I prove myself capable of taking, though, the more I lose motivation and any remnants of the belief that any of this is worthwhile.

The other day my friends and I were asking a deck of tarot cards questions about our lives and souls and such, and when the deck was asked to describe my past, present, and future, I received the card “stagnation” for my present state. I quipped, “Well, I am stuck in the educational system right now,” which does feel like stagnation. Sometimes I do think it’s all a mind trick that I can’t handle anymore--trying to convince myself that what I’m “learning” will be applicable and helpful in the rest of my schooling and beyond, and that there really is a point to shelling out all that college money. Bitter, jaded, and exhausted, I end up believing that my educational experience has largely been a series of inanities, indignations, absurdities, anxieties, and yes, stagnation. Why? I like to learn. I love facts and unusual words and logic and reading and writing and analyzing history. But school isn’t teaching me how to think, except by accident, when I became frustrated enough to understand that none of this inanity and slogging through testing and ennui was actually making me better-rounded, happier, or even smarter.

We’re living in an absurd matrix, whose dysfunctions seem to be in the same mold as those of the war on drugs: it’s not that the system isn’t working, it’s that it’s working all too well with terrible fallout. We are the fallout, my generation. Those who came before us are also victims of the industrial school system, but we stand at a point more crucial than ever, when we need to be educated more than ever, when we need to be thinking--and we’re not. Sometimes we are, but we’re not supposed to be. We know we’re suffering; we know we’re ridiculously stressed and that there’s ridiculous privilege and wealth disparity in our society. But the big picture, the insidious whole, is hard to see from inside, and even harder to dismantle.  

It goes far beyond individuals, either students or teachers. Creating individuals is not the goal of schooling any more than is teaching us to think. Even in my September blog post, I acknowledged, “The teachers, on the whole, are not the problem, or at least, not the enemy. The enemy is the system that locks them into delivering the sort of worthless, classist, irrelevant education that will leave us unfit to handle the future for which we are the last chance.” Who knew that a class within a school within this system would actually come to teach about this enemy, to help us identify how and why we are being controlled and screwed over? (How many of my classmates will believe or realize the gravity of what they’re reading?)

I’m grateful to have taken this class, but the ironies are plenty, as well as the epiphanies. In order to take a class in which I feel that the students are actually thinking, actually analyzing and applying arguments and theories to our own lives and the world around us, I had to be a top-level, masochistic student willing to take on the pressure and course load of an AP English class. That it’s at the AP level only that this curriculum is offered ensures that the students taking it will be mostly white or Asian, on the wealthier side of things, extremely driven, and equipped with the support (emotional or academic) to take such a demanding class. Even in this best of classes I’ve taken, it is serving the function of divide and conquer: as I wrote in September, “Honors and AP classes do not winnow out the students who are brightest. They winnow out the ones who can best fit in the hamster-wheel framework we have been strapped to.” There are kids in my class who admit that they took it only because of those two little letters, AP, and there are friends of mine who declare their lower-level classes insults to their intelligence, but are daunted by the course load of an AP English class. This is a very tricky and very clever strategy: reserving the few classes where thinking might actually take place as the domain of students who have proved themselves so successful within the system that thinking might be a habit so unfamiliar that they are at little risk of developing it.