In the 1949 Broadway musical South Pacific, by Rodgers and Hammerstein, there is a song, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” which stirred quite the controversy at the time.
As a tune about racism, the song provoked howls of protest from Southern lawmakers and even charges of communist “race-mixing” propaganda during the early days of the Cold War.
Here are the lyrics:
Many years later, the National Conference of Christians and Jews would adopt a variation on this theme as their semi-official slogan: “You Have to Be Taught How to Hate.”
On the one hand, there is little doubt that people are taught racism.
Racist parents often pass along their biases to their children, the latter of whom are also taught hatred and bigotry in online rabbit holes down which they too often jump nowadays.
Yet, the idea that one is taught racism rather than being born with it, though obvious, fails to account for how that teaching occurs.
Or rather, it suggests a teaching and learning process that is too simple: the parent instructing the child on who to like and dislike as if part of some family ritual through which intergenerational bias is transmitted.
But what if bias is taught through less direct means? Perhaps not hatred, per se, but certainly prejudice and beliefs about group superiority and inferiority?
Racism is taught even without direct instruction
For instance, think about the lessons taught by the social structure itself and how we speak about it.
If a child is taught that America is a place where anyone can succeed if they try, but they look around and see that some (disproportionately of color) aren’t succeeding as readily, and others (disproportionately white) are, what might they conclude?
In that situation, isn’t it likely a child might decide there was something wrong with Black and brown folks and something potentially superior about whites?
Might not a kind of racism become almost a default position?
If we grow up believing in meritocracy and rugged individualism, never subjecting these to critical examination, this would logically be the result, as sexism and class bias would also be.
After all, wealthy folks and men also have disproportionate power in America. If we’re taught that where people end up is all about their effort, we can’t be surprised when many conclude rich white guys just must be better than everyone else.
Absent a sociological and historical context helping them see how meritocracy has been subverted and effort unequally rewarded, children (especially but not only white ones) will grow up to presume white superiority. At the very least, they’ll likely internalize a kind of indifference to the inequities they see.
They will presume these inequities to be natural. And once normalized, they will see little purpose in trying to narrow or eliminate them.
In this way, contrary to the imagery conjured by South Pacific, being taught bias (if not necessarily hatred) is not something that has to be purposely drummed into one’s head.
It can be planted there simply by an uninterrogated faith in the national mythology.
There is no neutrality — we’re either taught racism or antiracism
During the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, Senator Ted Cruz expressed dismay at the children’s book Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi. The 24-page volume — apparently relevant to Cruz because Jackson sits on the Board of a school that has recommended it — includes the statement that children are “either taught racism or antiracism. There is no neutrality.”
To Cruz, the suggestion is outrageous. To say that children are taught racism or antiracism makes it sound as if anyone who isn’t on the antiracist left is by necessity a racist, teaching their children to hate.
But that isn’t really what Kendi is saying, and it isn’t the take-away of the statement from the book itself.
The argument that one is either taught racism or antiracism and that neutrality is not an option rests on the realization that what we think of as neutrality — often claimed as being “non-racist” — is just a passive form of acquiescence to racial inequity and unfairness.
For instance, during the period of enslavement, most white southerners, to say nothing of whites elsewhere, did not own other human beings as property.
Likewise, during segregation, most whites didn’t own businesses that refused service to Black people.
Most did not participate in lynchings.
Most did not attack sit-in protesters or burn Freedom Ride buses.
But neither did most whites join the struggle against enslavement or segregation.
Most never participated in abolitionist activity.
Few joined with Black people to protest lynching or Jim Crow laws.
Few marched for civil rights, statistically speaking.
Even during periods of our nation’s most grotesque racialized violence, most white people did nothing.
Indeed, most whites in the 1960s saw no need for the Civil Rights Movement at all — they believed Black people were already treated equally and that protests would only make things worse.
But could we say such people were neutral?
Would we believe them if they claimed to have been “non-racist,” just because they weren’t the ones putting out cigarettes on the necks of Black people at lunch counters or laughing and celebrating around a lynching tree as a Black body hanged there?
Of course not.
Because by their inaction they were ensuring that those intent on perpetrating evils such as these would be able to do so.
And where did they learn to passively sit back and collaborate with the injustice done by others, which was then ingrained in the institutional structures of the society?
They learned passivity by not being directly taught and trained to be antiracist.
By not being taught by parents, educators, or someone, to resist racism — to stand up and fight it — most white Americans went along. In doing so, they participated in the maintenance of racism.
That’s what Kendi is talking about.
. . .
Ultimately, the problem of racism throughout American history has not been due to most white people being awful bigots deliberately seeking to harm Black folks and other people of color.
Or to teach their kids to do the same.
It has been due to something worse. Something more pernicious and harder to address.
It has been the result of collaboration and silence.
It has been the result of a kind of bystanderism without which the evil deeds of conscious monsters could never have been carried out.
It is that passive acceptance of things as they are that we have taught our children for generations.
They don’t write songs about it. It’s much easier to condemn malevolence than nonchalance, after all.
But the latter has destroyed the lives of far more than the former. And it will continue to do so until we decide, collectively, that the sidelines are an unacceptable place to be.
They always have been.
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This post was previously published on Tim Wise’s blog.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
Escape the Act Like a Man Box | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | The First Myth of the Patriarchy: The Acorn on the Pillow |
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Great essay, so very true. Change requires actively doing. Thanks, Tim.