stereotype & society

"Seeing is Believing," by A. E. Souzis

Editor's Note: One of the most entrenched stereotypes in the United States, one that has been vigorously promoted by a powerful Medical-Industrial Complex since the late 1940s, is that single payer, national health care is something to be feared, a first step toward the dreaded "Socialism." 

 

Ronald Reagan was a prominent participant in a American Medical Association PR campaign against a popularly supported single-payer universal health care system that was about to be enacted in the United States in 1949; a final brick in the New Deal's social insurance edifice.  The AMA campaign, orchestrated by the pioneering right-wing media consultants, Clem Whitaker and Leone Baxter, in league with the National Association of Manufacturers, their smear campaign effectively killed off a proposal that was earlier considered a shoe-in. Putting on an anti-communist horror show depicting America drowning in a whirlpool of socialistic robotizing, their "success" insured that health care would not be an inalienable right for people in the United States. Today, we live with the disastrous aftereffects of their success.

Such guaranteed universal health care systems are, the mantra continues, far inferior to the for-profit health care system that prevails in the the U.S.A. 

Like a growing number of people, however, Michael Moore, in his recent film "Sicko," questions this "patriotic" faith and suggests that carefully cultivated propaganda against universal single-payer health systems is erroneous and destructive to the general well-being of society.

 

Adrianne Wort's, 1996

"Seeing is Believing," a memoir by author A. E. Souzis, offers an eloquent story of her own experiences when, struck by a loss-of-vision emergency, she received single-payer state supported laser-eye surgery in the Czech Republic, where a universal health care system is in place.

A. E. Souzis' laser eye surgery diagnosis and prescription from a Dutch doctor (oog = eye)

"Seeing is Believing," by A. E. Souzis

The train from Warsaw pulled into Halving Andras at about 8 a.m. I got off, shaking the hand of the unsmiling Polish woman who shared my overnight sleeper, and went to look for T.J. on the platform. He was bleary-eyed and a little grumpy after a restless night in third-class. When we walked out into the sunlit Novae Mes to, he seemed happier. "I haven't been to Prague in two years" he explained as we walked to find a cafe, "it's always the favorite part of my trip." T.J. was Australian, and thus required to travel to Europe every few years to drink and party. We had met in Krakow three days before, sharing the same hostel room on the outskirts of the Old Town. Amidst the November chill and my own worries, I was grateful for a friend.

We sat at a quiet café, drinking coffee. T.J. was about to hop on a train to Cesky Krumlov, a tiny town in the south that every backpacker I met raved about, some kind of a medieval party paradise. "Meet me at ----". He rattled off a bunch of hostels and pubs in the town, and I took notes, nodding seriously, as if I could imagine anything past what would happen that day. Because right now the big hope that my trip would continue at all centered on a dog-eared entry in the Prague city section of my guidebook, listing the emergency medical aid available for foreigners at Hospital Na Homolce. The book promised that the highly-rated hospital had a Fakultna Poliklinica, a drop-in clinic geared to foreigners with an English-speaking staff.

 
I walked T.J. back to the train station to catch the local.  "Alright, kiddo, meet me in Cesky Krumlov," he said, hugging me clumsily before getting on the train. The foreign clinic didn't open until noon, so I walked slowly through Wencelas Square, just starting to wake up, and past the National Museum to the Zizkov neighborhood. I made the mistake of checking into the Clown and Bard House even though I'd been warned that it was one of the most popular hostels in Prague. Two hippy-types wearing dreadlocks with Canadian flags sown to their backpacks were checking out as I came in. A sleepy fat Czech guy handed me a receipt and pointed upstairs.

The stairs were redwood and newly renovated. I suddenly felt like I was up in northern California. The second cheapest dormitory was on the top floor, and it opened into a sky-lit room of beds. More dreadlocks nestled on the pillows. Nearly everyone was still asleep. I realized that I had stumbled into my worst nightmare- the party hostel, full of college-age, macho, suburban pseudo-hippy frat boys. But in my present state, none of it mattered. I got into my assigned bed, with two hours to kill, and tried to doze. The kids slowly began to wake up around me. Someone whispered really loudly "Hey, Mike, didja hear Gabe puking last night?" and everyone started laughing. "He woke us all up!" A girl shrieked, toothbrush in hand. "Dude, he was ralphing for like 6 hours last night." "Did he go to the absinthe bar with Kevin?" "Duuudde." Kevin sat up and shook his head. Gabe snored loudly, and the room began to clear out.

An hour later I got up. I washed my face and rubbed the streaks off my glasses, thinking I should look presentable. Most of the kids were still downstairs, blearily reading or drinking from a mug, still recovering from their night out. I felt as if we were in two alternate universes, side by side but completely different.

But out on the streets with the cobblestones glinting in the pale sunlight I felt better. It hit me: I was in Prague! The gilded buildings, the beautifully preserved streets - as I walked, I kept feeling as if I was coming back to a city I lived in many years ago. Awakening the feeling of a dim memory- if I searched too hard, it would flutter away.

The walk continued to cheer me up. Well, at least there was no more waiting. I hopped on a bus to the Homolka neighborhood. The streets became more residential and less touristy. The clinic was a newer, utilitarian-styled brick building on a side street that reminded me of the old public schools in New York City. I walked inside to a stairwell with cement steps. There was no sign so I wandered up and down the stairs until I found the floor I was looking for. Even in the hall there was nothing, only closed gray door after gray door. Following them down, I finally came to a reception area, where a man was listening to the radio behind a thick wall of glass.

"Hello," I said slowly in English, forgetting the Czech greeting I had been practicing. Adopting the poor English of the area I was in became a habit throughout my trip.
"I have problem with eye."

On the first week of my big trip through Europe, I started having flashes in my right eye. A burst of white light in the corner that traveled up slowly, only to explode in a burst of optic fireworks. Sly curlicues, a question mark uncurling itself, or sometimes, the glowing trail of a pixie flitting by. I was in Amsterdam, visiting a friend, and the flashes grew more frequent: in the falafel shop, in the Rijksmuseum, crossing the Leidseplein. An email came back from my parents, sharp with worry: I had a posterior vitreous detachment, better known as PVD; apparently a tear in my vitreous fluid had caused it to detach from the retinal wall. The loose fluid bouncing against the retina causes light to flash. No pain, no discomfort, but the worry that the tear, like a run in your stocking, will get larger until the retina, nothing to cling to, detaches into the void. My father had this condition years before, and the only treatment was emergency laser surgery. "Come back when a black curtain descends over your vision and you have pounding headaches, that is when your retina has detached," a Dutch doctor told me in flawless English. Well, thanks. And I kept traveling, hoping the flashes would fly away the further east I got. They didn't, and I finally made a deal with myself: if this foreign clinic in Prague couldn't treat me, I'd take my excitement and restlessness and wanderlust and drag them all home.

The guidebook had lied, I discovered. No one really spoke any English. The receptionist led me into a room without smiling once. A brisk sandy-haired nurse came in and finding we had no common words, wandered out again. Two more women walked in and out without even attempting to speak to me. I kept trying to say 'eye' in Czech: oko. Finally they brought in a nurse who could speak some English. She peered into my eye with a little flashlight and then switched it off. "You say you have eye problem. We don't see anything." This was it. I was completely defeated. I'd have to go home. I began to cry. "I have tear in my eye. My retina - you know retina? Thing we see out of? will detach. It will move away! I could go blind, will go blind. Can't see."

Somehow that got through to her. She nodded, and shouted to an assistant, who walked in carrying a small bottle. Thank god for that nod. Without another word, she deftly placed drops in my right eye. While I sat there, my head thrown back, I heard her pick up the phone. After a brief conversation, she came back. In thick, careful English, she explained "You must visit doctor in other hospital. Across the road. Floor three. The oko clinic." I clutched the note, full of thanks. She smiled for the first time "Good luck."

Back down the concrete stairs. Was it me or were the stairs tilting? The drops that dilated my eye made everything blurry. I was back on the large, silent road. There were no other cars, no people, no stores, just a row of quiet buildings. I realized for the first time in my life I was completely on my own.

And then I went up the stairs of an identical building. Gray walls, dusty corridors. But I counted. Floor three for the oko clinic. Momentum propelled me forward. I glided through the double doors. Down the hall. A group of old Czechs sat by the receptionist, who did not look up when she took the note. All the staff wore white robes and white sandals with sport socks. I sat down and, for lack of anything else, pulled out my copy of Gravity's Rainbow. When I looked up, all the faces turned away. When I went back to reading about Tyrone Slothrop's travails through Europe, the faces followed my head down.

The words swam before my eyes, but it was easier than looking at the people watching me. When they called my name finally, I didn't hear anything. I looked up to see everyone silently pointing at me. "Please come," the nurse said, she was younger and seemed to speak more English. I wanted to pray, I felt so grateful.

She moved me to another room across the hall. I sat for a while, staring at the dusty window, waiting for the drops to take full effect. My vision had almost completely blurred when Dr. Dvorak, (his actual name) came in. And he smiled, the whole time, as he dropped a few words in English. He looked like John Ritter with a beard, and I fell in love with him, especially after he peered into my right eye with a thin flashlight and said "Yes, I see hole. Come with me."

I followed him through a maze of hallways, and into an elevator. As it sped down to another floor, he said, "It is good to take care of this now." And that's all I needed. For in about five minutes, he led me into a darkened room and rested my chin on a plastic cup-like brace, flipped my eyelid up, and commanded me to "Look at the light." Blink blink blink. Three pulses and he moved the laser away. "Thank you." He lapsed back into a smile, his teeth very white.

That was it. I paid a bill back upstairs for about 300 koruna (approximately twelve dollars) and they insisted on giving me a receipt for reimbursement from my health insurance, even though it was less than my actual co-pay. I was required to come back in two weeks, and Dr. Dvorak warned me not to go running, swimming, or play with balls in that time. 

When I was invited to play water polo a week later at the municipal pool in the southern town of Tabor, I declined. But my fear and anxiety dissipated and I traveled for months more, forgetting almost completely about my eye. Occasionally when people invited me to dance at discotheques, I'd explain, well, I had this laser surgery, and they'd gape, but I savored it as a good story. Even when I got my eyes checked out back in San Francisco later, and was told Dr. Dvorak had done a good job, that the treatment was much cheaper and faster than anything I could get in the U.S., and that the Czech Republic is the indisputable center for eye surgery in Eastern Europe, I remained blasé. Miracles happen, but we move on, and even that very afternoon, with yellow gunk still in my eye, I walked over the Charles Bridge and visited the Prague Castle. What a place to see.

Originally published in Ivan Klima (forward), David Farley (Editor), Jessie Sholl (Editor), Travelers' Tales Prague and the Czech Republic: True Stories (2006). 

Everybody's Doing It

First It Was Michael Richards.
Then It Was Don Imus.
Now it's Ralph Papitto...

WHO???

Until recently he was the chairman of the Board of Trustees at a respected Rhode Island university.



Seems he used the N-word at a recent Roger Williams University Trustees meeting, as board members were lamenting about how difficult it had been to recruit black members for their group.

"It kind of slipped out," explained the now-ousted board leader who, as a big donor to the school, will retain the title "Chairman Emeritus."

Tongues appear to be slipping more and more, revealing the psychic core of race hatred that lurks close beneath the surface of "decent" America.

The AP report of the Papitto incident is easily accessed, but rather than rewrite the Michael Richards story for Stereotype & Society, or the Imus reiteration, just go back to the original Richards post, reimagine the context to fit the board room, and insert the name “Ralph Papitto.” The rest will take itself.

Same old story. Just fill in the blanks.

For further reading, see Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

The Physiognomy of Failure…and Success

An article in the January 28 edition of The New York Times reports on a Vanderbilt University study of legal immigrants in the United States.  Of more than two thousand immigrants studied, two findings stood out. Among a multi-hued range of immigrants, the study found that "those with the lightest skin earned an average of 8 percent to 15 percent more than similar immigrants with much darker skin."

"On average," Professor Joni Hersch—who conducted the study—reported, "being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education."

Another finding was that shorter immigrants earned less than taller immigrants. Every additional inch of height accounted for a "1 percent increase in income."

Stereotype & Society invites readers to send in personal stories that might put meat on the statistical bones of this study. Has your experience reflected the findings of this study? Let us know.

Send your experiences and observations to: [email protected]

Ghosts: A Fact-Based Fiction

READERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO SHARE STORIES AND EXPERIENCES RELATING TO STEREOTYPING OR BEING STEREOTYPED. USE COMMENTS TO TELL YOUR OWN STORIES, OR TO PUBLISH FACT-BASED FICTIONS

REPOST: BY SPECIAL REQUEST

On July 5, 1956, eleven-year-old Scott Stone answered a call to audition for a play. It was the same year as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, an act of mass civil disobedience that was a milestone in the flowering of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.  Earlier that year, the black population of Montgomery, Alabama refused to ride on city busses as long as they remained racially segregated, as long as Negroes were required to sit in the rear portion of the bus and—if a white person could not find a seat—were obligated to surrender their seat so the white might sit.
    The boycott was a response to the arrest of Rosa Parks, a seamstress and NAACP activist, in December of the previous year. After a long day’s work and some strategic planning, Mrs. Parks had refused to surrender her seat to a white man and was incarcer-ated for this defiant act of tiredness. In Montgomery, a city where white families often re-lied on the labors of domestic servants, all of whom lived in the black parts of town, the collective act of refusal caused considerable inconvenience. Busses ran empty; servants would not ride them to work for more than a year.  Ultimately, the Supreme Court judged the Montgomery bus ordinance unconstitutional. The Montgomery Improvement Asso-ciation won its battle and segregation on public transportation was outlawed throughout the land.
    Scott was not in Montgomery, Alabama. He would pass through the city nearly eight years later but at least for now it was among the furthest places from his mind.  Scott, a secularized Jewish kid with an Anglo name from Long Island, a second-generation American was at a summer camp, primarily for Jewish boys, in the Maine woods, about forty miles from Portland.  This was his third summer at Camp Neshoba, located on Long Lake, where activities for campers tended to center around camping, ex-ploring nature, and participating in sports: swimming, water skiing, tennis, golf, basket-ball, baseball, archery, riflery (where campers earned NRA badges) and other American pastimes.  Jews had long been denied access to camps and clubs where such activities took place, but at Neshoba they were enthusiastic participants, unaware of former prohi-bitions.
    Little was made of the common ethnicity of most of its campers, unless a new camper arrived whose features or mannerisms bore the taint of the unfamiliar.  This breach of normalcy became an occasion for comment and, depending on the kid’s ability to defend himself, petty torments. Food was not kosher, many of the counselors were of Christian backgrounds, and campers played at being mainstream Americans at a time when being American and being mainstream were extremely important.
    When Scott heard that auditions for a play were being held, he felt himself drawn to the opportunity. In his fantasy life he imagined himself as the center of attention, which was usually not the case at home. In bed at night, as he drifted off to sleep, he was reincarnated as the charming host of a popular television show. But at daybreak he re-turned to his childhood and self-doubt. Performing in a play seemed like a perfect oppor-tunity to fulfill his desire to be seen and heard.
    On the afternoon of the auditions, the drama counselor stood above a semi-circle of boys, in a field near the big house, and explained in a slow and easy drawl that the auditions were about to begin.  The counselor’s name was Howard Johnson, a ruddy-skinned white Southerner from Pensacola, in the Deep South of the Florida panhandle.   Howard was one of many white Southerners—college students at Ole Miss, University of Alabama and other mainstays of the Old South—who were recruited to be counselors by the camp owner, Martin Golden, to give his campers a taste of old-time American mascu-linity.
    Speaking to the campers who came to try out for the play, Johnson told them that it was a sidesplitting comedy, a short piece that would be great fun to put on and was sure to amuse the audience.  He then distributed dog-eared copies of the script so that the boys could take turns reading.  When Scott’s copy came around, he held it in his hands, staring down at the title page. 
   The play—Ghoses Er Not Ghoses. A Negro Debate—had been published decades before, in 1916, the year that Scott’s mother was born. Gazing out from the cover was the comical face of a monkey, or perhaps it was a man—Scott couldn’t quite tell—with bulging eyes, huge red lips and jet-black skin. Given the impenetrable title, Scott had no idea what this play was about.

    Without further ado, Howard Johnson explained.  This funny play, he told the boys, was to be performed in a “Negro dialect,” a language so garbled that simply hear-ing it would bring tears of laughter to the audience’s eyes.  The setting was that of a de-bate, a formally staged argument, over whether ghosts exist.  Negroes, counselor Johnson elucidated, were notoriously afraid of ghosts and the play hilariously presented this in-born dread.  The primary role was that of “Rastus Jones,” a debater who nervously, and with intense consternation, spelled out the ever-present hazards posed by the white-sheeted spirits who targeted “darkies” in particular.
    Though still a boy, Scott had been well prepared for this role.  He had never heard about the ghost connection, but on the television he had seen a program called Amos n’ Andy, where one character in particular had provided him with the necessary linguistic training.  The ”Kingfish,” a calculating con man, and denizen of the Lodge of the Mystic Knights of the Sea—where much of the program’s antics took place—had a round, clownish voice and bizarrely physical way of mouthing his words that, for Scott, seemed perfect.  “Well, hello there, Sapphire!” the Kingfish would say to his usually disapprov-ing wife, each time she surprised him in the midst of a scheme. Scott and his friends on Long Island would laughingly repeat the line to each other again and again, and had the accent down pat. The TV program starred black actors, with Tim Moore playing the iras-cible George “Kingfish” Stevens.  Scott had a close friend who was a Negro, Leon Haw-kins, and a black woman whom he deeply loved, Edith Byrd, took care of him when his mother was away. Neither of them fit the Amos n’ Andy molds, but Scott made no con-nection between these actual people in his life and the ridiculous characters he saw on TV.
    Scott was unaware that the program began on radio in the late 1920s, during the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and that the on air voices of these buffoons were the creation of two white actors, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll.  Gosden was a native of Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy, while Correll was a Midwesterner, from Peoria, Illinois, a hub of Klan activities in the 1920s. While the two would make public appearances wearing blackface greasepaint, the coming of television required a more convincing cast and black actors were assembled to assume the characters created by Gosden and Correll.  While the program had been taken off of CBS in 1953, it re-mained in syndication into the 1960s and was a familiar part of the popular culture on which Scott and others were raised.
    When it came time for Scott to read for the part, he faithfully carried the “King-fish” into his fervent interpretation of Rastus Jones. As he recited the words, he saw that Howard Johnson was very pleased, and this approval only added to the quality of his per-formance.  After all the boys had read, Scott was far and away the biggest ham, and won the part of Rastus without any serious competition.
    The play would take place in three weeks time, and in the intervening days there would be a number of rehearsals.  The first would be a dramatic read-through of the script.  Johnson encouraged the boys to start learning their lines, but said they could con-sult their scripts for this rehearsal.  Given the opportunity, and other diversions, Scott didn’t bother to learn a word, knowing he could rely on his newly discovered dramatic skills at the rehearsal.
    The rehearsal went fairly well, but when Howard Johnson noticed that his star was reading throughout, he firmly encouraged the boy to head to his cabin and start learn-ing his lines.  Scott knew that the counselor was right, but there was something inside of him that resisted committing Ghoses Er Not Ghoses to memory.  It was nothing rational; he still relished the prospect of starring in the play, but there was something about the play that troubled him.  He continued not to learn his lines, though he created the illusion that he was by memorizing bits and pieces of the play for rehearsals, while relying primarily on his script.
    By the third rehearsal, Howard Johnson was livid.  “This little Jew,” he thought to himself, “is about to ruin my play.” “Scott,” he told the boy, “we’re heading towards a dress rehearsal in a few days and if you don’t learn those lines you’re going to be in seri-ous trouble.” Beneath the relative decorum of this warning, Scott Stone smelled danger.  This guy was really mad.  It wasn’t just the play.  The level of the drama counselor’s pal-pable fury suggested that issues ran far deeper.  Johnson assumed that the severity of his admonition would be enough to scare his recalcitrant lead into line.
    The day of the dress rehearsal arrived.  Ludicrous costumes, that would add a vis-ual absurdity to the debate, had been prepared.  A tin of blackface make-up was open on a table, and one-by-one, the boys had the greasepaint smeared over their faces and necks.  An inch-wide space for the lips was left without make-up; creating the appearance of the preposterously huge mouth that Scott saw each time he looked at the cover of his script. 
    When it came time for Scott to be blackened up, he sat down at the table, but in-stead of submitting to the ritual he tremulously turned to Howard Johnson and told him, in so many words, that he had not learned his lines and could not perform in the play.  Johnson had a paroxysm. 
    Without Scott, the play was nothing. All was lost. His face turned beat red, and he spat white salvos of saliva as he told the boy that he had “wrecked the play for everyone.”  He turned to the other boys—all made up—and with a glance communicated the order that Scott be shunned for his unpardonable transgression.
    Scott felt embarrassed and inept.  He thought he had done something terribly wrong.  At the same time, deep inside, there was a feeling of satisfaction that he would not be forced to appear publicly in this play with burnt cork on his face.  For days, none of the boys would talk to him. He felt very alone.
    As time went on, his campmate’s anger dissipated, but Howard Johnson’s only grew.  The level of this anger began with nasty looks and comments.  Then, about a week after the blackface debacle, Scott was walking along a dirt hill towards the mess hall when suddenly he was pushed from behind.  He felt his hands scraping on the rough ter-rain and, after looking at his minor abrasions, he turned back and there stood counselor Johnson, smiling over his prone body.  “Did our little Rastus hurt himself?” 
    Fear of the man now entered Scott’s universe.  He would do his best to avoid him and hope that this was the end of it.  But it wasn’t.  The taunts continued and then, a screen door was slammed in Scott’s face. Again, it was Johnson at the wheel.  Following this second assault, Scott summed up his courage and went to visit the owner of the camp, Martin Golden.  While Scott readily admitted that he had not learned his lines, wouldn’t blacken up, and had caused the play’s cancellation, he believed that Johnson’s treatment was beyond the pale.  There was nothing about corporal punishments in the Camp Neshoba brochure, and Golden has assured Scott’s parents that the boy was in good hands. 
    This brought an end to Johnson’s harassments. Worried for his job he pulled back from his petulant reign of terror.  Still, there were furtive glances and, if Scott understood them correctly, evil eyes.
    This childhood tale remained with Scott well into adulthood. It was, for him, a de-fining moment.  Over the years, the events here told faded from Howard Johnson’s mem-ory.  But in this confrontation between camper and counselor, as the level of Johnson’s fury indicated, lay matters the reached far beyond the individuals involved.
    As a white Southerner in 1956, Johnson had been raised in an environment where everything and every person had a designated place.  While the world was changing around him, the world he held tightly within his head was propelled by ideas of human inequality.   Though he was unaware of it, it was this familiar world that led him to select the play he wished to mount at Camp Neshoba. In being performed, the play would give voice to ideas about African-Americans that his culture had defined for him since he was a boy.
    While Scott was only barely aware of events taking place in Alabama, there were things about the world within his head that—without his knowing—had pushed him into an unconscious act of defiance.  In spite of his Anglo name, he was a Jew born in the last days of the Holocaust. During his early childhood, there were elusive references to family members who had “died in the camps.”  Given the world they had witnessed from the safety of America, Scott’s parents had raised the boy to know that “prejudice” was a bad thing and that the “Germans” had murdered millions of Jews and other people because of prejudice and hatred.  On occasion, they would talk about “the Negroes,” and the ways that they, like the Jews, were victims of bigotry.  Though none of this was at the forefront of his mind when he tried out for Ghoses er Not Ghoses, his unwitting refusal to participate in making the play’s worldview public, had been shaped by the template of his own men-tal environment.
    The violent reaction that Scott’s refusal provoked in Howard Johnson was not simply the result of a personality conflict.  The intensity of Johnson’s wrath was but an index of the extent to which the boy’s non-compliance implicitly challenged a set of com-fortable convictions about who was who in the order of things.  Embedded within his un-conscious mind, Johnson held a set of preconceptions about different groups of people.  Oblivious to their influence, the fixed ideas that he carried around with him shaped the way he saw the people he encountered, even before the encounter occurred. Their per-sonhood, in his mind, was secondary to his prefabricated presumptions about them.  The play he wished to direct was a cultural expression of these presumptions and, even in 1956, he still felt at ease with them.
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Hell's Kitchen

READERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO SHARE STORIES AND EXPERIENCES RELATING TO STEREOTYPING OR BEING STEREOTYPED. USE COMMENTS TO TELL YOUR OWN STORIES, OR TO PUBLISH FACT-BASED FICTIONS. SELECTED STORIES WILL BE POSTED AS HEADLINE ENTRIES.

I teach video at a High School in Hell’s Kitchen. The curriculum and structure of the school has been developed by Facing History and Ourselves, an educational organization which encourages leading the students in critical examination of history, with particular focus on genocide and mass violence. The Holocaust is thoroughly studied, so are more current issues, like conflict in Sudan, etc.

The ethnicity of the students is 3% white, 22 % black, 74 % Hispanic and 1% Asian. When I came to the school I wanted to see past color and culture but I was immediately confronted with it the very first day.

The teacher whose class I was observing to familiarize myself with school’s teaching methods, discipline rules, etc. was leading a lesson on integrity. The questions students were to discuss was “If you found a wallet with $20 in it and an ID, what would you do”. The first response I heard came from a Latino 10th grader was: “If it belonged to a white person, I would take the money, if not, I would give it back”. Some other students cheered in approval. I was the only white person in the room at that moment and I froze. The teacher asked “why so?” and the boy replied: “white people have enough money already”.

Another day I was encouraging a student to complete an assignment, which required writing a short proposal for a movie project. He kept saying “I can’t do it”. When asked “why”, he said, “I can’t do it, I’m black”.

Tolerance is the core of Facing History School’s curriculum and I do believe that education should be the catalyst for an end to stereotypes, prejudice, violence, and injustice. I believe that we are evolving as a society, but it will take time and a good amount of effort from both educators and students to get rid off signs of typecasting, like the “N” word I hear in the school hallways at least 50 times a day.

Gosia

 

Story From a Reader

READERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO SHARE STORIES AND EXPERIENCES RELATING TO STEREOTYPING OR BEING STEREOTYPED. USE COMMENTS TO TELL YOUR OWN STORIES, OR TO PUBLISH FACT-BASED FICTIONS

My story is short but possibly revealing to this context. I took an Ethnic Politics class during which our teacher explained to us that having stereotypes was "normal" (she used that word). I raised my hand and said that stereotypes were equal to racism and that no one could condone stereotypes. The professor got irrated and called me ignorant. She then demanded that I reveal a racial stereotype that I believed in because I had to have one. I said that I didn't have any and she called me a liar. In a college in America, I, a student, was defending knowledge and social progress to a Ethnic Politics professor. It was a sad day for education.

Posted by: Tristan Weisgal Wermus | 21 November 2006 at 03:34 AM