Libertarian, I actually suggested that zigaretten wasn’t reading for comprehension. No, I am not a teacher. However, if you disagreed with my interpretation, it might have been more helpful to give at least one example of how. I also don’t have any problem with the use of racially charged language in literature and art when the conclusion is a condemnation of racism. But this little piece is not Huck Finn.
I did overlook the addendum post, in which Scylla does say that such attitudes are unacceptable. However, I have reread the OP again (and I really tire of the suggestion that I made a hasty read of it, having tried to make explicit in several ways my objections to it). I do agree that the protagonist’s return to racism is ambigiuous, and subject to multiple interpretations. However, I continue to be unable to read anything other than the opposite of racism is happy crap. Please show me how this is wrong. Please show me where the OP condemns racism. If you are going to write a story that uses a racial epithet 24 times, including affirmative usage by the protagonist, I think that the moral payoff has to be a bit stronger than “I was wrong. There is nothing contemptible about my grandfather. It is people who aren’t heroic who are contemptible.”
I can’t think of how to say it any more clearly. Attack me some more if you like, but I don’ t think it will be helpful for me to respond further along those lines. Help me to see the condemnation of racism, and the evolution of the thinking of the protagonist regarding his own racism, and that will be helpful.
I’m sorry you were in a bad mood this morning; I hope the rest of the day was better.
You said:
I had to laugh when I read this. Er, surely you realize that this is just what you were doing in your post? I, however, do not find it offensive because, IMO, this is what we all do, every day, all day long, whether here or in real life. It is the motivation behind any attempt to communicate, is it not?
FWIW, I did indeed think that a couple of posters had become so upset before finishing the OP that they had overlooked Scylla’s disclaimer. shrug You weren’t one of them.
Scylla
An overall excellent treatment of a complex and sensitive matter. Do you mind if I offer one small bit of constructive criticism? It seems to me that one phrase in particular is being interpreted differently by different readers, and from one interpretation it does, indeed, cast a blight on your motives and conclusions. You wrote:
(emphasis mine)
I believe this is what is offending some people. I took it as a derogatory reference to the trendy, everyones-a-victim pop psychology/sociology that many use to absolve people of personal responsibility for criminal behavior. However, I can see how much easier it is to read this as a blanket condemnation of teaching tolerance, empathy, and understanding, and the result is a complete reversal of the message you are trying to send.
I believe that you need rewrite this part so that it more clearly conveys your true meaning (whatever it is - my interpretation may also be off the mark).
On preview I see that Hentor the Barbarian has confirmed my guess that some may have overlooked the disclaimer, and also that the ‘happy crap’ phrase seems to be the major sticking point. FWIW, Hentor, I understand your point; I suspect that many of us are reading this differently because of long-time familiarity with Scylla’s writings on this board. And kudos to you for being willing to keep an open mind and discuss the matter calmly and intelligently.
I wasn’t aware of the racial epithets/moral payoff ratio convention when I wrote my OP.
And, I guess I hold a different opinion of “condemnations of racism.” They seem ultimately self-serving and empty. If I wrote a post glorifying racism unambiguously, and then wrote “BTW I am not a racist and I condemn racism,” how does that change anything? If you remember the end of the Godfather when the priest asked Michael “Do you condemn Satan, and all his works?” and Michael said “I do condemn them?” At that very moment he was having all his enemies whacked.
Finally, on this subject , I did put a condemnation of racism in there after I posted, just to be safe in case anybody thought it was ambiguous. That didn’t seem enough to work for either you or a couple of others. You’re complaining that I didn’t condemn racism and then when you find in error that I did you indicate that it doesn’t really matter.
You’re paraphrase of my moral is also in an error. Usually if people misinterpret you, it’s your fault. In this case, since most people seem to have gotten it and explained it to you over and over, I think the fault may lie with you. You’re free to interpret things as you like, but it looks like you have an agenda to me.
There is no overt condemnation of racism in my piece. I didn’t and don’t think it needs it.
The evolution of thought of myself goes like this:
-Little child thinks Grandpa is hero and Nigger = monster.
-Little child learns that it means black people and is confused. Something is wrong because Amanda is not a monster, though she is black.
-Little child is taught that there is something wrong with grandpa that makes him see things this way. He is taught that racism and prejudice are bad in much the same way he is taught the alphabet. It is empty and abstract, but he doesn’t know this. It is all theory that he doesn’t really understand.
-Little kid encounters the behaviors in some of his black schoolmates, that are likely responsible for his Grandpa’s racism. He learns that there are monsters. Empty theory and abstract learning mean little when you are being terrorized, and certain racist attitudes like “don’t go to the bathroom or be caught in the hall alone with a group of black kids” become compulsory.
-Somewhat older kid is able to put that into context and obtains what he thinks is an adult attitude towards prejudice as a failing of human character. He thinks he understands it all now, and he is smug. He overcame the environmental pressures that likely brought his grandfather to racism, and he feels quite secure in his superiority to his grandpa in this. He is more evolved, and his grandfather is worthy of contempt for his failure to grasp the larger truth.
-Child learns that the firm he had on truth was actually a handful of sand. It is not so simple as he thought. The child does indeed hold a more evolved view of racism intellectually and in the abstract. His grandfather demonstrates that evolved thought however doesn’t make one better, or superior, or give one the right to look down on another. He sees people stand and watch and comment while other people die nearby. They watch like it was entertainment. Our narrator is one of them.
Here is where the moral lesson or the evolution occurs. What I felt at that time was empty and contemptible myself. I felt that way for having felt superior to this man. All that I had, and all that I felt proud of, and superior about, was simply a sugar coating. My grandfather on the other hand (to maintain the metaphor) had a coating of shit. I compare my outside coat to his outside coat and feel superior, as if it defines me, and it defines him. That day in the surf thoug wasn’t about the coating. It was about the substance underneath. My grandfather had that substance. Those who watched and were simply tittilated or who did nothing revealed that underneath their outer coating there was nothing.
-As an adult, I see Grandpa in a nursing home. He commits an egregious racial offense. He is belittled and treated with contempt for it. What I see are people comparing their sugary outer shells with each other, and feeling very proud of themselves and very smug that their shells are so sweet and sugary, while his is so shitty. It comes to me that the only reason one would be so proud and focussed on their outer shell is because there is nothing underneath it.
My OP is not primarily about racism. It’s about the evolution of attitudes towards it.
Heh. You’re quite right. I guess I resent it less when one is conjecturing in such a way that gives people the benefit of the doubt. I can’t know why people posted what they did, but my making a guess about their thought process is perhaps less offensive if the end result is flattering to the guessee. In other words, guessing that they read carefully but had an heartfelt reaction to something is not as bad as guessing that they were careless or uncomprehending.
Any more hairs I can split?
But you’re right, I’m simply better off not guessing, especially if I’m going to gripe about other people doing that. I can only speak for myself.
Let me say, Scylla, that I do appreciate your posting such a personal story, and attempting to tackle some tough issues. I’ll just say one more thing, and then I’ll stop, unless something specific to me comes up.
Well, I apologize for overlooking the addendum in my critique, but yes, as you say, it does come off as a glorification of racism with a coda of “oh yeah, it’s bad to think that way.” When you say that it is okay to call people a racial epithet because of their actions, in my opinion it is important to reconcile this pretty explicitly at some point. You don’t, but it’s your story, and your right to do so. I hope that it is my right to say that it is unsatisfactory.
Well, see below for more discussion on your moral and my confusion thereof.
The problem is that, in the story, your understanding of why racism is bad is simply that you are told it is, by your mother, teachers, and Sesame Street. Yes, you have a black friend, but you present efforts to combat racism in a manner that makes them sound like political correctness, empty and paling in the face of the heroic act of your grandfather.
But here you show the failure of growth of the character, or of yourself, I suppose. This is my confusion with your moral. You fail to extend the lesson learned about your grandfather to all those others you so simply discard as sugar-coated and empty. Surely they are just as likely as your grandfather to have engaged in an act of heroism at some point? You continue to apply dichotomies, and judge people as empty and hypocritical by the little that you observe in them in the context of their response to the racist behavior of your grandfather. If the growth that you suggest by your moral had occurred (specifically that you came to understand that a person’s character cannot be entirely judged by a limited sample of their behavior) it seems it would be applied to the others that you now regard as shit, or less than shit, as nothing. You presume that the people watching were titilated by the trauma they witnessed. It is as likely that they would rush into a burning house to save a child, but cannot swim. It is as likely that they were stunned by what they were witnessing, but would stand up against injustice as an act of heroism. It is as likely that a worker in a nursing home who is African American has faced a load greater than you could carry of racism throughout his life, and it is a small act of heroism that he deals with your grandfather in an even tempered way. Yet, you discard these people as shit, failing to extend your understanding of the complexity of the life of your grandfather to them as well.
Again, I applaud your efforts to deal with this subject. However, I do feel that you provide a strong effort to justify using a racial epithet, but fail to demonstrate that the protagonist, you, later comes to internalize messages contrary to racism. Rather, you appear to dismiss them blithely. Perhaps I feel too strongly that racist messages should be met with critical thought and condemnation. If I have an agenda in this matter, it is only that.
Please understand that he wasn’t writing a novel, or even a short story. What you can do with a couple of k-bytes is necessarily limited. There was much that he didn’t speak to, but the point is about what he did speak to. Just as you, after several posts, have failed to develop an argument that has convinced me, so Scylla can be expected to do only so much character development in such a small space. I thought that he developed the character of his grandfather beautifully, and that was what his post was about.
Those who look down on Scylla’s grandpa are not neccesarily better than he is because they are doing what they are condemning in him, if only for other reasons.
Or shorter:
It is not so important to talk the talk, what matters is that you can walk the walk.
To be fair, you’ve never seen the workers in the nursing home in the type of situation you put forth as evidence for your Grandfather’s inner character.(for it seems you’ve built this model of humanity as dual-layered, an outer shell that people interact with daily and a true self which they show when the chips are really down. I’ll continue to use that metaphor for the rest of this post, just to be clear)
For all you know they would have been swimming alongside him trying to pull people out of the riptide and to safety. You’ve seen the shell AND interior of your grandfather and you condem his shell while you praise his heart. You’ve only seen the shell of the workers in the home and you’re condemning them based upon what you think their hearts would be like. This seems at least as unfair as them condemning him based upon his shell. Perhaps moreso because you hold the belief that a person should not be judged solely on their outer shell and as far as we know they hold no such belief. While their condemnation of your Grandfather could be in perfect keeping with their moral and ethical principles, your condemnation of them seems to contradict yours.
Well, I just changed some things in my profile as a result of reading this thread. My profile used to read “German-American, single, white, straight male.” I edited it by taking out the words white and straight, because I felt it was my own way of being a bigot.
If some of you looked at it, and didn’t call me on it, then thanks for being so nice. If none of you looked at my profile, well then why the hell not??
I keep reading it over and over, and it just hit me when I felt like this before.
It is how I felt when I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and read what Huck says in his story of the explosion on the steamboat, near the end of the novel.
Your grandfather, and my grandmother, and my father-in-law. They were racist, and they were wrong, but that doesn’t mean they were bad people. At least, not all bad.
That’s what I got out of your OP. And it was plenty.
Scylla, your grandfather’s ‘exterior coating’ reminds me of your story about your dad’s Cummins Turbo diesel in the Pit. For those that haven’t read it, I recall the truck had never been cleaned inside or out for 7-odd years, but it was no less powerful.
I think almost anyone of a certain age has a relative like this; I have quite a few. They’ll make Lester Maddox look like Jane Fonda one moment, then perform a selfless act of kindness the next. It is easy not to challenge their racism because it is a thing that is clearly passing on; there is no real reason to fight it. It’s amazing to me how even the dilution in each successive generation afterward is. My father/uncle/aunt’s generation still commonly use n-words and such, but it’s more like an affectation instead of a worldview. My generation, it’s down to mind-echoes that can be shrugged off. I’ve often had inexplicably strong negative thoughts about minorities, which to me are indefensible and making about as much sense to my logical mind as Tourette’s; I know, though, that my family put them there, encouraging them directly or indirectly. This known, I can ignore them. As I’ve gotten older, this is increasingly easier to do. It’s probably a large part of why I’m so left - I feel like I have to balance the universe out, so to speak.
That said, I’m quite positive my grandkids, if I ever have any, will look at me in much the same light, probably for meat-eating or environment-destroying. “You drove a CAR? And you ate FLESH?” Then I’ll accidentally redeem myself in their eyes by rescuing a herd of cows with a fusion-powered hovercraft.
I don’t know what to say. My grandfather was quite a racist, as well. My grandparents raised me for about four impressionable years, and it took a lot to get his vitrol out of my own head.
I think it’s important to note that Scylla was writing from the heart, and as Pascal said, “The heart hath reasons that reason cannot comprehend”.
I truly felt for the grandfather…he reminded me in many ways of my own grandmother, a woman who had no compunctions about using the word “nigger” and yet treated the black children of the neighborhood like they were her own grandchildren.
Despite what the glib pop-psychologists that swarm the net boards would like to believe, and would prefer us to believe, there is NOTHING simple about human behavior and human interaction. And the presence of one negative quality (a quality only considered negative by our current standards, mind you) doesn’t cancel out the presence of a positive quality. You have to take the good with the bad, in other words, and realize that the attempt to categorize people into nice little neat boxes is such a sign of shallow thinking as to be juvenile.
If we were to look at the story from a moral perspective, it would be much improved if it were a story of how there was more than one human hidden within Grandpa, and how wrong the narrator was in sitting in harsh judgment over Grandpa’s overt racism. The bigger moral learnt is not to judge people without looking carefully at all their faces.
Instead, based on one incident, the narrator judges the people who watched the drowning, and the nurses (not in the story) who deal with Grandpa as hypocrites, i.e., as having just a sugar coat thus suggesting that Grandpa is indeed the better man despite the shitty coating (to continue the phrases used). He does not extend the complexity of human nature and behavior that he recognizes in his Grandpa to these people which, if I may do this to a story, is logically inconsistent.
But, yes, it is a creation of someone else which deserves its flexible license… Yet, I cannot help but think that the story is driven more by the author’s contempt for those faceless people who, in the author’s eyes, hypocritically condemn his Grandfather than by the author’s desire to spread, IMHO, the more important moral that myopic judgment is easy and dangerous.
Interesting story. ** Scylla ** has a flair for writing. I liked the way the narrative of the child was written.
