I was reminded of something I said when I was young and foolish. My parents were attempting to explain segregation to me, and prefaced their explanation with the statement that black people were just like us. “No they aren’t!” I triumphantly pointed out. “They have darker skin!”
My point: Although I have maybe two black friends, I know that melanin content is the only difference between me and said friends. So, do we need to teach tolerance, or just unteach intolerance?
It depends on how you really define tolerance.
If you define tolerance as in, “okay, you do your thing, I’ll do mine, you stay outta my face, I stay out of yours and we don’t kill each other,” sure.
If you define tolerance as in, “okay, I’m different than you and dammit you WILL accept whatever I throw at you, regardless of what you personally think about it,” no.
Thing is, seems as though most folks these days are defining tolerance by the latter … which is really better described as “acceptance,” IMHO.
Do people REALLY want to just be tolerated? Or do they want to be accepted?
I do think we need to teach tolerance. When my younger daughter at age barely five began kindergarten, the class was racially balanced. She used to come home and talk about, “the brownskinners.”
The point is, she noticed the difference and classified people based on skin color, even though (I assume) the school never taught her to do this, nor did she learn this at home.
So, what’ve people been throwing at you, WV_Woman? What appalling things have you been asked to accept?
I think we need to teach acceptance, not tolerance. I see alot of people “tolerating” people of other ethiniticies all the time. Tolerating being such a tenious concept. They sure as hell like to flap thier lips about the people they are “tolerating”.
Acceptance is the key here. Acceptance is not talking smack about somebody behing thier back because they happen to have ancestors from Mexico or Africa. (or be Muslim) Acceptance is treating somebody as a person no matter what color thier skin is. Not “ok, I won’t kill you, but I am going to cause you problems when I can, and talk bad about you to my white buddies”.
(I am white btw, so I hear this crap from them all the time, they seem to think I share thier sentiments)
Epi, why do you want to control what other people say?
Take me, for instance. I’m fat. Yep. I am.
I do not give a flying rat’s ass what someone says about me to their friends behind my back. As long as they leave me alone to live my life in peace, they can say what they want. That’s the beauty of freedom of speech: the right to be a dickhead.
You cannot force anyone to accept somebody else. We all have our preferences. The best we can hope for is tolerance.
I, hopefully, am teaching my boys not to make rash judgements based on what they see on the surface. I’d like them to get to the person behind the skin tone/weight/nationality/et cetera and then decide if they like him or her.
To do this, we learn about different cultures and religions every chance we get. This year, we’re going to celebrate Hanukkah, Christmas and Kwanzaa because my oldest son wants to know what they are. Typically, we only celebrate Christmas.
I’ve got some prejudices I don’t want to pass to my sons. I’m working on them and I recognize they are wrong. Never EVER will you see me defending them or learning to accept them. I don’t tolerate my prejudices and will address any my sons have immediately.
I think we need to teach our children not to generalize, which is easy to do. “Us” and “Them” are very ingrained concepts and pigeon-holing groups of people is a lot faster than getting to know every individual and judging them on their own merits. Appearance is the first thing we see and color is a part of that, as well as size. Normal is “Us”, to a child. This isn’t formally taught. My family is very racially diverse, and the children are more likely to point out the ‘lady in the beautiful dress’ than the ‘black’ lady.
Much of the lessons taught about tolerance are rather humorous. For one, it should be “acceptance” not tolerance. Tolerance, by definition, means that you do not like the people you are tolerating. Acceptance fits more with what is being taught. Yet, in this teaching, rest many contradictions. The first being the following fact. We are taught to treasure differences, but yet think of everyone in the same way. This is a massive contradiction. Also, it assumes that everyone is worthy of respect and kindness. Some people are no better than animals, and yet we are taught to treat them with respect. People should be polite to everyone until they truly know them, but respect is a different matter. Respect should be earned. So, what we should be teaching is to be nice to everyone until you learn that they don’t deserve it and respect or disrespect people according to their worthiness. People are not the same, nor should they be treated as such. Assumptions should be avoided, but that is the only thing that should be avoided. For example, should you be kind to a serial killer? Should you treat a serial killer with respect?
It is not about forcing anybody to do anything. It is about teaching them to not hate somebody because they are different. It is about being civil, and not being a jerk because somebody has a different skin tone, or from a different country.
Epi, you cannot stop people from being jerks. You will die trying.
Actually, WV_Woman, I hope I do die trying. Just because something is hard, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.
You hope you die trying to control what other people think/say/do?
Can we say “control freak” boys and girls?
See
http://www.splcenter.org/teachingtolerance/tt-index.html
Main page: http://www.splcenter.org/splc.html
People make assumptions. This is unavoidable. It is natural to assume things when there is no other way to come to a conclusion. So, the trick is to somehow manage to fight assumptions. This will be difficult if not impossible. Also, how far do we go with this? We can’t say that all humans are equal. They aren’t. What about rapists, murderers? The stupid, the mentally ill, the retarded. We ignore the fact that people are born with different abilities and personalities, and some of them aren’t worth anything. Not every human being in the world is worth something. Personally, I think that you are only worth something if you give as much back to society as you take away, throughout the course of your life. Does Osama deserve tolerance and acceptance? Not all humans deserve to be treated well. Now, I wouldn’t be for judgements based on race or nationality, but judgements based on impressions one gets from speaking with a person, from being around them, from watching them, from learning about their past, their intelligence, their abilities, their personality, etc.
He’s not trying to stop people from being jerks, precisely. At least, that’s not what I got out of it. People are mean and cruel- you can’t stop jerk-like behavior. But you can stop, or try to stop, them from doing in based on race/gender/religion/etc. Like what Mandos was saying. If you’re going to judge someone, at least do it on personality or character. That’s a lot more intelligent than automatically judging someone before you get to know what they’re like. Not so much forcing it down people’s throats, but trying to get people to stop making snap judgements.
I don’t think tolerance has much to do with things like race, things like that are immutable. Tolerance probably belongs in the are of behaviour and belief and ideas.
Tolerance is properly defined around allowing others to hold differing beliefs without accepting those beliefs. That’s why it’s so ridiculous to hear folks spout off about tolerance, since what they really mean is for people to condone and approve, or else.
Well said, Ted.
Neither, I think we instead need to be careful not to teach intolerance in the first place. Of the thirteen 3 and 4 year olds in our morning class this year, two of them are not white, and none of them seems to realize that there’s a difference. I don’t think that they’ll notice there’s a difference that matters to some people until someone points it out to them, and perhaps then will they start to judge people on their skin color. As far as I can observe intolerance is something we learn, not an innate quality.