The results speak for themselves: Bessie became a dentist and Sadie a high school teacher, each of them among the first African-American women to achieve those positions. When they encountered prejudice and discrimination, they had the internal fortitude to move beyond it; as Sadie says, “Life’s not easy for anyone, despite how it may look. Sometimes you just have to put up with a lot to get the little bit you need.” (The long-living Delany sisters—Bessie died six months after my visit—are also prime examples of what researchers are discovering about the positive role an affirmative outlook on life can play in physical health. Certainly it lowers our levels of anger and hostility, freeing up energy for more constructive purposes.)
The family is not only children’s heritage; it is also the first “civilization” they know, the first context in which they can learn about their rights and obligations. Research summarized in a study by psychologists at the National Institute of Mental Health shows that children are ready to begin their instruction at a very early age. Precursors to empathy begin to manifest themselves in infancy, when a baby will cry in response to another baby’s cry. Between the ages of one year and two and a half, children begin to help, share, and comfort. Toddlers pat one another reassuringly or hug an upset parent. Around this time, they begin to display feelings of guilt or shame when they cause distress or disobey a clear standard of conduct. These are signs that children’s moral sense is beginning to emerge.
Whether or not it continues to develop depends largely on the actions of the adults around them. Everyday experiences and conversations—showing a toddler how to touch a pet or a baby sister gently, or asking a six-year-old to imagine how it would feel to be a homeless person—provide ongoing opportunities to teach core values and beliefs.
At the same time, adults must help children to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Teaching tolerance, for example, should not be confused with giving children the sense that anything goes. They should learn that some behaviors, such as violence, abuse, or harassment, are unacceptable. And they should not be afraid to make judgments that reflect an understanding of the real world. It is realistic, not racist, to be cautious when walking through a high-crime neighborhood, or to want to avoid a corner where a drive-by shooting has taken place. Such judgments become biased only when they are motivated by negative stereotypes rather than common sense.
Awareness of racial, ethnic, and other differences occurs by the age of three or four, when they readily notice variations in skin color, for example, and are not shy about pointing them out. They do not automatically assume that people who do not look and speak as they do are persons they should fear, mistrust, or dislike, however.
Yet rather than taking their observations as ready-made opportunities to teach children respect for others, many parents ignore or stifle such comments. They may be afraid that they will say the wrong thing, or that simply talking about difference makes them bigots. But when parents ignore what children notice, they abdicate their role as teachers to the media and to their children’s peers, who will be quick to supply negative stereotypes. By keeping silent, these parents are teaching bias as surely as if they blatantly voiced it.
“Every one of us has been made aware of a simple truth,” my husband said in a speech in Austin, Texas, in October 1995. “White Americans and black Americans often see the same world in drastically different ways…. The reasons for this divide are many. Some are rooted in the awful history and stubborn persistence of racism. Some are rooted in the different ways we experience the threats of modern life to personal security, family values, and strong communities. Some are rooted in the fact that we still haven’t learned to talk frankly, to listen carefully, and to work together across racial lines.” He was speaking of racial conflict, but his prescription applies more broadly to all forms of bias in our multiracial, multiethnic society.
As always, the solution begins at home. Parents must learn to talk with children about the diversity of human experiences and traits, answering their questions simply and directly and giving them an appropriate vocabulary to describe what they see. Religion can play a key role. I remember once as a child having diversity explained to me this way: If God had made a garden with only one kind of flower, it would not be nearly as beautiful as a garden with many different flowers. We can also point out to children that scientists who study genetics are learning that despite our superficial differences, human beings are more alike than unlike; we share common ancestors and are all members of the human family.
At the same time, adults should be alert to the language they themselves use, even when they are not addressing children directly. Especially in the early years, when children are voraciously acquiring vocabulary, what adults say makes a lasting impression, even if it is not intended seriously. Children are not born bigots, but they are quick learners. As the lyrics to the song “Carefully Taught” from South Pacific remind us, you have to be taught, “Before you are six or seven or eight / To hate all the people your relatives hate.”
Within and beyond their homes, adults must speak out against racial, ethnic, religious, or gender slurs. We can say simply, “We don’t talk like that in this house,” or, as a friend’s father always told her, “That kind of comment has no place in this world.” We can also say to others, “Please don’t speak like that in front of my family.” Standing up for tolerance and respect in front of children gives them models for how to confront bigotry on their own, whether it is directed at them or others.
When children are the target of bias, open and honest talk is critical, to acknowledge the pain and to underscore that what causes it is bigotry, not identity. Adults can often comfort children by reminding them that those who resort to name-calling and finger-pointing do not know the first thing about them.
The village should also help prevent negative stereotypes from taking root in the first place, whether through more sensitive portrayals of people in the media or through adorning the walls of classrooms and day care centers with images that acknowledge and celebrate diversity. Toys, games, and books that promote positive images of women and minorities have an impact too. There is no substitute, however, for giving children experience with people who are not like them and cultures that are not like their own, as I learned in my own childhood. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, school clubs, church groups, and other community programs offer children of different backgrounds the opportunity to share activities and to discover their common interests. Sports teams in particular can be havens of cooperation and teamwork.
Clearly, schools and day care centers, where many children are first introduced to people from a variety of backgrounds, have an important role to play in shaping their attitudes and expectations. At the Washington Beech Community Preschool in Roslindale, Massachusetts, director Ellen Wolpert has children play games like Go Fish and Concentration with a deck of cards adorned with images—men holding babies, women pounding nails, elderly men on ladders, gray-haired women on skateboards—that counter the predictable images. Some schools are reinventing the old tradition of “pen pals,” arranging for students to exchange letters, artwork, or even videotapes with children from other countries and cultures. Others have developed history and social studies lessons about the unfair treatment—and accomplishments—of women and minorities, which are often overlooked. Special opportunities like Black History Month can be used to expose students to the contributions of particular groups of Americans. In some school districts, teachers and staff undergo training to make them more comfortable with the topic of diversity and to expose them to innovative ways of dealing with it in the classroom. Schools in districts where there are children of different races or ethnicities have formed parent-staff committees to promote potluck dinners, family-to-family visits, and workshops for parents and staff.
Yet no matter how hard schools work to teach tolerance and empathy, conflicts will arise, especially when children bring with them different cultural assumptions and expectations. My pa
rents drilled into my brothers and me that familiar refrain “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” and the advice to “take a deep breath and count to ten” to give us ways to avoid hostile confrontations.
Schools can help to equip children with the tools to prevent harsh words and playground taunts from escalating into aggressive behavior. In April 1995, I visited a peer mediation project at Seward Park High School on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Every day, nearly three thousand youngsters arrive there from homes in which they have grown up speaking different languages, celebrating different holidays, belonging to different religions, and experiencing different family cultures. I watched college students from New York University who are AmeriCorps members teaching the high school students techniques for mediating their peers’ disputes, working in groups to negotiate nonviolent resolutions rather than relying on teachers and administrators to “police” them.
Some of the most effective approaches to promoting affirmative living are those that involve the entire village. A World of Difference, a national educational project sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League, helps teachers, administrators, students, and parents to promote tolerance and diversity in their schools and communities. Workshops throughout the year teach students to recognize and resist prejudiced behavior and to share their reflections about racial and cultural issues. An annual event in Boston called Team Harmony brings middle and high school students and teachers together with local sports figures and business leaders to take a stand against prejudice and bigotry. Local television and radio stations, newspapers, churches, and synagogues get involved.
After the Team Harmony event in 1994, many students wrote about the positive messages they received. “Since the event, I want to do all that I can to stop racism,” one of them wrote. “I want everyone to live in peace and harmony, where there is no hatred and no violence. I don’t care that some of my friends are black, white, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Portuguese.”
When racial tensions surfaced in the town of Lima, Ohio, following the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial, Mayor David Berger initiated a series of dialogues about race relations. In firehouses and living rooms, classrooms and church halls, residents came together to discuss their perceptions of one another and of their community, an all too rare opportunity. As one resident put it, “It’s not like you can walk up to someone on the street and say, ‘Hey, what do you think about race relations?’”
Members of the community were trained as discussion leaders, with the task of seeing that the conversation stayed focused and that everyone’s viewpoint was included. The ground rules were much the same as those the peer mediators at Seward Park were taught: listening carefully, speaking freely and honestly but respectfully, asking for clarification rather than letting a misperception fester, maintaining an open mind.
The ongoing dialogues have proved successful in allowing citizens to confront stereotypes and to move beyond them. As the Reverend James McLemore of St. Paul AME Church in Lima says, “Once people get past the issue of race, they start looking at the problems they have in common.”
In Billings, Montana, organized bigots began to perpetrate a series of hate crimes against blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and Native Americans in 1993. After this had gone on for several months, someone threw a chunk of cinder block through the bedroom window of a five-year-old Jewish boy in which a menorah was displayed to mark the festival of Hanukkah. The boy was not hurt, but the town had finally had enough.
Margaret MacDonald, a local woman who calls herself “the church lady,” recalled hearing how, in Denmark during World War II, ordinary citizens had decided to wear Stars of David when the Nazis ordered Jews to wear them. MacDonald convinced members of her church to display menorahs too. The local newspaper ran a picture of a menorah so that people could cut it out and tape it to their windows, and the editors urged all citizens to participate. “Let all the world know,” they wrote, “that the irrational hatred of a few cannot destroy what all of us in Billings, and in America, have worked together so long to build.” Within a very short time, thousands of homes had menorahs prominently displayed. The hate crimes have ceased, but concerned citizens stress the need to maintain vigilance. Respect is an ongoing lesson in today’s village, where so many cultures and races live and work together.
NEVER HAS our nation been as diverse in its population as it is today. Nor has any previous generation of children been confronted so urgently with the task of learning to respect and empathize with one another and to recognize a common humanity. At a time when democracy depends so much on our finding common ground, and when so many adults are unsure about how to bridge societal divides, there seems to be one idea on which most people agree: we need to find ways to offer our children a vision of affirmative living that can be applied in their daily actions and interactions.
One way in which young people have historically come together and expressed their sense of humanity and compassion is by giving their service to a greater cause. This is an American tradition that extends from the YMCAs and YWCAs and the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, begun around the turn of the century, to the Civilian Conservation Corps and National Youth Administration of the Great Depression, and the Peace Corps, which was launched in the early 1960s. As civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded us, “Everybody can be great because everybody can serve.”
Throughout our history, American thinkers and philosophers have recognized that public service is crucial to safeguarding democracy and to maintaining national unity in peacetime as well as in war. Harvard professor Robert Putnam observes that people who join the PTA or their local garden clubs or bowling leagues learn lessons that are central to democracy: mutual trust, cooperation, the habit of expressing their opinions openly and listening to those of others. In the words of former senator Harris Wofford, who helped to found the Peace Corps and who now heads the Corporation for National Service, “The service ethic should be to democracy what the work ethic is to capitalism.”
But the service ethic does not magically appear upon adulthood. Educator Ernest L. Boyer notes: “If we want good citizenship among older people, it surely must become a part of children’s lives.” Compassion and empathy are more likely to take root if they are grounded in daily life. Service can begin at home, with children performing chores—setting the table, vacuuming the rug, watering the plants—on behalf of their families. My mother taught my brothers and me that helping others was not only an obligation but a privilege. She encouraged us to get involved in drives to collect money and goods for needy people through our church and school, and she came up with ways of making service fun. One year, she helped us organize a neighborhood athletic competition modeled on the Olympics to raise money for our town’s United Way.
Children need to hear from authoritative voices that kindness and caring matter. Even more important, they need to see adults helping others if we expect them to follow suit. In the words of Rabbi Lyle Fishman, service is “caught rather than taught.” Psychologist Julius Segal recalled: “When my friends and I were young children, we used to see our elders regularly empty their carefully saved pennies from a ‘charity box’ and offer them to anyone who came to the door seeking help. My own father’s ability to pay the next month’s rent was chronically in doubt but never his readiness to reach out to people he viewed as ‘even worse off than I am.’ Such acts set tangible standards for children. They fix in the soul a posture of caring.”
My husband’s mother also set an example of service for her children. One Thanksgiving when Bill was ten, Virginia sent him to the corner store for some last-minute shopping. One of his classmates was there, eating a doughnut and drinking a soda. When Bill asked him where he was having Thanksgiving dinner, the boy held up his doughnut and said, “Right here.” Bill did not hesitate to invite him home, knowing his mother would have done the same.
From the time Chelsea was a toddler, we have tried to give her opportunities to serve, at home and
through church and school. Thanksgivings, we took her with us to volunteer at shelters. At Christmas, we bundled up and played Santa to needy families. But we have also tried to teach her, as we were taught, that service is a part of daily life—as the saying goes, the rent we pay for living. There is no shortage of needs waiting to be met: an elderly neighbor who needs someone to carry groceries, a park or block or strip of highway strewn with litter, a single mother who could use some extra baby-sitting help, a playmate home with a broken arm. We should remember that just as a positive outlook on life can promote good health, so can everyday acts of kindness. The great psychiatrist Karl Menninger reportedly advised a man who said he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown: “Lock your house, go across the railroad tracks, find someone in need, and do something for him.”
Children who are raised with an ethic of service learn to give beyond what is asked of them. Sarah Pollack graduated from high school in Virginia in 1994. Her parents promised to buy her a car for high school graduation if she got good grades and a college scholarship. Sarah got straight A’s and won a scholarship of more than five thousand dollars a year. When it came time for her to spend the fifteen thousand dollars her parents had set aside for her car, Sarah asked if she could take the money and start a college fund for needy students at her high school. Asked by a reporter what prompted her to use the money to benefit others, she replied: “They were friends. They were people I respected, with talent. It really just killed me that they could go nowhere…. I’m just passing something on that I’ve been fortunate to have. That doesn’t make me any more special than anybody else.”
It Takes a Village Page 17
