“Sweet Jesus, White People Dumb as Shit!”
Most teachers know that the most scrumptious, hilarious, and, often most meaningful moments aren’t anticipated. Sometimes humor, energy, and meaning emerge together and inadvertently from a student’s background, from her set of cultural expectations which can often be just so different from, well, in LaTisha’s case, mine.
And sometimes, what is genuinely funny could seem on first blush crude or even racist, unless one takes into account divergent cultural histories. This was such a moment and it may not be one for those who cherish what I’ll call Cultural Symmetry, the unstated demand that majorities often make, that minorities express themselves as if they have lived lives as majorities do. Majorities often do demand that and when we do we miss, or dismiss, some of life’s most pungently endearing and important moments.
I’m pleased my students and I didn’t miss this one.
Before I retired I taught at a school for kids struggling with dyslexia. Most of the students were intelligent and, when they got this shot at our school, seen by them and their parents as their last good chance, they were determined to make something excellent of it.
LaTisha was a junior, just under five feet and skinny, a tall stick of fire-eyes dynamite. She was “destined” to be a defense attorney. I was impressed by her sense of purpose. LaTisha was also, on occasion, defiant, so I had her sit about sixteen inches across a narrow trapezoid table from me. It didn’t stop LaTisha from voicing her often unfiltered ideas and feelings, even if sotto voce, and I’m (mostly) glad it didn’t.
As you likely know, one way of helping dyslexic kids absorb literature is to choose excellent novels and plays that have translated to film because the more senses access plots, themes, dialogue, the better. Film can palpably enhance reading. That’s likely true for most kids, dyslexic or no. Mine loved, for instance, Roman Polanski’s remarkably bloody Macbeth and Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, as prelims for reading and for acting out scenes. With language-challenged children, voices and bodies in motion help a lot.
From jump, LaTisha could not take seriously the hero and heroine in the 1930’s film classic, The Most Dangerous Game, based on the 1924 Richard Connell short story. In the film Joel Macrae and Fay Wray…you may remember this classic story: a hero stranded on a private Atlantic isle owned by an exiled, pre-revolutionary Russian baron, a mad big-game hunter who, grown bored of bagging boar, tiger, lion, wildebeest, panther…now arranges mishaps at sea and hunts those who make it to shore.
Toward the middle of the film there’s the obligatory goose-bumpy scene when hero and damsel, realizing there’s a reason the baron had warned them not to go down, twisty-staircase-down to the dungeon-like basement.
You just know this isn’t a good idea.
But, of course, hero and damsel don’t know it’s a Very Bad Idea: all sorts of heads, animal and human, are mounted on the dungeon walls. And yet they creep on. Most (white) audiences see them as bold and brave.
Not LaTisha.
Precisely as they get mid-way creepy-creepy-down, LaTisha, shaking her head, under her breath:
“Sweet Jesus! White People Dumb as Shit!”
I began laughing so hard I nearly fell to the floor.
My class, of course, demanded to know what LaTisha had whispered. Still laughing, I stepped to the DVD player, stopped the film, and invited LaTisha to let the class in on it. She looked at me askance very briefly as if to ask, Is This Some Teacher Trick?, saw my face, shrugged, and repeated aloud her matter-of-fact assessment of White People Heroes and Damsels born to a world so very, very safe and predictable compared to hers, compared to her parents’, compared to her grandparents’…that they, White people, would actually creep down that foreboding and so obviously bad-bad-very-bad-idea creepy, windy staircase.
And, so totally unplanned, one of the very best cross-cultural discussions I ever witnessed ensued — LaTisha, and every Black child in that room, certified White people as, yes, in-context crazy, or dumb-as-shit, for not knowing what they said Black people, by dint of such a very different, utterly asymmetrical cultural history, just knew:
No one with an ounce of sense steps down those stairs.
Now, extrapolate this lesson to most facets of life and you have a partial yet salient understanding of LaTisha’s world view and the fact that a White kid saying the same about Black people would not, simply would not, have been an equivalence.
And it would not have been funny because the demand for Cultural Symmetry is a wish only majorities cherish and, even if silently, foist upon minorities if only in semi-conscious fantasy. But that’s all it is: the demand for cultural symmetry does not reflect any shared legitimate or meaningful historical or current reality at all.
Ron Powell
08/09/2019 @ 12:52 pm
“…the demand for cultural symmetry does not reflect any shared legitimate or meaningful historical or current reality at all.”
The demand for cultural symmetry has another name:
It may also be known as “white privilege”.
Jonathan Wolfman
08/09/2019 @ 12:54 pm
of course
Ron Powell
08/09/2019 @ 1:12 pm
This “demand for cultural symmetry” is precisely the kind of context in which. The Unwitting Perpetration and Perpetuation of Racism occurs…
No purpose or intention no visceral or palpable sense of hatred….
But clearly it is racist to expect or anticipate something that isn’t there because it simply can’t or ought not be there due to cultural asymmetry…
There’s the rub for I, like Prof Glaude, was taught to learn the stereotypes, anticipate the application of them and destroy or explode the usage by not being or manifesting the stereotype…
White people often respond with incredulity, resentment, and in some cases , hostility when they discover that their ster eotye has no currency or legitimacy when dealing with someone who has been taught to turn it on its ear…
That’s when I get the reaction that Eddie Glaude got: “What else?”
Which was , in your words, a demand for cultural symmetry.
An unwitting and unintended manifestation of the racism that is “baked in” to American society and culture so much so that it can be unconsciously perpetrated and perpetuated by otherwise “decent” people…
08/09/2019 @ 2:24 pm
“poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” ~ Joe R. Biden
Your Democratic Party coronated White Privileged candidate 2020
Jonathan Wolfman
08/09/2019 @ 2:27 pm
A-OK, Amy, tho I’m not sure what the relevance is to this post. And there are numbers of other candidates. (I am sure you’ve noticed. 😉 )
08/09/2019 @ 7:27 pm
It is a comment in regards to why LaTisha’s has that “world view”… old, neo-liberal, white men who think poor (or any other negative stereotype) equates to Black. It is a textbook example of white privilege at it’s finest.
koshersalaami
08/09/2019 @ 9:41 pm
LaTisha wasn’t talking about neoliberals being too stupid to stay out of the basement. She was making a cultural comparison about recognizing threats.
Jonathan Wolfman
08/10/2019 @ 7:43 am
Kosh has it right as to what my student was referencing.
koshersalaami
08/09/2019 @ 5:31 pm
? Is the relevance here “Joe Biden dumb as shit”? Why do you think Biden is coronated? Do you know any blogger on this site who wants Biden to be our nominee? I’m not sure who your audience is for this comment.
08/09/2019 @ 7:31 pm
Please explain to me how my point is much different than “Black and White in America are not yin-yang”?
P.S. …and if you don’t think Biden isn’t nominally coronated as the 2020 Democratic party candidate by the DNC then you haven’t been paying attention.
koshersalaami
08/09/2019 @ 5:28 pm
Symmetry has a lot to do with racism in recent years. Black and White in America are not yin-yang, opposite sides of the same coin, anything like that. In a whole lot of cases, they aren’t really even the same kind of category. The vast majority of Blacks in America belong to what would be considered one ethnic group, by which in this case I mean those descended from American slaves. People here usually use “Black” to reference this ethnic group. There really isn’t culture in race, only in ethnicity, so this is an important distinction. “White,” on the other hand, can refer to a sort of default ethnic group consisting of people who no longer maintain other ethnic identity, but for millions it just refers to race because there are so many ethnic groups who are (now considered) racially White. So, for the most part, in common usage, Black is more the equivalent of Irish or Italian or Polish than of White. In that sense, treating Blacks and Whites as somehow symmetrical populations is almost as silly as viewing Jews and Gentiles as symmetrical populations. Those are symmetries that don’t exist. In terms of relative positions in America, viewing White and Black as symmetrical is more akin to viewing rich and poor as symmetrical. That’s done too, and never with moral results. That’s like the Anatole France quote that rich and poor are equally prohibited from sleeping under bridges.
Jonathan Wolfman
08/09/2019 @ 5:35 pm
Too, it all touches on the idiocy of competitive-grievance politics and psychology.
koshersalaami
08/09/2019 @ 5:44 pm
Yes. Part of it is that, and competition between grievances of a dominant population and a suppressed population doesn’t work.
Jonathan Wolfman
08/10/2019 @ 7:46 am
To clear it up: Her comment was about general societal pitfalls and specific dangers based on how Black and White people have navigated (had to navigate) this country, and the learned behaviors that make you more or less likely to be wary.