This one time when I was in pre-school my mom and my aunt started telling me that I had issues asking for help and I remember them asking me to “just try it, just ask for help”. They wanted me to just experiment, just ask someone for something, anything, even if it’s real small and you could totally do it yourself. “you need to practice asking for help”. They just kept telling me this.
So one day in pre-school, we’re doing a little art project and my pen falls on the floor. I had been getting along with the person next to me and we seemed to like each other, so I realized this was my chance to do what my mom and aunt wanted and so I asked him to pick it up for me.
“Oh sure”, he says, just no problem with doing this for me. He actually seemed happy that I asked him.
But the teacher overheard and starts yelling at me, “How dare you! You don’t just order people around like that, Kalin! He’s not your slave!” And she yelled at the kid who had already picked up my pen and given it to me, demanded that he take the pen and drop it back on the floor so that I could learn to do things for myself. So utterly humiliated, in front of the whole class I picked up my own pen. Then the teacher promptly sent me to stand in the corner. This is the one and only time I can remember ever experiencing a punishment like this. In fact, this may have been the first time I was punished for anything, since my parents didn’t really do punishments.
This whole experience was confusing and emotionally devastating for me. Needless to say, this didn’t help with my fear of asking for help. That deep-seated fear has continued even today.
And this also ruined my relationship with my only friend in pre-school. He had gotten yelled at too, that was the weird part of it, the teacher had treated him like he was enabling my slave-driving by doing me a tiny favor. After this it felt like there was this darkness between us, and it was like we were scared to interact with each other because of this experience.
Sometimes I wonder if it was racial. Maybe the kid was black or something. I don’t remember. If he was, he was probably the only one in the class.
I wonder if she would have accused me of wanting to own slaves if I hadn’t been white.
But I was thinking about this experience because of that Street Data Audiobook that kept talking about marginalization of specifically defined demographics of race, gender and sexual orientation and seems to just ignore the myriad of other ways that kids can be marginalized. I know this is the third entry in a row that I’ve been shitting on that book and I’m sorry, it probably doesn’t deserve it, I’m probably making unfair assumptions about the author’s intentions, but it struck a nerve with me for some reason.
Diversity and Inclusion is really on my mind lately and I realized I forgot to mention in my previous entry, I had listed some examples of ways people can be marginalized that have nothing to do with traditionally protected demographics and I totally forgot to mention music–on the plane back to Pittsburgh I watched a documentary called United States of Insanity on Amazon about the Insane Clown Posse (ICP), and for a third time in a matter of days I consumed media that I did not realize would be all about diversity and inclusion, but that’s kind of what ICP was sort of about. They’re actually big into their own brand of diversity and inclusion. I did not know that.
I guess the ACLU sued the FBI on behalf of ICP and eventually won the case. The FBI had declared their fan base a gang which caused venues to cancel their concerts, police to harass their fans and random people to express fear and violence toward a bunch of people who are really just the musical equivalent of horror movie fans.
Yes, ICP has some really disgusting and violent lyrics and statistically their fans are probably slightly more likely to become criminals than the rest of the population, but judging the whole fan-base based on that is just as unfair as judging any other demographic based on the actions of a minority of people within that demographic.
I never stopped to think about this from the ICP fan’s perspective before this.
This is why we need to tell our stories. Everyone who feels marginalized for any whacked out reason should be telling their stories.
Much of society is genuinely trying to deal with racism and sexism and bigotry, but it feels like most of us are trying to deal with it as though we can just read a list of rules, “don’t say racist stuff”, “don’t say sexist stuff”, don’t question gender identity, like we can just create a list of marginalized groups and a list of standards to follow and that’s going to solve all this bigotry.
But the long term fight against bigotry is obviously not going so well at the moment so we need to go deeper. We need to stop making policies about respecting certain specific groups and start creating social values that tell us that all people are worthy of respect, even if they smell bad or enjoy awful music, or more importantly, some other “bad” thing that no one has thought to mention before.
Rules about what is and is not marginalization and what is and isn’t bigotry or what is and isn’t a microaggression, well those rules separate us from the actual humanity of what’s happening in our minds and souls. We all view those things differently and some rule written at the school administration level isn’t going to meet the needs of all students and rules written at the federal level are going to struggle to meet the needs of even a small minority.
We need to learn to connect on a human level, to actually hear what each other is going through personally, as an individual, not as some distant representative of our demographics.
We need to tell our stories. And we need to listen to those stories.