Perspectives on Your Past Activity
I. Read through the following items (I to VI) and reflect on how you were raised as child to address the following topics.
I. Message about Similarities
Think back on your childhood, through high school, when you were forming your ideas and values and remember the messages you received about people who are most like you. Message may include:
- Teachings from parents, guardians, church, community or school.
- Statements from the media—newspaper, radio, television, etc.
- Things you just knew—maybe no one ever said them; you just knew what was right and wrong.
- Statements from your peers and other kids in the neighborhood or at school.
I grew up in the eighties. Diversity was appearing on television and the radio, even if it wasn’t happening much around me. Early influences were all of the sitcoms on commercial broadcast and cable TV, pop and rock music on the radio, and even public television. I don’t remember ever not having an awareness of differences in color. There were white people, like me, and everyone around me, but there were black people who lived in America, too, and they had to deal with racists because there were people who didn’t like them simply because of the color of their skin. My parents were products of their own Appalachian isolated upbringing, so they knew almost no one any different from them, and they had preconceived notions about other groups, mostly in that people of one race didn’t date and marry another race. This was never, in my mind, a condemnation of any race, but some affirmation of an Old Testament belief that had carried over into New Testament Christian church doctrines. There were never any racial or prejudiced sentiments from my parents, and I had quite progressive ideas presented to me through commercial and public television. However, due to our area and history, there was a sentiment of “otherness” about other races of people. I was staunchly opposed to this, even as a small child. I thought racial prejudice was a terrible wrong and I would speak up about it if I suspected it. The landmark mini-series Roots (and its sequel that took the story to modern day), re-aired in the eighties and nineties and had a profound impact on me and it taught me so many subtle lessons on why racism was still happening. It was such a long process for a country to progress from a slave-trading and owning nation to one where all races were legally protected from racial abuse, not that the laws were effective all the time.
Having those good influences were not all I was exposed to. I never understood how pervasive racial and prejudiced ideas were in my daily interactions, especially at school, until I was in college. Everyone had a supply of ethnic jokes, and quite a few fully racial jokes. I didn’t understand the difference until I was much older. My mother had grown up with many more racial sentiments, and she found it a bit disconcerting that her youngest daughter, around age nine or ten, was completely in love with Michael Jackson, a black man. Looking back, this came from her own family and her upbringing in the mountains. At times, I think both parents were concerned that I was taking too much influence from people who were of a different race than me, but on the other hand, pop culture began to have a very strong influence on youth in the eighties, far more than it had when my sisters were growing up in the sixties and seventies. Twenty years later, none of that mattered to my mom and dad at all. People were people, especially if they were like you in non-racial ways, like having similar religious orientation to you. Even this notion seemed to fall away in their last years. My father had a Muslim cancer doctor, probably the first Muslim he ever knew. My mother had had Jewish, Hindu and Muslim doctors over the years, and I’m sure this was a powerful influence on her that was a sharp contrast to the notions she was raised with in the mountains.
I attended Berea College, a liberal arts school that had admitted blacks before the civil war, and whose founders had been run out of town for being abolitionists in slave-owning central Kentucky. I was very proud to be at first college in the south to admit blacks after re-establishing itself after the war ended. I really thought I knew what racism was, and how not to be a part of it. Then Jane Elliot, the creator of the Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes experiment, came to speak in my freshman year, and I learned about how so much racial prejudice was built in to American society and that white Americans were often unaware of it, and continued to promote it. It was profoundly influential on my future outlook and approach to races and groups. (Note to instructor: If you don’t know this lady, you should read this, you might use her work or examples in this course, or a similar one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Elliott/)
II. Messages about Strangers
Think about again, and remember the messages you received about people you did not know, those who are considered strangers.
When I was a kid, strangers were, well, strangers. I grew up in the age of the Adam Walsh kidnapping and murder, and subsequent TV movie that helped usher in the age of “stranger danger”. I grew up playing outside, and being able to roam the neighborhood, but I was always reminded to be wary of strangers, and never accept rides. In general terms, mountain people were distrustful of outsiders, but this faded as people got to know one another.
III. Messages about Differences
Think again, and remember the messages you received about people different from you in:
- Gender
Men had roles that were different from women. In church, I was taught that women couldn’t preach, so female ministers were just some form of wrong. Outside of that, women could do whatever men could do, not that they would want to. I was the only girl on the academic team in elementary and middle school, and one of two females in the Industrial Arts department in college. My sister had acquired a chemistry degree, and had had a similar experience. Over the years, I evolved into having a feminist outlook, in the purest form of the word. I feel no boundary should be placed upon me because of my gender, but I will not work to disenfranchise a man to get the rights I deserve. That is hypocrisy in my mind, and works against the foundations of feminism.
- Age
You are supposed to listen to older people and respect their wishes. When the adults are talking, the kids go off and play somewhere. You don’t sit under their feet listening to everything, and why would you want to, after all, it’s super boring! The older people were revered to a certain extent, too. My grandfather, who died when I was ten, was my favorite human at the time, and it was a great loss to me.
I had parents that were 36 and 37 when I was born, and where I lived, this was ancient compared to my classmates. I realized fairly early on that older parents were actually an advantage. They had already had all the upheavals of younger married living and the raising of multiple kids in the generation before me. I was almost like an only child. My classmates talked about things their parents did, and it reminded me of things my older sisters did. These two groups were similar in age --- my siblings to their parents. By high school, older parents were really cool, they weren’t uptight about curfews; they had figured out that that kind of thing didn’t make much difference. I never saw my parents as old, even back then, and they both died young, at ages 70 and 69, and I have always felt cheated that I didn’t get to have them in what could have been many years of “old age”.
- Religion
I grew up in the Church of Christ, a church known for strict beliefs about Christian doctrine that often separated individual congregations from one another, and certainly isolated them from other non-denominational churches around them. We were a unique variety of this church in that our church permitted musical instruments in the service. I was a church pianist in high school sometimes. This church made me wary of other kinds of churches and religions. The Baptists were wrong for one reason, the Catholics were wrong for some other reasons. Everyone but us was wrong. This was a fallacy that began to sour me on the church as I got older. After all, who were we to be so right and everyone else to be wrong? Even back then, I had a scientific mind, and I expected a black-and-white answer to everything, and church is the last place you’ll find that sort of thing. I didn’t get the message that those different than me were bad, but that they were wrong, and lost, and to be pitied. All those other religions were fake, and those people lost, too.
I grew out of this kind of thinking as a young adult, and I realized what a hold those beliefs had had on my childhood when I lived in Taiwan amongst the Buddhist temples and monasteries. I realized how big the world really was, and how small my particular brand of “churching” had tried to make it.
- Ethnicity
I was a white kid, with some Native American thrown in from two generations back, but no one could tell you exactly which group. When I was a kid, ethnic groups were something that existed elsewhere. Black people were like unicorns. People from any other country were rare and usually only a guest or visitor to the area. As time progressed, this changed. There were more minority groups who lived and worked in my area.
IV. More Messages:
Think back once more, and remember the messages you received about:
- People with disabilities
I had a sister with mental disabilities and nearly 90% hearing loss. She was twenty-two years older than me. I was not even aware of her mental deficits until I was older; as a child I knew I had a deaf sister that spoke with a severe speech impediment, and relied on lip-reading to communicate. She lived independently for the most part, but always had aunts and uncles (and my parents) to watch over her. I had a sister who had cerebral palsy and cystic fibrosis who died at the age of 11 in 1972, three years before I was born. She had struggled with living from a very young age, and there was no treatment for cystic fibrosis at the time. She was wheelchair bound due to her CF, but I grew up thinking cerebral palsy had been the reason for her death. It was through an adult’s educated eyes that I could determine that she actually died of cystic fibrosis, and that her cerebral palsy had been, in fact, rather mild, and would not have caused walking or speaking difficulties at all.
My paternal grandfather had a prosthetic leg because he lost his leg in a mining accident in 1960. He had worked as a security guard in the years following before retiring and living nearby for my childhood.
My sister nearest to my age (eleven years older) is a life-long Type I diabetic. My mother was a Type I diabetic as well. There were syringes on the kitchen table, and coping with chronic life-threatening illness was a part of normal, everyday life.
The take-away from my family’s medical history is this: Disabilities weren’t an excuse to not do the things you wanted to do, or were supposed to do with your life. Some people have disabilities, and some are lucky enough not to have them, but regardless of your situation, you work with what you’ve got.
How much do you feel these messages influence your reaction and interactions with different people? Explain, your decision below:
A great deal Very little (why not?)
My answer, obviously, is A great deal. Many of the influences that I would discuss here have already been explained in the previous answers, (and the poor reader is going to need new glasses from reading this long history) but I should elaborate pertaining to the last question about disabilities.
I was taught to feel lucky for the physical health I had and the intellect I had. My mother used to remind me that the doctors urged her to end her pregnancy with me because she was 36 years old, and had four children as a diabetic. They had predicted all sorts of disabilities for me, particularly mental deficits, and I had turned out to be quite the opposite. My mother had decided to have me, and the alternative was never really a consideration for her, but I was surprised to find out in my teenage years that my mother and sister were pro-choice, which was not the response I had expected given my religious upbringing. I think this was due to the diabetes. My sister never had biological children because the doctors told her that she would likely lose her kidney function, but she thrived professionally and adopted four children.
I suppose, as a result of this history with my mother and sister, I felt a duty to accomplish something, to have successes that reflected my talents. I never felt like I lived up to nearly the potential I had. Hindsight, is, as they say, 20/20, and I had no idea until I looked back that I could have gone farther with intellectual pursuits. These notions of regret inform my daily outlook in the classroom in the way I encourage my students toward college and vocational studies, and how important the pursuit of true interests are to a person’s happiness and well-being.
