A moral conundrum

Total non sequitur, naive white liberal guilt variety: I'm watching Eyes on the Prize, and it just kills me to watch a bunch of smug white people - which, in general, is a group to which I belong - cheerfully defending their resistance to civil rights as if such resistance is absolutely natural and right. The scary thing is that to them, it was. They're so cheery about it because they're so secure in this belief that they can't even take the contrary seriously. It always scares me to think, if I had grown up in the south during the period of Jim Crow - would I have supported segregation? I mean, if I'd been taught from childhood that it was "right" and "natural" that people of different races should live separately, how much would it have taken to convince me otherwise? Because there were plenty of evil, evil people who supported segregation. But I'm sure there were plenty of ordinary, reasonably good people who did, too, just because it was the way it had always been, and they probably thought that if that was the case, there must have been a reason for it.

And you know, none of this happened very long ago.

Comments

[comebacknikki]

I think about this a lot. I wonder if I would have been one of the people who was out there supporting civil rights or one of the people silenting condoning segregation. Of course, I would like to think I wouldn't have supported segregation, but who really knows?

Honestly, if I had stayed in the community I grew up in, I probably would not be in relationship with a black man, as I am now. Being in Chicago has had a huge influence on my views and beliefs. Perhaps if I had been in a pro-segregation community at that time, I would have been influenced to think the same... and that's a horrible, scary thought.

[Celandine]

*nods* I know, when I am teaching Western Civ through the medieval era, one of the things that often baffles students is WHY the poor peasants didn't object to how they were treated, or WHY women didn't demand to have more rights, etc. So I try to keep pointing out how much cultural norms and social assumptions work to maintain the status quo, and how difficult it is for anyone to think beyond that.

Today we (well, MANY of us, in North America and Europe at least) take for granted that women have at least theoretically equal rights with men; but it's not even a century since women got the vote in the US. Roe v. Wade happened in my lifetime, but the ERA was also voted down. How many of our students have even heard of the ERA? How easily could the presumption that those who are not straight white men are equal to them be overturned?

[af]

I'm teaching my first class on women and religion, and I find myself wondering whether I would have been one of the complacently oppressed women that existed in so many cultures. Not that many of them had a real choice, not at all, but I think we like to look back and think that we would have been brave, we would have seen the value in ourselves if we'd been viewed as property, or chattel, or whatever, and we would have fought back, changed things, rebelled. But probably most of us would have gotten used to it. Weird.

[Flavia]

I wonder about this, too, and I'm certainly not prepared to say that I would have been on the side of the angels, had I lived in the South in the 1950s. But just try explaining to a roomful of freshman, reading "Letter from Birmingham Jail," that actually a LOT of people supported segregation, and that most of them were probably not hateful, evil racists, and they look at you like you're insane (and possibly a hateful, evil racist yourself).

It's heartening, certainly, that my students can't imagine a world in which that kind of attitude is normal. But it's worrying when they can't get their minds around the idea that it once WAS fairly normal, because it suggests an inability to recognize all the issues that we're living through today, and which we have no idea how history will judge, but about which my students have either already made up their minds or chosen to be apathetic towards.

[Phantom Scribbler]

We were watching it last night, and Mr. Blue was trying to decide if he could work it into his class somehow. "Because it wasn't that long ago," he said. "It's in our own lifetimes."

I had to (gently, I hope) point out that in fact it was NOT in the lifetimes of his students (or mine, even) and that black and whire footage would not give the students the same sense of immediacy that he gets from it.

[turtlebella]

I think about this a lot too, about if I lived during the segregationist South. I also often wonder if I was in Nazi Germany if I would have helped Jewish people to escape and survive or if I would have quietly done nothing and not risked my life or that of my family. I really hope that I would have done (what I now consider to be) the right thing.

I grew up in a mildly conservative don't-rock-the-boat kind of family and I still turned out to be pretty much a left-wing rabblerouser. And even when I was younger and didn't really have any critical thinking skills I'd get really upset about any injustice that I read about in the newspaper. Sometimes I think some people just have an inherent moral compass deep within them that tells them when something is wrong, regardless of what their parents have taught them. Now, that's not to say that our parents don't influence us... but perhaps we can overcome some of that if it is at odds with how we feel, deep down on an intuitive level. Don't really mean this to sound all woo-waa-y. It's all a way of saying that I hope I'm a good person because of who I am, not because of the times I'm living in. I think I am, and I think you are too, New Kid.

[Dee]

I'm pretty sure I would have been just chilling under tyranny, saying "oh well, at least the trains run on time." I really hope I would have hidden Anne Frank, but I don't know. I am completely sure that there is no way I would have been at Tiananmen Square.

I've been thinking about this lately too, but more in response to the contemporary rhetoric about "well, Iraq has no water or electricity, but it's better than having a tyrant!"

[JF]

I saw this one too- a couple of the previous episodes as well- and found it extraordinarily disturbing, especially how these former mayors and sheriffs, twenty years later, were still such ignorant bigots. I thought it was incredibly emotionally powerful, and it really brought home to me how awful it was. I also wondered if I would be able to stand up so strongly for a policy that never would have discriminated directly against me. I hope so. I hope I would have had the courage.

Flavia says her students can't imagine how that attitude was normal- but I must say, while legal segregation has ended, I'm not so sure that the attitudes are gone. I grew up in the deep and not-so-deep South, and my next-door neigbor still refers to African-Americans in offensive terms. My racist, Midwestern in-laws (school teachers, no less!) have said to me that black people are just stupider, among other things. When I was in elementary school, not so very long ago, our school district still had forced busing and court-supervised desegregation- I believe it ended in the late '90s.