You’ve Got to Be Taught
You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught to be afraid.
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
(RODGERS AND HAMMERSTEIN “SOUTH PACIFIC” – © 1958)
I don’t know how much more obvious we have to be in pointing this out: We do this deliberately, carefully, frequently to our children. It’s not a secret, but we act surprised when our kids act out as racist: “That can’t be my Johnny, my Jenny. He must have picked it up from school. She must have heard this from TV.” No, Johnny and Jenny picked it up from you…
I’m working on an essay that comes from a comment made yesterday by someone whom I esteem greatly. I want to explore where this racist inculcation comes from and when this happens. Although it is not something that everyone acquires—still, racism spreads like a virus, generation to generation.
Trying to cure the disease in school is probably too late. It’s being pushed into kids at a much earlier age than even seven or eight. The songwriters here were try to shock us, and yet they soften this truth: our children are inculcated with our racism at the earliest ages. When a three-year-old comes home crying from pre-school because their classmates called them ugly for being brown or Black, or because they’re told they can’t play with the others because their skin color is “wrong”—well, this racism erupts way before seven or eight.
Can we fix this?
Maybe. How much work do we want to put in to that?
We could cure the common cold in a month or two. We simply have to isolate all seven or eight billion of us for about a month in something like individual space suits. (Mine better have a heater. I always want to wear another sweater.) The cold viruses would all run their course, our bodies would fight them off and kill them through antibodies–and then no more cold viruses. Ever.
We can’t use that methodology for raising kids who are not racist (or better, “antiracist”). We can’t simply isolate every single kid from infancy through adulthood until all the racist adults die off.
We have to find another way.
It doesn’t have to be this way.