As I was walking my dog this morning, I found myself reflecting on a few of the many ways prejudice infected my childhood and how political correctness saved me.
My mother tells the story of how I first came to recognize that not all people have white skin. When I was three and we were living in upstate New York, she took me into a drug store and I yelled at the top of my lungs: “Mom, that boy’s all black!” A university town during the civil rights movement wasn’t the most opportune place or time to make this discovery. My mother clamped a hand over my mouth and pulled me out of the store. I expect I received an age appropriate lecture about what can and can’t be said out loud in public places. I wonder if that incident had a traumatizing–or at least inhibiting–effect on my ability to give things their proper names. At least I didn’t use the “N” word.
I encountered the “N” word in a backhanded way a few years later. I took piano lessons from the most flamboyant man on earth. By coincidence, so did the girl who lived around the corner from me. (Given the fact that our piano teacher lived in another part of town and given the population of the town (Toronto), it was truly a coincidence of the highest order.) Our teacher founded Toronto’s first all male gay chorus and later died of complications from HIV/AIDS. Those two facts may or may not be related. My rival piano student once did a project on punk rock and came to school wearing chains but lost the keys and so wore the chains for weeks until she either found the keys or her father borrowed bolt cutters. I forget which. At piano recitals, she liked to play Claude Debussy’s Le Petit Nègre. No one ever bothered to translate the title because of its association with the “N” word. We just talked about Le Petit Nègre and left it at that.
When you listen to the piece, it’s easy to imagine the stereotype Debussy was working with: the five-year-old black boy hopping around barefoot, happy as a lark. Poor simple black folk are like that. They don’t have the insight to understand how much they haven’t got, and so they’re happy.
Speaking of insight, that reminds me of the girl’s father. He was from the UK. Maybe he was kicked out because he was too eccentric even for them. Maybe nothing. There’s a story floating around that in a less than sober moment he confessed to a mutual acquaintance that he thought my mom would be great fun if only he could get a few shots of gin into her. Unfortunately for him, there were two strikes against his designs on my mom. First, you could no more persuade my mom to drink a shot of gin than persuade a Tea Partier that Obama is an American. Second, the acquaintance who received his confession was a close friend of our family so we heard everything. The image of him in a drunken slaver over my mom is a bit disturbing, but a little bit flattering too, and it brought hours of laughter to our family dinner table, or at least until my dad told about the staff party at his school where one of the teachers stood on a desk and stripped for all her colleagues. Ah, the sixties!
So in my childhood I learned that black boys are no different than me and can grow up to be president, white men can be oversexed drunks, and it’s okay to use the “N” word as long as it’s in French and belongs to the title of a little chunk of hundred-year-old high culture.