Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Racial epithets fill my daughter’s ears, while I sit glassy-eyed

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Look, folks. Not every single night of the week do tired parents and their talked-out kid feel inspired to exchange dinner-table anecdotes and witticisms, to the sweet notes of Charlie Parker in the background.

So Cristie, Scout and I occasionally have dinner in front of the TV. I don't like to watch America's Funniest Home Videos reruns. If I wanted a nightly reminder of how stupid Americans can be, I'd watch Fox News, or MSNBC. We're tired of Dirty Jobs, and nobody wants to watch public television.

So sometimes we watch old sitcom reruns. The Andy Griffith Show was great, but then they moved it out of the time slot. Sanford & Son, we couldn't abide.  I was excited when All in the Family got slotted in. But it's kind of a pain to watch, because Scout has questions throughout.

Why is that guy so mean to his wife? Because he's unhappy. Why is he unhappy? You know how there are good things that happen to you, and bad things that happen to you every day? Yeah. Well, maybe he had more bad things than good things happen to him. Or maybe he just thinks more about the bad things. How the hell do I know why Archie Bunker is unhappy?

One night last week there were more questions than usual. It was the episode where Sammy Davis, Jr. visits the Bunker home.

For the first time, Scout heard several intersting new vocabulary words. "Porch monkey," "spear chucker," "coon," "nigger" and more.

Mom and I are looked each other out of the corner of our eye, wondering what Scout was understanding.

There was a mention of Davis's glass eye, and Scout fixated on that. Which eye is it? Why does he have a glass eye? What happened to his other eye? How does he get his glass eye out?

"And don't say nothing to Lionel about this," Archie meanwhile told Meathead, referring of course to Lionel Jefferson, the black neighbor. "If he finds out, he'll jump on his tom-toms and before you know it, we'll be up to our armpits in jungle bunnies."

(!)

Why didn't I get up out of my own Archie Bunker chair and snap the TV off? I don't know why, exactly. It's not as if we were watching some difficult but constructive racial conversation. What we were watching was a time-capsule specimen—something that could once have been argued to be constructive in some way. But really: What on earth could a seven-year old be getting out of this?

The only reason I can think of that I didn't turn it off—aside from my own admittedly powerful desire to see the famous episode—is that, while we're careful to show Scout things that we (roughly) deem age-appropriate, I never like to give her the impression that I'm actually scared of showing her something. I censor, but I don't like to let her see me censor—especially in an urgent, cover your eyes! kind of way.

I know: We should have turned it off.

James Kilpatrick, those pearly gates might be surly gates

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I only knew James J. Kilpatrick as a syndicated words columnist who my dad liked to read in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

I had no idea Kilpatrick had once supported segregation so vehemently that in 1963 he wrote an article for The Saturday Evening Post with the proposed title, "The Hell He Is Equal," and a thesis that, "the Negro race, as a race, is in fact an inferior race."

(The article wasn't published because the editor got to feeling queasy when four black girls were killed the church bombing in Birmingham, Ala.)

As a writer, I guess I find it comforting to know that it's possible to be dead-ass wrong on the most important moral issue of your time, and go on to have a happy writing career.

As a man, I hope I never have to account for such a grave error on the ungenerous side of the ledger.

How did you tell YOUR six-year-old about Hitler’s theory of the Master Race?

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This weekend, home-schooling occurred to me for the first time.

I’m not going to do it, of course, for the high-minded reason that Scout needs to be exposed to people other than me, and for the real reason: I’m far too lazy.

But here's what caused me to relate to people who don't want their kids learning about Darwin:

Because February is Black History Month in the United States, all public school teachers are expected to do a unit on it. In Scout's class, the Family Project this month is profiles of famous black figures—Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton. Well, maybe not Fred Hampton. ("And then one morning, the Chicago Police ventilated Hampton while he slept.")

Our family's famous black figure is Jesse Owens.

So Cristie and I get to explain to Scout—so she can in-turn formally present to her six-year-old colleagues—who “Raydolph Hitler” was, and how he thought white people were better than … other people. You know, people like Jesse Owens. But the story has a happy ending, we’re supposed to feel: Owens won and Hitler got a lesson in anger management.

(I reckon we’ll wait until next Black History Month to tell Scout that after Jesse Owens won, Hitler privately shrugged off the victory as a shoe-in for someone whose ancestors “came from the jungle." And maybe the February after that, we’ll tell her that Owens actually thought Hitler was mistreated by the press; he felt snubbed by President Roosevelt, who “didn’t even send me a telegram.” Third grade? That’ll be the time we talk about how Owens was unfairly stripped of his amateur status and had to scrap together a living hustling for black exploitation films, racing against horses and running from IRS agents.)

Look. We could hold a long, boring million-man beer summit in this country on when and how it’s appropriate to introduce race and racism to our innocents, thereby inducing the lifelong intellectual and emotional epilepsy that will make them truly American.

But what are the chances that the exact best way to bring them into this deeply complex realm is all at once, Lincoln to Hitler to X, in February of their kindergarten year, because it happens to be Black History Month?

And then to have them learn the stuff from one another's imbecile presentations?

Is this stupid, or what?