John and I have been watching a Learning Company program on “Great Presidents”. We’ve just finished watching the lectures on Theodore Roosevelt (president 1901-08). The lecturer commented several times that TR wasn’t a racist or segregationist, in the terms of the day, but that he definitely believed in the superiority of the white, Protestant, Northern European “race”. And when he ran in 1904, he carried every state except the “Solid South”, which voted Democratic, and enforced a lot of “Jim Crow” laws.
With this on our minds, I wondered why neither of us has a prejudiced bone in our bodies. The quick and easy answer is that, as it says in the song in South Pacific, “you have to be taught, before it’s too late. Before you are six, or seven, or eight…”. And our parents weren’t prejudiced, so we didn’t get that attitude taught in our homes.
This is understandable in John’s family. They immigrated to central Illinois in the 1840s and were too busy surviving and dealing with their own problems of being “newcomers”.
The mystery is with my family. As far back as I know for sure, my family lived in Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, and Texas - definitely all in the Old South. Why did I not get any of the stereotypic racial attitudes of the time?
My family tended to be what I’ve always called “small town gentry” - merchants, lawyers, judges - not the wealthiest, but not the bottom of the social rung, either. And they were all educated people.
Certainly not all of the southern wealthy or poor people were racist, and surely some of our family were. But I still wondered why that was totally left out of me. I’m forever grateful to my family for that legacy. But it’s still a puzzlement…..
Any ideas?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
I would like to think that there have always been people who understood that we live in a varied world. Somehow they also understood that it was not necessary to teach the children to hate.
Of all the things they taught their children, my parents did not teach their own prejudices.
I grew up in a very closed community with nobody other than blonde, blue-eyed people living there. Prejudice was rampant, but it never felt okay to me. I could not WAIT to leave home and discover the world. I guess some of us aren't wired to be mean.
Post a Comment