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Loading ...Corvino: That’s how I was raised
A recent New York Times Magazine article spotlighted a shocking vestige of our nation’s racism: segregated proms. It focused on one school in Georgia’s Montgomery County, though the practice is common across the rural South.
I say “shocking” even though I personally wasn’t surprised. One of my best friends is from rural Tennessee. His alma mater still segregates superlatives: White Most Likely to Succeed, Black Most Likely to Succeed; Funniest White, Funniest Black, and so on.The white students quoted in the Times article expressed some reservations about the practice, but generally concluded with “It’s how it’s always been…It’s just a tradition.” In the words of Harley Boone, a platinum blond girl with beauty-queen looks who co-chaired last year’s white prom, “It doesn’t seem like a big deal around here. It’s just what we know and what our parents have done for so many years.”
“It’s just what we know.” Miss Boone reminded me of another beauty queen, in both her appearance and her comment: Miss California USA Carrie Prejean.
Miss Prejean, you’ll recall, when asked her beliefs about marriage equality, responded (in part), “I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that’s how I was raised.”
How I was raised. Tradition. What our parents have done. This is not, in itself, a bad reason for doing something. It explains why I set the table the way I do, for instance, or why I always put an extra unlit candle on a birthday cake (”good luck for the next year,” my mom always told me). It explains, too, more substantial practices—how we gather, celebrate milestones, express joy, or mourn loss. No generation does, or should, invent everything from scratch.
And yet, sometimes “what we know”—or thought we knew—stops working, or never worked very well in the first place.
I used to load the dishwasher with the forks tines down—because that’s how my parents did and still do it—until I realized they get cleaner tines up (in my dishwasher, anyway, and please don’t send me irate e-mails if yours is different).
Spotty forks are one thing. Racial and sexual inequality are quite another. When traditions cause palpable harm to people, it’s time to change. At that point, rethinking tradition is not merely optional, as in the dishwasher case—it’s morally mandatory.
And that’s why Prejean’s ” how I was raised” comment struck so many of us as a dumb answer. No educated person can justifiably claim ignorance of the challenges gay individuals and couples face. We gays are deprived of a fundamental social institution, treated unequally in the eyes of the law, and told that our deep, committed, loving relationships are inferior, counterfeit, or depraved. In the face of such injustice, “that’s how I was raised” sounds hollow and cowardly.
There are those who bristle at any analogy between homophobia and racial injustice. Indeed, a favorite new right-wing strategy is to claim that liberals unfairly label as “bigots” anyone who opposes same-sex marriage, even on the basis of sincere moral and religious convictions.
But that’s one reason why the analogy is so powerful, and so revealing. It shows that citing “sincere moral and religious convictions” doesn’t get one a free pass for maintaining unjust institutions.
No analogy compares two things that are exactly the same. (That would not be an analogy, but an identity.) Analogies compare two or more things that are similar in some relevant respect(s). The similarities can be instructive.
The white citizens of Montgomery County, Georgia, seem like a nice enough bunch. They don’t carry pitchforks or wear hooded robes. I doubt that Miss Boone ever uses the n-word, although her grandparents probably do. (Mine did, too, until we grandchildren protested loudly enough.) They are otherwise decent folk misled by powerful tradition.
I’m sure that, pressed for further explanation, many of these folks could make the right noises about doing what’s best for their children and eventual grandchildren. And much like “that’s just what we know,” that response would sound familiar. Opponents of marriage equality use it constantly.
But don’t marriage-equality opponents have social-science data backing them up? They don’t. Yes, they have data about how children fare in fatherless households, for example, and then they extrapolate from that data to draw conclusions about lesbian households. The problem is that there are too many confounding variables. So then they fall back on their “vast untested social experiment” argument: we just don’t know how this is going to turn out. Which, again, is precisely the sort of thing we might expect the Montgomery parents to say to justify their “tradition.”
From the fact that two groups of people use the same forms of argument, it doesn’t follow that their conclusions are equally good or bad. It depends on the truth of their premises.
Still, the tendency of both segregationists and marriage-equality opponents to hide behind “that’s how I was raised” provides a powerful analogy—in moral laziness.
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John Corvino, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and philosophy professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. His column “The Gay Moralist” appears weekly on 365gay.com. Read more about him at www.johncorvino.com.
John will be a volunteer faculty member this summer for Campus Pride’s Leadership Camp for GLBT students. For more about Campus Pride’s work, or to make a donation on John’s behalf to support this year’s program, visit http://www.campuspride.org/.
I’m from rural West Tennessee and I can confirm that, until a few years ago, the “Most Beautiful” and “Most Handsome” categories were separated by Black and White. I’m sure they have been forced to integrate by now, not for fairness, but for practical reasons. Rapidly changing demographics would make for a virtual rainbow of superlatives: Most Handsome Latino, Most Beautiful Asian, etc.
Finally, for safety reasons, remember to always load pointy knives facing down.
It’s a perplexing idea but what about the humans that are raised by racists that don’t turn out as such? or those that are forced so hard one way they rebel the other in general.
Nonetheless, I’m still so unsure why us gays seem to give a crap what straights think about us.
That is one of the better posts I have read. Yes, traditions are important but sometimes are used to hold minority groups back. And traditions that are not reasonable or if they do not work anymore, need to be disregarded. People need to step outside their comfort zone instead of believing stereotypes that their parents may have taught them. If they do step outside, they might learn some valuable life lessons. Good job on this post-very thought provoking!
To DanM, thanks for leading me back to that quote, my memory returns,
. It is a good one. To add one other footnote to this discussion. The absolutely most frightening day of my life was one day I was gut-punched by the reality – “My God, my parents were right”. Finally. The denial of our common humanity, which is in essence what all of this is about, is a weed that each generation has the responsibility of rooting out; it will never go away, but we can and must get our social weed whackers out and kill it when we see it and always be aware of it. In biblical times this was the defined role of the prophet, to bring correction, maybe we just need to listen more to those voices who raise up and just say ‘this is wrong’.
The practice (various segregations) is NOT common across the rural South. Yes, there are instances of it, and yes, places in the South can still be segregated in ways, but I feel your choice of wording intentionally misrepresents the South to better fit the slant of your article.
I live in “the rural South,” about a hundred miles NE of Knoxville, and there’s no way in hell anyone would ever look at someone here differently due to race.
What’s ridiculous is that there IS research in the area of children raised by gay parents. It is NOT an untested social experiment:
“Research has compared children of lesbian mothers with children and heterosexual parents on measures such as sexual identity, personal development, and social relationships. This research has found evidence that the children of lesbian mothers develop as well as children reared by heterosexual couples (Golombok et. al., 2003; Patterson, 1992, 2000). Research has also shown that child-rearing practices of lesbian mothers and heterosexual mothers are quite similar (Falk, 1993).
Regarding the issue of stigmatizing, one study found no differences between children from lesbian households and heterosexual households in peer group relationships, popularity, and social adjustment (Green et al., 1986).
Another concern is that lesbian parents might work to “convert” their children to being lesbian or gay or that children might model their mother’s lesbian relationship. In fact, the data indicate that the great majority of children growing up with a gay or lesbian parent become heterosexual (Bailey & Dawood, 1998).”
(all studies taken from Half the Human Experience by Janet Shibley Hyde).
I see people who oppose gay marriage and even gay equality wrap themselves up in this label of “Traditional Values.”
I find myself wondering how is it that these people go unchallenged. I would like to know whose traditional values they are talking about? I am 47 and my family values and my grandmother’s family values are what I consider traditional….but they include equality for all. I am at a loss. It is not like I was just born. I feel as though my values of equality for all are Traditional Values. I believe our Constitutions preamble is 400 years old and contains words to the effect that all men are created equally. So, supporting Gay Marriage and equality is traditional Values.
Persecuting gays for being different or offensive to a religion is not a traditional value. Yet, they get away with clocking themselves in that label all the time.
In regards to “I was just raised that way.” Auhg!! How about I was raised to see ______ as inferior and undeserving of human dignity and inalienable rights. No offense. WTF? Insert the disabled, women, Latinos, Asians, ect….there would be an uprising.
What a bunch of lazy brains just bumbling along well enough to feed themselves I guess. Unbelievable!
Brad Ryden perhaps you refer to:
“Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age 18.” – Albert Einstein
I agree 100% with your conclusion. Moral and intellectual laziness is always a problem. Many anti-gay establishments misrepresent scientific data and reference the data correctly. They know that almost all of their readers are not going to look up the references to see for themselves. I consider that a form of intellectual laziness. Not bothering to question (look up the sources) tradition is moral laziness. I think that is a good analogy.
I’ve heard of the self-segregating thing in high schools, especially in the rural South. In my high school in Nashville, the gap between black and white had more to do with living miles apart from each other, but no way in hell would we have thought (in the early 80s) of race-based senior superlatives. Then too, as I’ve said before, the urban/suburban South and the deep rural South can be two different universes.
At least the self-segregation in Mongomery County Georgia doesn’t lead to a denial of access to education. Here in Cleveland, where the superlatives aren’t parceled out by race, most white kids in suburban districts barely see any black students. The whites move away from the blacks, which is a far more sinister form of segregation, because there’s no kind of equal to that separate.
Yes, we all learned ideas that became outmoded. The opposite sex has cooties (still does for too many gay men
). Only men can be President or astronauts. As we grow up, we have opportunities to open ourselves, to learn to see good and find wisdom in places we were taught it couldn’t be found. My mother had a harder time with me saying I was gay (she was maybe 53) than did my grandmother (who would’ve been 71 or 72).
As for the forks…if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, then you know that separating the silver and placing it end-down means you can reach down and retrieve the clean silver without touching the business end, and you don’t even have to look because you sorted it and know what’s where. That too is a learned behavior, and my way is better
.
What’s a bit ironic about this topic is the fact when I talked to my mother on why she disapproved of a homosexual lifestyle (mine in particular) after her own child hood best friend was gay. (Sadly he died of AIDs in the early 90’s). She said her reason was because of the way she was raised. And I couldn’t help but be a bit confused, and sad at her reasoning. This is ignorance. Plain and simple. Sorry Mom….
And this is new? MLK jr pointed this out in his Letters to Birmingham Jail.
“that’s how I was raised” provides a powerful analogy—in moral laziness.
Then you definitely need a dose of growing pains to remedy that rotten attitude.
That’s the way we’ve always done it reminds me of the joke about cutting 2″ off the pot roast because “that’s the way mother always did it”. When asked why mother said, “That’s the only way it would fit in my pan.” So buy a bigger pan! Expand your beliefs.
I don’t care what your mother told you. Putting the forks in the dishwasher tines down is wrong, wrong, wrong.
It reminds me of something I read last week, that prejudices are things we learn and believe before we are 18.