Shush, Don't Speak the Truth!
Few of the blogs I read regularly have brought up the subject of prejudice lately in one form or another. That combined with a continuous discussion in the media got me thinking. It is a difficult subject and has many aspects to it which are going to be impossible to cover in one blog entry. Let me try to make one point here that I have thought about a lot. Here is a little thinking exercise.
Try to imagine:
It is Norway's national day. A parent is watching their kid in a parade and a TV reporter walks up to the parent and starts asking few questions. One of the questions is the following: “Almost half of the kids in you kid's school are immigrants. Do you see it having any cultural effects on your kid's school”. The parent answers: "Yes, there is a lot of fighting because of that".
If you were watching this on TV, what would your reaction be? Shocked? Would you say that the parent was prejudiced against foreigners? Maybe even a racist?
Now lets imagine something else:
Lets say it was not the parent that got asked but a little boy in his school's parade. He answers the same way. "Yes, there is a lot of fighting because of that".
What is your reaction to that? Still maybe a little shocked by the boys bluntness? I doubt that you would call a little innocent boy a racist. After all kids are just being honest and don't have the filter we start imposing on ourselves as we grow older? Or?
The latter case with the little boy is actually the true case and was shown on national TV on Norway's national day. My reaction was a little surprise and then I just brushed it off as a little boy being innocent and honest. Only later did I realize that I would have reacted differently if this had been the parent.
Whether what the little boy said is true or not I have no knowledge of and don't wish to make any guesses. That is not the issue I am trying to point out here but rather how differently we tend to react. Lets just make this an hypothetical example and say that the little boy was telling the truth. Why would it all of a sudden be such a bad, prejudiced thing to say if said by a grown-up? Shouldn't you still be able to state a fact even if it doesn't necessarily paint the prettiest picture of something.
Can anyone tell me how we are ever going to solve any problems if we aren't even allowed to say out loud that something is a problem?
Discrimination is the problem
There's a big difference between prejudice and discrimination. Prejudices are the opinions we hold about categories of people, and I think we should all be entitled to hold and express our opinions regardless of whether they are "socially acceptable" or not, as long as it's done with honesty and courtesy.
Discrimination is when you act on that opinion, and have an direct impact on other people's lives. It's when you treat people differently based on your own pre-conceived notions, instead of starting a "blank slate" with each individual person.
As a Canadian, I had very utopian ideals about racial harmony until I moved to the Middle East, and began to understand a bit more.
I now believe that when you move to a new country, you must be prepared to live by its rules. The adaptation can be difficult - but it's necessary. I am doing my best to adapt here, and I expect no less of immigrants moving to Canada.
Sorry
Sorry for double-posting - that was finger-trouble on my part...
Very good point!
No worries! I can try to delete one of the entry.
You bring up a very valid point there. Those are two different things. I think discrimination is never right but let me get back to that.
I am myself an immigrant here in Norway and have been a student in the US. I have thought about writing an entry about it for a long time but am a bit afraid that since people tend to get really upset if somebody mentions that you can require things from immigrants. That one of those things when people here start shouting prejudice. I totally agree, if you move somewhere you have to be willing to adapt and live after the rules in that country. It doesn't mean you have to drop all you traditions. If they are not in conflict with what is socially acceptible in that country people should be welcome to keep them. In a democracy it should be possible for immigrants to raise their voice, complain, and suggest things. But other people should also be able to come with counter arguments and raise their voice too. I am not always a perfect immigrant but I do try and I would appreciate it if people would point out when I am completely missing something crucial.
I think in many cases discrimination results from not addressing something that is a problem. Sure it often happens because there idiots who want to discriminate people based on some outdated, ignorant views. In that case they themselves are the problem and should be treated as such. A extremely silly example (and this has nothing to do with immigrants) of how not addressing a problem can cause someone to be left out. Somebody does never shower and smells. If you cannot point out the problem, what will happen is that everyone will slowly start excluding that person. This I have seen happen more than once in my life and I think it is sad.
But as you said all this needs to be done with "honesty and courtesy". I think that is extremely important to keep in mind.
Who is innocent?
There was fighting in my school, because there were kids of different races (and religions, and sects of the same religion) and because of alleged (and later, when it meant something) actual sexuality. 8-year-old boys who decide to pick on someone because they are a different colour or religion are generally expressing things they have learned. And expressing it in ways that the adults they learned it from wouldn't dare use.
Between schools, at sporting events, it tended to be *relatively* mild. "Send the micks (catholics) to vietnam" was a holdover from when schoolkids were indeed being drafted and sent to war, largely perceived as cannon fodder.
A little out of the public eye, comments like "gooks go home" carved into cafeteria trays don't strike me as terribly innocent. 14-year-old kids rejecting someone by calling him "lubra lips" and "nigger" isn't about speaking the truth, it is about being a racist. 10-year-old girls assaulting someone for being asian isn't innocent. It is a reflection of the values we provide for children to imitate.
Kids are not sweet and innocent. They lack social graces and the ability to dissemble in order to make a society that works. Although they have a tendency to understand what is fair and reasonable, and an ability to stick up for what is right that is refreshing to adults, they have the ability to be extemely nasty, and they often reflect the very worst of us, the forbidden things we don't show.
Sometimes that mirror is a view onto our hypocrisy. But sometimes it is a view onto the moronic prejudices we don't bother trying to change.
How can you think a vietnamese girl is really hot, have a diet based around asian cooking, buy clothes made in China and South-East Asia, go to Thailand for holidays, and then believe it is reasonable to keep "them" out of the country because they are different?
How can it be the fault of a handful of Afghan kids that their schoolmates, who have no idea what Islam is about and don't even understand the idea of terrorism hound them out of playgrouond groups for being filthy terrorists and towelheads?
Do fights really start because there are immigrants? Or perhaps we are asking the wrong questions. Who started a fight? What was it over? Who allowed it to develop (we are talking about a supervised environment, remember)?
I've been in a number of fights, from two kids to a group of adults in an all-in brawl with weapons. Some of them involved immigrants. But I have never once in my entire life seen a fight that was caused by the fact that there *are* immigrants. I have seen people go gook-bashing, and received SMS invitations to a race riot. I've been confronted by angry maghrebains with weapons, and drunk irishmen with numbers, and vietnamese immigrant gangs with both, looking for some excuse to fight.
It's childish behaviour. Most adults have learned to express themselves more subtly. Many have decided that picking on someone when their "reason" is really an irrelevant excuse actually holds about as much water as raping someone because "she'll like it in the end".
Unfortunately, some take a position and cloak it in reasonableness, then ask leading questions, manipulate responses, and resort to a variety of rhetorical tricks to get other people to see their agenda as sound, even without declaring that agenda. Politicians are generally cleverer about this than violent skinheads. Nazi germany was built in part on the skilful use of both. Like many people they were not averse to adding bare-faced lies when they thought they would get away with it.
It's hard. For every brave christian fighting to honestly apply their religion to a wartime situation there are very many people committing theft, rape and murder under a christian banner - freeing the inner monster that yearns, just once, for a license to do all the bad things that could never be tolerated at home because society would collapse. For every scumbag lawyer who provides a confessed rapist with a defense in order to ensure a fair trial, there are dozens who call for a simple execution, never knowing the facts of the case or the circumstances of the confession, nor really caring.
How much harder, then, when someone else is inciting us, is trying to lead us down a path, to examine what we are really doing, what we are really being told? Socrates was condemend to death by democracy, in an open court, by a bigger jury of citizens than anyone in our world can even hope to address.
Would we really have chosen differently? Would we really have voted against the Nazis? Would we have freed our slaves just because we said all men had the inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Would we have thrown the stones, claimed the profits and rewards for turning in our resistance-minded neighbours, or the painful and nasty pensioner downstairs, and pointed out that we provided food and shelter to people who would only be attacked by someone if they were left to their own devices?
There aren't easy answers. But there are good reasons why raising children to be soldiers is a strategy for success.Give me the boy, I shall give you the man, said the Jesuits. And the Tamil tigers, and the Hitler-jugend and the boy scouts and the Spartans and various armies fighting in Africa and the komsomol. And of course the anti-discrimination unit of the ministry of primary education. In Norway, most kids are not owned by anyone completely, because diversity is the basis of avoiding totalitarianism and sectarian violence. It applies in schoolyards as well as continents. Imperfectly, reflecting the people who make it.
You have experienced a lot!
Yes, there is a lot of unfairness in this world. You have obviously gone to a school that was much more varied than the school I went to. There kids got picked on either because they were stupid or boring. We were all pretty much a like and class difference didn't exist. Yes, we were cruel and mean but things were also a lot simpler than they are now and I don't think there were many that had the capability to calculated attacks in the first years of school.
All the things you describe are horrible and wrong and shouldn't be accepted. The parents should have been alerted. I think if I had been caught saying something like this, my parents would have and they would not have let me get away with it. I hope this is the case here in Norway that parents get alerted when their kid is saying ugly mean things like that but my hunch says that it isn't always possible partly because it isn't allowed to say anyone is doing anything wrong.
I think you might have misunderstood me a little though. I wasn't saying that the little boy was telling the truth. Read my next entry where I try to describe a little bit better what I am trying to say.
There are so many things you talk about that I would like to comment on but I don't know where to begin even. What it makes me think though even more is that the truth is the best way to go. There are so many cultural difference in this world that we cannot just always keep quiet. We need to be able to tell each other if something is bothering us and maybe it is something that we can just work out together and all get a long. Ok, maybe it will never be that easy but I think a lot can be done simply by sometimes being blunt.
If only...
When my parents found out about nasty things that I did I would be in serious trouble. And the school made a big effort on that score. It often failed - and it was one of the best-equipped schools in the country to deal with it.
I am all for people telling the truth. Suppressing it is, I agree, a terrible idea. But I get concerned because being blunt with half-truths or half-thought-through "truth" is often destructive. Suzy's response to your next post identifies the problem - blaming iceland for a gang of nsaty kids isn't a good way to approach the problem - it provides feeding grounds for anti-iceland prejudices before even determining whether that is a relevant factor. Maybe the kids are all abused - hardly something that is unique to or even common in iceland. Maybe they came from a previous school where they were ostracised. Maybe they are an unusually large gathering of psychopaths. Most kids are a bit psychopathic, but it is rare to find a lot of them who are strongly so gathered together and sharting a particular ethnic background).
What concerns me is that people leap on the first available explanation, which is usually one that conforms to their prejudices (that's what the word means, after all), and spout it as "truth" without thinking about it. And, as Göbbels pointed out, the great lie only needs to be repeated a while before it becomes accepted.
Let's be blunt here. What we are really talking about is brown people and muslims. The Iceland analogy falls over because your apparently typical background doesn't include the range of experiences out there.
Parents having a good little talking to their nice norwegian kids isn't the same as people who have walked through a war zone explaining the niceties of good manners to kids whose siblings or schoolfriends are just splatters in the mud, or slaves halfway around the world.
So let's not be overly blunt. The fine balance between telling the truth, and not pointlessly upsetting people is further complicated by the fact that we all see the world through a different little keyhole.
We could make life easier in Norway (or other rich western countries) by abandoning the rest of the world to its own misery, and shutting difficult people out of the country. Australia has gone a long way down that path, the US is filled with calls to go there, Denmark and the Netherlands are on the way.
On the other hand, if we follow that path instead of fights in the schoolyard we may, by and by, have the kind of difficulties the US and Israel have with people who have genuine grievances being joined by people who have genuine malice, and causing massive grief to people who are just livng their lives and don't even understand why others might target them.
Against all of that, we balance the fact that we live in a democracy. That is, a state where some of the people tell enough of the people what they want to hear, and back it up often enough with demonstrations, that most of the people who vote are convinced that the country is going the right way. The decision-making processes at work are what, in politics, is called totalitarianism. In our society, we allow some of the endless discussions about how to run the place to actually drive the society, and are proud of it. (Except when people express their will and make the wrong choice, as in Nicaragua, Chile, Venezuala, Iran, Palestine, ...). So people are economical with the truth to keep the discussion manageable, and economical with freedom to keep those who they see as a threat (to freedom, of course, because they simply wear people down and frustrate them into moving toward a dictatorship as an easier answer for them) from causing serious damage to our fragile democracy.
Democracy, like a giant social circle, is fragile. And unlike most social circles the option of simply splitting into fragments isn't available. Countries geenrally can't just decide that some of their members are not worth the bother and stop inviting them to parties. Rarely, they can split amicably - like Iceland and Nazi-occupied Denmark, the Czech republic and Slovakia, or perhaps Serbia and Montenegro. Normally it is messy, like Yugoslavia and Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, or the USSR and Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, or Russia and Chechnya, or Serbia and Kosovo, or Spain and the Pais Vasco.
So telling the truth is important. Like we tell kids. But knowing when to do it is also important (and very difficult to get right, of course, which is no reason not to try).
Damn [insert nation/culture/religion of choice]
Ah, so my analogy of using Icelandic kids fell short? Why? Well, because nobody would really care if somebody called Icelanders names or accused them of something. Most of the time we don't care ourselves even because we know that we either deserve it when we are accused of something or that the people doing it are just idiots.
There was a "large" population of Icelanders going to school in Tulsa when I came there. Icelanders, known for being party animals, had apperently been banned from numerous clubs in town because of repeated disturbance. Sure, it meant that I couldn't go to some clubs. Fair? Maybe not but I cannot remember anyone making a fuss about it. Shortly afterward people started behaving well enough to lose their reputation and all was fine. I honestly think it was for the good we got banned for a little bit even if it meant that the ones of us that were behaving had to "suffer" a little.
It is generally accepted to call Americans stupid. That is pretty offensive isn't? Strangely enough it seems acceptible to say demeaning things about the Polish people coming here for work. But as soon as something says anything about anyone with a hint of color on their skin all hell goes loose (even in cases when it is the truth).
I find it ridiculous. I don't judge people by the color of their skin. I would be a very happy person if I would wake up tomorrow and have a nice brown color on my skin instead of the sickly white I have now. I judge people based on their actions and actions alone. Yes, that is contradicting myself a little bit because then it wouldn't matter where they came from would it? But hear me out here. What I have sometimes found out after getting into situations where I am angry or offended is that the culture of the person offending me is different and in that culture this is perfectly acceptible. Either it is me that doesn't know any better or them? Wouldn't a little honestly help put the appropirate person in its place?
No, I agree that Susann has a point. There isn't always a need for pointing that it was a particular group that was causing a problem. Sometime white lies or leaving out details is perfectly harmless. If you can avoid grouping people and saying mean things about groups you have admirable strength. If you however say something that is true about a minority it shouldn't be treated as prejudism.
And it should be equally bad calling Americans, Icelanders, and some African nations stupid... Hey, those are all equal people and why isn't equally bad, and equally allowed/disallowed to call any of them stupid.
What I would like to see in society is more openess and more discussion. If we all learn to know each other, are able to risk asking things that might possibly offend each other, and learn how to apologize when we do, I think we would be in better shape.
Maybe it is just my childish view of the world to think we can all get along if we just try to work out our differences.
I think part of the problem i
I think part of the problem is that when this little boy (or his parent, for that matter) says that there is more fighting in his school because half the kids there are immigrants, it could be for several reasons. One very possible one is that he actually observes that many fights include immigrants. But instead of assuming that the boy is right in his statement, let's consider this hypothetical statement from a (more enlightened?) student at the same school: "there is more fighting in my school because the norwegian government doesn't do a good enough job integrating immigrants into our society". This, in my opinion, is probably in most cases a more correct statement, but the point is that what we mere mortals usually persieve as being the problem or the cause of the problem, is more often than not incorrect because we're not seeing the full picture.
Another aspect is that I would be surprised if that little boy came up with his statement himself. I consider it more than likely that he has picked up his "opinions" at home, listening to his parents talking about how horrible the immigrants in Norway are, and how much fighting they are doing in school, and how much they are involved in crime etc etc.
So to answer your question, I personally think that "saying out loud that something is a problem" is perfectly fine, as long as what you're saying out loud is actually the problem or the reason for the problem, which in your example with the little boy's statement is likely not true. What would happen if it became "legit" for everyone to start talking about how much more fighting there is in schools because of immigrants?
- Eirik
Never see the full picture if everything is shushed
Good, good! You brought up exactly something that I was hoping somebody would bring up. I deliberately cut off the last part of my entry to leave it a bit more open ended.
I am pretty sure we have all been in a situation when we are having a problem with something. Because we are brewing on frustration and don't want to confront anyone with what is bothering us we escalate the
problem in our minds. Then when we finally dare to say out loud what the problem is, we find out that it is really our own problem sometimes. In other cases stating the problem starts a discussion which reveals
hidden factors which change the whole situation.
That little boy might have been telling the truth or not. There might be a lot of fighting in his school and it might or might not involve immigrants. That is probably just the first perception and if it isn't allowed to say out loud: "Hey there is a problem there and it seems to stem from this" then that problem will never be addressed. If investigated they might for example find out that the ethnic Norwegian kids are spreading hatred and that is why there are fights. They might find out that immigrant kids are being excluded or even that the person was simply just lying. All these issues need to be addressed and the sooner the better!
You are absolutely right that we never see the full picture when just one person makes a statement, but we will never see it if we are too afraid of pointing out that something could potentially be a problem.