The Things We Are Not Supposed to Talk About

A good friend of mine told me today about how one of her granddaughters recently got beaten up by a fellow student for:

1. singing a "black song."

2. responding to a question by said student about whether or not she wanted to be black by saying that she actually wanted to be Latina.

3. admitting that she was in actuality an Arab.

Needless to say, none of these reasons deserved punishment but that's what the poor girl got anyway. And unfortunately, such incidents are not rare. According to my friend, the girl's older half-brother got similar treatment from bullies when he was younger even though he was half-black. For that matter, so did the girl's biracial mother.

And sadly enough, the student responsible did not apologize until several days afterward -- and even then the grandmother suspected that the bully's true motive for apologizing was not genuine regret but a desire to avoid prosecution for a hate crime.

I could go on to say more but then again it should not matter what else I could say. The fact is that the little girl was bullied and I can't help feeling very angry about it. It should not matter if the girl responsible was white. It should not matter if she was black. It should not matter if she was Arab or Latina or Asian or anything else. A bully is a bully is a bully is a bully is a bully and anyone who tells you different is probably either a potential bully or an enabler of bullies.

I know that is fashionable in some sections of modern society to pretend differently but I prefer not to think that way. After all, when a former co-worker told me about how her younger sister had once been bullied by Mexicans, my first reaction was not, "Yeah, you Anglo girls deserved that." It was "My God, how would I feel if something like that happened to my sister!"

I also know that it is fashionable to rationalize the desire to not talk about such incidents on the grounds that such talk will only encourage people to get the wrong idea about certain minorities. This is an understandable sentiment but unfortunately, it is also a bit shortsighted if for no other reason that most of the victims of such bullies are themselves minorities. And even if they were white, the same attitude would still be shortsighted. After all, few white people -- especially white liberals -- would be flattered by the idea that there is absolutely no difference between them and the average white bully. Yet this is very often the type of assumption that white liberals are expected to make in regard to nonwhite bullies: that there is no difference between, say, the Mexican who beats up on little kids and the Mexican who does not beat up on little kids. And even if such assumptions could be "proved" to be just, the fact still remains that most people -- regardless of race-- resent like hell the idea that it's okay for people to beat them up.

In any event, this is not a recent problem. Some of my older Mexican-American cousins used to complain about the bullying they experienced in Detroit schools back when they were young. And I somehow doubt that they were the only ones who experienced such problems.

For that matter, I don't kid myself that any one ethnic group has a monopoly on school bullies. But I also don't kid myself that any ethnic group is immune to the temptation to bully.

As for the notion that we just should not talk about it:

1. The one thing we should have learned in the 1960s is that major social problems don't just go away because certain people don't want to talk about them.

2. Said problems are likely to affect people's behavior and attitudes whether we talk about them or not. So it is not very helpful to society to just pretend such problems don't exist.

3. Just because you don't want to talk about certain problems doesn't mean that people are going to stop talking about them. They just won't talk about them to you. And that attitude, needless to say, can come back to haunt you.