If we are to rid our minds of stereotypes, something needs to fill the empty space. Nothing works better than the real stories of real people drawn from the anecdotal warehouses that supply many of our deepest values, feelings and philosophy.
If you find your classroom, organization or workplace bogged down in cultural tension and abstract confrontation -- or perhaps feeling the silence that comes from being near one another and not knowing what to say -- why not take a break and let people tell their own stories?
In writing this book, I sat down with a number of people who had crossed the barricades of culture to some good end. I wanted their wisdom but I also wanted their stories, for wisdom seldom comes without a tale.
If I were just to tell you that each had experienced "institutional racism" or had suffered from some sort of "cultural stereotype" you'd probably forget about it before the end of this chapter. Here instead are a few of their stories:
Kyung Kyu Lim is employed by an association of state transportation officials in Washington, DC. He is active with Young Koreans United and has worked in multi-cultural coalitions. He believes that "part of getting Korean-American identity is learning commonalities with other groups." In the early seventies, Kyung Kyu moved from Korea to an African-American community in LA. In high school, through a program ironically called A Better Chance, he ended up with a white host family in suburban Minneapolis where the overwhelmingly white student body made him feel "wretched," with its clannishness, nice cars, and derogatory comments about "boat people."
"I felt myself shrinking," Kyung Kyu recalls.
Things got no better at McCalester College. The prejudice he found there made him feel "smaller and smaller." He tried running away by dropping out and moving to Alaska. That didn't work. Nor did changing schools to University of Connecticut -- not long after he arrived, members of the football team spat upon some Asian students.
Rudy Arredondo handles civil rights problems for the Department of Agriculture and has worked with Cesar Chavez and for a city health department. He came to Texas from Mexico when he was three. By five he was working in the fields. At six, his mother put him on a bus to go to kindergarten for the first time. As he sat down, the Anglo passengers started screaming at him. He knew no English so he did not realize that the bus was segregated and that he was in the white section. He knew only that strange people were screaming at him in a foreign tongue and he was very scared. At twelve Rudy tried to buy a movie ticket in Lubbock. The clerk pointed to a sign that read, No Niggers, Dogs or Mexicans allowed.
John Callahan is editing the unpublished works of Ralph Ellison. He grew up in the New Haven. At the age of eight -- and a small eight -- he was sent to a parochial school in the formerly Irish turned Italian neighborhood of Fairhaven. There he was greeted by some seemingly friendly (and much bigger) Italian kids who asked him, "Do you know what an Irishman is?" John said he didn't and one of the kids said, "A nigger turned inside out." They pummeled him and one grabbed his Yankees baseball hat, saying of the team's star, 'DiMag belongs to us.'"
Later, when he was 16 and working as a mail clerk for a bank, he overheard a bank officer on the phone. The bank officer was looking out the window, his long legs stretched over a corner of his desk. He was saying, "If the funny little mick doesn't work out, we can always bring in a nigger."
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But Kyung Kyu, Rudy and John also told me a different type of story.
For example, Kyung Kyu remembered that at his elementary school, it was black teachers who helped him through the wrenching experience of being a young stranger in a new land. They also taught him how to handle the kids who taunted him for his poor English -- by saying he was Korean and proud of it.
Kyung Kyu became a community organizer and eventually found his way east and to a MIT program for organizers run by Mel King -- a longtime African-American activist and one-time candidate for mayor of Boston. King became his teacher and guide.
When I talked with Rudy, our conversation turned to Sammie Abbott, an Arab-American and local activist who had led the local anti-freeway crusade in the 60s and who eventually became mayor of Takoma Park, MD. Along the way he taught a Latino organizer and an Anglo-Irish journalist a lot about politics and life. At his memorial service I had said that for Sammie, "a cause was not a career move, not an option purchased on a political future, nor a flirtation of conscience. It was simply the just life's work of a just human." Rudy recalled that "Sam Abbott had preconceived notions about everything. We would have strong arguments." Yet when Sam became mayor, the town meetings would often run late, because he "never used a gavel to shut anyone up."
Someone also crossed the barriers to help John Callahan. Going through -- and dropping out of -- college, John worked for two African-Americans who "taught me a great deal about the hard work of becoming a man." Later still, when John Callahan had become a man and an academic, he wrote an essay about a black novelist. He sent a copy to the writer who responded with a long letter and an offer that they get together if John ever came to New York..
That's how, just before four p.m. one afternoon in 1978, John Callahan found himself ringing the doorbell of Ralph Ellison. "We talked like we were in a Henry James novel," says Callahan. Ellison called him Mr. Callahan and Callahan called him Mr. Ellison. Then, at precisely five minutes of five, Ellison leaned towards Callahan and asked, "John, would you like a drink?"
"Why yes, Mr. Elli -- ah Ralph -- I would." Ellison excused himself and returned with two bottles of whiskey, one bourbon and one Irish. They began to talk again, but no longer as in a Henry James novel and only for the first of many times.
Much later, Ralph Ellison told John's mother that if he and his wife had had a son, they would have liked him to have been like John. Today John Callahan is editing the unfinished works of a black author who found something of himself in an Irish kid from New Haven.
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