My grandma told me a story recently in which she referred to a Native American man as an Indian.* I corrected her, interjecting “Native American,” the next time that she said it. She smiled at me and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “They’re Indians. They’ve been Indians my whole life. You can’t change it on me now.” We bantered for a moment, then the conversation continued onto another topic. While our exchange felt worthwhile, I sincerely doubt that she has since changed her terminology in retelling this story. This is a familiar narrative in families and communities all across the United States, and particularly, I imagine, in white circles. I could ask just about any one of my white age-peers if their grandparents are a little bit racist, and they’d likely have a hard time denying that they sometimes say things that make it seem that way. “The personality,” as journalist Howard Witt put it in his article in the Chicago Tribune, “is familiar to us all: the sweet old aunt, the loving grandfather or the generous widow down the street, each of them unfailingly kind towards friends and family but given to flights of shocking prejudice when the conversation turns toward ethnic groups to which they don’t belong.” One of the difficult things about this is that these people, saying inappropriate things, are very often people that we love. President Obama has faced this conundrum, which he shared in a 2008 speech on race. He said that his grandmother was “a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.” These are not easy issues to address, and it seems that the problematic statements and tendencies of elderly people are regularly and comfortingly downplayed by the conclusion that they “mean no harm” by their words. They were simply raised in another era, a “less enlightened” time in which it was perfectly fine, perfectly normal, to make such stereotypic remarks. The author and historian Timothy Tyson, in his book Blood Done Sign My Name, about the turmoil of a small North Carolina town in the 1970s, described his grandmother as “a woman of her time and place,” trying to explain her segregationist ways. Of her time and place, at least partially excused, on account of her age. Many older people use this generational difference as an explanation for their own behavior. A mild example is my grandmother, saying that Native Americans had been “Indians [her] whole life.” A less mild, more public example is the famous French parfumier Jean Paul Guerlain who, in 2010, spoke about creating a perfume: “... for once I started working like a n****r. I don’t know if n****rs ever worked that hard.” In 2012, facing fines for his comments, Guerlain made the excuse, “I am from another generation,” citing that his utterance was “a common expression at the time.” Guerlain also apologized for his words, calling the remark “imbecilic,” but his generational defense stands out as emblematic of a larger trend The idea that older people tend to be more prejudiced, while an idea that itself acts as a stereotype, actually has some evidence to back it up. In a 2012 paper British Political Scientist Rob Ford found a “substantial difference in attitudes towards immigration across generations.” While younger generations, having grown up in more diverse communities, were more favorable towards immigration and less concerned about the origin of migrants, their parents and grandparents were remarkably less favorable toward immigration and more concerned with the origin of migrants. In 2012 the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 35% of Americans age 60 and above believe that white people and black people should not be romantically involved. This 35% is more than halved with the next generation, with only 16% of baby boomers in agreement. For Americans younger than 30, this number dropped to just 6%. Harvard University’s Project Implicit, a lab that measures participants’ “implicit associations about race, gender, sexual orientation, and other topics,” has also found an uptick in implicit bias for the elderly, with whites age 60 and older showing 5%-10% more bias than their younger counterparts. Psychologist William von Hippel’s research suggests a similar conclusion, stating that “older adults have a tendency to be more prejudiced than their younger counterparts,” but von Hippel’s work paints the older generation in a more favorable, less culpable light. According to his research, this prejudicial tendency is due in large part to a deteriorating frontal lobe. “Atrophy of the frontal lobes,” he says, “does not diminish intelligence, but it degrades brain areas responsible for inhibiting irrelevant or inappropriate thoughts. Research suggests that this is why older adults have greater difficulty finding the word they're looking for - and why there is a greater likelihood of them voicing ideas they would have previously suppressed.” According to Von Hippel’s research, it is only older adults who show signs of poor frontal lobe functioning that are more likely to rely on stereotypes and be generally socially insensitive, not all older adults at large. It seems, according to this research, that some older people begin to show prejudice even if they never did before, as they find it much more difficult than they did when they were young to halt the vocalization of their implicit biases. The result is that “older adults are more likely to think and express prejudicial thoughts, even when they want to be non-prejudiced and are reminded to ignore stereotypes.” While there is little discussion of this phenomena in broader culture, what conversation does take place, outside of “racist grandpa” tropes, seems to agree that as the younger generation takes the main stage, eventually becoming the older generation, this prejudice will no longer present a significant issue. Oprah exemplified this opinion in a 2013 address promoting The Butler. She said “there are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it – that prejudice and racism – and they just have to die.” The likely-not-far-off deaths of older adults seems to be used as a tacit excuse for letting their prejudice slide by without comment. The idea that ‘they’ll be dead soon enough’ and the generational shift will solve many of these issues is a morbid, easy solution, a smooth path to take out of that conversation with a racist grandparent. Popular opinion holds that the next generation will have grown up in a “time and place” that held fewer stereotypes – a less racist, less prejudiced era. While this idea has certainly been called into question this election season, the outrage of millennials at large over the win of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, whose campaign has been largely fueled by racism and prejudice, seems to lend some credence to this theory. It is important to remember, however, that these are people whose frontal lobes are still fully functioning, and also that they are by no means a wholly unprejudiced group. The relegation of prejudice to the domain of older people makes it easy to ignore the prejudice of younger people, as well as the everyday acts of bias that make up many of the obstacle on the path to greater equality and justice. We all hold implicit biases, learned at a young age when we cannot realize that they are incorrect and harmful. As we grow older, these biases are psychobiologically likely to become more apparent. As the younger generation physically ages, they may take on these characteristics which they currently denounce in their parents and grandparents. In discussing the racism of older adults, it is important also to keep in mind another –ism: ageism. Some qualitative studies have found a “much greater openness and diversity of opinion than is suggested by elderly stereotypes and quantitative analyses of people's’ attitudes.” The statement that old people are more prejudiced does have some scientific backing, but it is by no means applicable as a blanket statement, and is also an oversimplification of the issue at hand. Many older people lack demographic exposure to people of other races, and many are aware that they are “unqualified to comment as a result.” It is also important to remember that many people in the current elderly population are the children of the 50s and 60s, having grown up with the Civil Rights movement, the rise of youth culture, and women’s liberation. They are not as ignorant of racial justice as younger generations might think. It is a disservice to old people, and to the cause of advancing justice and combating prejudice, to paint all old people with the same ‘racist’ brush. This is not to say that older generations do not demonstrate greater rates of prejudicial action, as has been discussed above, but that this tendency does not grant permission to assume that older people are inherently prejudiced. To do so promotes the prejudice of ageism. So, what then is there to do? When our loving grandmother stereotypes the Japanese woman in line at the grocery store, our grandad blames President Obama’s flaws on his blackness, and our aunt says that the owners of the taqueria around the corner “have gotta be illegal,” how do we react? Likely it is true that these people, people that we love, do not mean any harm. Just because they do not mean harm, however, does not mean that they do not cause harm. Our response to these sorts of comments are often “a nervous laugh, a wan smile or a hasty effort to change the subject.” In this, I believe we are doing our world and the old people in our lives a disservice. We often stereotype old people for being racist, making them culpable for their comments through attempts at humor, talking about their comments when they are out of the room, and, occasionally, correcting them. I think that we need to rethink the distribution of culpability in these situations. I think that all of us are culpable. Members of younger generations, we are certainly culpable for speaking to those in our circle of influence – to grandparents and parents, aunts and uncles and neighbors. If there are people who speak and act out of prejudice, it is our job to speak with them and address their behavior. If these people will listen to us and take us seriously, and we do not speak up on behalf of the marginalized, we are then culpable for their misguided behavior and we should be held accountable for that. The people speaking words of prejudice are culpable too, regardless of their age. Old age does not give anyone a free pass to say whatever comes to mind. Those who speak and act out of prejudice need to be confronted with and about their prejudice, but that confrontation also needs to come with the grace of understanding that there are psychobiological factors at work and, to some extent, they may not be able to fully help all the things that slip past their filters. One amazing example of this grace-filled confrontation is the crowdsourced letter that young Asian Americans wrote to their families about the Black Lives Matter movement. The letter, written in English and then translated into many other languages, explained why these young Asian Americans felt that they and their families should be involved in activism against police violence towards black Americans. It brought up the uncomfortable subject of “anti-blackness in Asian-American and immigrant communities,” which many of these young people felt uncomfortable bringing up with their parents and grandparents. The letter started a lot of important conversations, and led to a lot of healthy confrontation and growth in many people’s lives and relationships. This is the action that I think we should take: conversation, entered into with a willingness to be uncomfortable. We need to talk to our grandparents about race, to our neighbors about prejudice. We need to try to understand where they come from, and try to explain where we come from. We need to speak up on behalf of the marginalized. We need to try to look at the world together, try to say what needs to be said in a way in which it can be heard. We need to talk to each other and create a new time and place of mutual understanding from which we can come into relationship and go out into the world – filled with grace and not letting any statement or action rooted in prejudice slide by. *I am aware that many Native Americans prefer the name American Indian, reclaiming a once forced identity. I fully respect and encourage this action. As a white person, however, I feel that it is not my place to refer to these people groups by this name. Coming from me, it may still ring with imperialism. I therefore choose to use the name Native American. Thanks to nightwolfdezines for the art!
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Rebecca Rose“There is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.” Archives
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