My Sorting Hat

I've been thinking about race since the latest incident of cop-shoots–kid. I have no idea whether the cop shot the kid because the kid was black, but it seems that in all these instances, people make some sort of split-second decisions that lead to bullets flying. So what are those decisions that people make, and how many are racial, or racist? I'm sure brainiacs have written endless papers about the psychology of law enforcement, and how a cop assesses mortal danger, but I'm not inclined to look them up. Nor am I inclined to read Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink," if only because I'm tired of Malcolm Gladwell.  But I'm interested in the way we sort people into categories, like Hogwarts's Sorting Hat, based on whatever knowledge we gain in the first thirty seconds of knowing someone. The easiest way to sort, of course, is visually: height, weight, skin color, Charles Manson eyes, abnormalities of limbs or face. Race is one of those quickly-read, but often incorrect, sorting criteria. So think back for a minute and try to remember how you first learned that people were different races, and why it mattered.

Noticing differences among us is part of nature -- not just human nature, but the entire realm of that vicious bitch-queen, Mother Nature. I've heard a story of some creature that thinks one of three thoughts when encountering another creature: (1) this thing is bigger than I am, so I will RUN; (2) this thing is smaller than I am, so I will kill it; or (3) this thing is the same size I am, so I will try to mate with it.

Run, kill, or mate: those are the options. Now, I'm fairly certain human beings are slightly more sophisticated, but still, their initial social instincts are to categorize people: is this stranger like me, not like me, attractive, repellent, neutral...or is it  Geraldo Rivera, in which case all bets are off anyway? I wonder if this very basic sorting of people into categories is what begins our journey into racism. Someone is the same color as me, so then go into the "acceptable" bin without any real questions. Someone is a different color, so they go into a different bin.

When I was a little kid, we lived in Virginia, and it was there, in elementary school, that I have my first real memories of black people.  My parents had spent the latter half of the 1960s in Mississippi (where my brother and I were born) and Georgia, so I know that I was raised in the hotbed of civil rights and racial tension, but I recall very little of it.  As Yankee Catholics, my parents were about as popular with white southerners as rattlesnakes in a swimming hole, but even their popey category of social misfit was still a world away from being black. I don't remember much of anything race-related till elementary school, when I first encountered a sizable group of black kids.

 I remember being a little scared, and a little awed, and intimidated...and envious. They looked different, sounded different, moved differently, and for lack of a better word, they had an identity as a group, something that made them seem comfortable with each other -- way more comfortable than white people ever were with other white people. They tended to hang out together on the playgrounds, and of course back then I didn't realize that this was de facto segregation. I just figured they didn't want to hang out with us, and I couldn't blame them there. I'm not sure I wanted to hang out with the white kids either, but that's how it worked, and it never occurred to me to challenge the social norms. I was fascinated, but from a distance. I did try to imitate their "accent" once, and it was the first time I can remember trying to mimic another person. The word was "pencils," but they pronounced it "pailn-suls." How did they make that word come out so differently than I did? Why did it sound so exotic, so cool? I always felt hopelessly bland around black people. The funny thing is that I had no idea that in the social climate of the times, being white was actually considered valuable. I just knew there was this difference, some sort of otherness about these groups that I wished I could join sometimes.

Even on the television of my childhood, the black characters were the Jeffersons, Jimmy Walker, Cosby, Sanford and Son...and almost never did they interact with white characters. They had these inside jokes that were often about being black or making fun of the social norms, and I probably learned the most about such things from those shows.  They were hilarious shows, but they definitely had been sorted by race. Strangely, my dog seemed to categorize people by race, too; the only person she ever hated instinctively was the very kind black woman who coached the little league cheerleaders. I must have heard the N word regularly, but by that time, it didn't mean all black people. It meant some category of black people that seemed equivalent to white trash, much the way Chris Rock uses the word. It was another layer of sorting then, but it was finally, slowly becoming a word that nicer people didn't use.

What about communities that were nearly all white? How did the social sorting work when everyone had roughly the same skin tone? For that sort of question, I could always trek up north to see my extended family in western Wisconsin, where my young mind knew that racism could not possibly exist, because who the hell were they gonna be racist against? Redheads? But even there, I could listen to my grandfather telling Ole and Line jokes (jokes about Norwegians, similar to Polish jokes), and I learned there is a heritage difference between a person named Hansen and another named Hanson. Later, I heard some pretty virulent racism being spewed in those flat, nasal accents, and it shocked me to bits, in part because I thought racism required a southern drawl and a banjo. It was strange to hear those wholesome, Midwestern tones speaking the same hateful bullshit I associated with southern pickup trucks. I remember thinking, wow, I guess if you don't have any darker-skinned people in your state, you start subdividing the Scandinavians and making distinctions between blond people...sheesh.

And then we moved to Florida, and I encountered all new sorting schemes. Two of the guys I met in fifth grade were Ira Adler and Brent Goldman. I had never met Jewish kids, and when Brent asked, "Can you come over today, Ira?" it was in that musical, Brooklyn-Jewish accent I learned to mimic perfectly. It sounded, to my redneck ears, like aliens communicating. Now I had to learn a new social category, and I would hear people talk about kids who "looked Jewish." What the hell did THAT mean, I wondered; how could you LOOK like the people you went to church with? It made no sense to me then. And then, with each wave of immigrants from the islands, or South or Central America, I learned that they sorted each other, too. Cubans thought they were more impressive than Puerto Ricans, who were clearly better off than Dominicans, and everyone thought Haitians were the lowest. Later I learned that Cubans were treated far better because they were fleeing Communism, whereas everyone else was just fleeing brutal dictators, poverty, starvation, disease, and hopelessness. So the new Americans were being sorted according to the particular form of hell that inspired them to float to Miami in the first place.

This kind of sorting happens everywhere. Friends in Israel have told me that even there, Jews of the Diaspora are treated differently than Jews who came from other places. There are fine differences between migrating to Palestine in the 1920s and being shipped there from displaced persons camps after WWII. My Pakistani friend tells me that skin tone matters there, with paler skin being "better" or more desirable than dark skin. Various European nations are worried about losing their essentially white population as immigrants from North Africa and southwest Asia stream in. People who cover their heads to show respect for their gods are treated differently than people who wear baseball caps and earbuds. Regardless of where you are in the world, it seems there is some distinguishing skin-tone or cultural heritage that automatically determines your social standing.

So we tried an experiment, 15 years ago, on the newborn Cassie, which could be considered unethical, I suppose, if I had any ethics to begin with. We never referred to anyone by race when talking with her. We used names when we could, but otherwise would ask about her teacher with the red shirt, the kid who liked playing with blocks, the girl with the book Cassie liked, the man with the Falcons hat. We wanted to see how long it took till she absorbed some kind of race-sorting concepts from the rest of society. Of course, the whole thing ended up being a lesson for us, too, as we no longer used race-based terminology. It's fascinating to try cutting a whole category of words out of your vocabulary.  Try it.

She was about three when she realized an important (to her) difference between people: hair styles. A little girl in her class had a beautiful set of beads in her hair, set in intricate patterns and rows that looked like sculpture. Cassie realized that her own hair was different than that of the beaded girls. Later, we let Cassie get beaded, but still, she knew her hair just wasn't the same. A few years later, we were listening to a song that referred to people by "color," and she wanted to know what yellow people were. When I explained that yellow was for Asia, she was irritated, because, "No one is yellow; that's silly." So I asked, "How many people do you know who are actually black? Or really white? None of those color words make sense." And the conversation started there. We are still trying to sort it out year after year, particularly as black history is a major part of education here in Atlanta.

We have never gotten back to automatically referring to people by race. Once we realized how many other ways people could be sorted, race became a criterion of last resort. Simply by changing our behavior, our viewpoints shifted. I'm not saying this is particularly virtuous; we are not on some new plane of existence because of this little game we played. But it becomes really interesting, during times of racial tension, to try to guess what kind of Sorting Hat people wear, and how they could be redesigned just a bit.  It won't cure racism in a minute, but it is worth looking at how the Sorting works.