As something of a writing experiment, I decided to write quickly and succinctly about something I'd only ever tried to write about at length. I can already feel that I'm going to have missed some key point, perhaps a really key one that will mean that I've come across as saying the very opposite of what I meant. I feel that so deeply that I read the first-thus-far Twitter mention of this, my latest Dish guest-post, and assumed I was being called WRONG, when upon an extra second's reflection, it seems more likely this was someone agreeing with me.
In other news, I had a dream recently that I'd gotten highlights. Not something I'd done or seriously considered doing since I was, I think, 13, but in my dream they looked fabulous.
My Grandma in rural western Minnesota raised her kids with the idea that racial bigotry was wrong and that people shouldn't be judged by their skin color or ethnic background. And, for her, in the 1950s and 1960s in that place, those beliefs were very much tied in to class aspirations. In addition to telling her kids that racial bigotry was wrong, she also told them that it was stupid, low-class, and ignorant. She was from wealthy (7 kids on a rural postal carrier's salary and living in a house that didn't even have an above-ground level for years because at first a basement was all they could afford to build), but in the small town where she had been raised her family had been the educated storekeepers with a nice lace table cloth and a belief in the value of education and music. She was snobby about a lot of the people in town, considered herself a cultured person, and wanted to raise her kids to be the sorts of people who would be better than those low-class, ignorant bigots.
ReplyDeleteI think Grandma was also opposed to segregation and the like for good and valid reasons, but the snob aspect can't be ignored.
CW, that's fascinating! And it brings up the question I didn't quite have space to get into, which is... what then? Is it possible to disentangle class snobbery from anti-racism, or is there something to be said for making tolerance and acceptance fashionable?
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