Where it Begins: Introduction

There is a song in the Broadway Musical South Pacific called “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught”. It goes like this:

“You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught”

The same is true for all the ways we learn to treat differently others whom we (learn to) perceive to be different from ourselves: people of a different gender, different class, different age.

Where it begins is with ourselves, with the ways in which we are treated by our parents and other adults in our lives. Or rather it begins with the ways in which we are mistreated, in the ways we are treated as less than or lacking or wrong or ugly or in any way other than the beautiful unique people we are.

The perspective that all the cruelty in the world can be linked to early trauma is almost universally accepted. When most people think of trauma however, they think of physical and/or sexual abuse and neglect. But, just as the microaggressions that people of people of color experience have a profoundly negative impact on their lives, the same is true for the microabuses we experience as children. In this series of posts, I would like to present examples of such mistreatment.

I am sharing them so they can be seen for in my experience they are invisible to most people. I want them to be seen so that, once seen, once understood to be responsible for creating the fertile ground within which all our adult irrationalities (from racism to being a “control freak”) take root and grow, that we will be inspired to both strive to refrain from these microabuses in our interactions with children and to heal from having experienced them ourselves when we were children. (Indeed this latter work is essential to being able to succeed at the former.)

I am not sharing these thoughts to attack, blame or shame parents. We have an impossible job, particularly in the industrialized world where parenting can hardly be said be a job so little support is it given. We are all doing our very, very best. And, there are things we do, that we have been taught to do, that nearly everyone around us does, that were done to us, that hurt our children and, through them, hurt others. We need to notice and acknowledge these things not only in order to heal ourselves and our children but also, I believe, to heal our world.

I started collecting examples of these microabuses decades ago when my daughter was an infant. I have been reluctant to share my thoughts about them because I feared that doing so would only result in anger and alienation. This remains a concern but my greater concern is that we bring an end to these early teachings of being less than, of being powerless, of being stupid, of being worthless. We have been carefully, carefully taught and are carefully carefully teaching our children to endure, perpetuate and be complicit in a society that treats human beings as a commodity. I would like to help change the lessons we are teaching and, thereby, the world in which we live.

So, here, in this series of posts, are my thoughts about the connection between parenting and oppressions of all kinds. I hope they will be received as a gift rather than an attack.