…or sitting in it, as it were.
…or rather avoiding confirming Stereotypes.
When planning lessons for my kids these days, I automatically make every effort to avoid or dispel stereotypes and / or illustrate the universality of certain ideas and behaviors that often get asserted here as gaijin staples…not to mention those that get distributed as racial features.
Sometimes I do this by placing black faces and bodies in occupations and scenarios thought to be the exclusive domain of white people (and the Japanese with the wherewithal to emulate them).
There isn’t any pushback when I replace the constant and unacknowledged barrage of white images with black folk. Like when I replace the pics of white ballerinas standing perfectly poised on their toes with black dancers like my girl, the dance virtuoso Dwana Smallwood, formerly of Alvin Ailey, soaring flawlessly through the air. Or replace white orchestra conductors and symphony musicians with the brothers Wynton and Branford Marsalis. There’s just this look of amazement and enlightenment and I LOVE that. It’s a win-win scenario.
If students or teachers should look a bit puzzled by photos of black doctors and astronauts, I’m not above a bit of propaganda. After all propaganda is partly the cause of their puzzlement. And I’ve found it’s quite necessary sometimes to force students to question their race-based culture-based presumptions.
I try not to waste a single opportunity to even the playing field. My goal is to get to a point where I make every lesson reflective of a global diversity, a world where anybody can do anything, where no one is limited by or has an undue advantage due to their racial makeup, where Japanese can excel in Hiphop, like them cats in Rhymester and blacks can master ikebana (art of Japanese flower arrangement), like my boy Jesse Freeman, well on his way to becoming the first black person to be accredited for doing so.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when, how and why I developed this compulsion to avoid fulfilling stereotypes and to challenge presumptions, but there’s no question about it, I go way out of my way sometimes. Even lie sometimes. Anything not to step in someone’s pigeonhole droppings.
Japan is not responsible for it, that’s for sure, though there has been a marked increase in stereotype assertions I have to wade through since coming here…my tendency to avoid them certainly didn’t start here. I had to do quite of bit of it back in NY.
I often had jobs where I was the only or one of a handful of black people in the company or department. And this naturally lent itself to my being the butt of stereotypes, the source of stereotype confirming-type questions, and having to represent my race in many situations where I would rather not have the burden of an entire people on my shoulders.
So, I consider the work I do here a sort of crusade to make the world a better place by getting the people within my sphere of influence to question the ideas bouncing around their skulls, and to envision a world where this kind of thing doesn’t take place…where people actually weigh the value of asserting their unsubstantiated ideas upon another person or group against the ignorance they are actually, in most cases, replete with. Where many of the world’s issues become realistically resolvable by seeing the world as a place where humans are not objects of fear or pity or even admiration. Where they are not classifiable at a glance. Where race is not a label or a tattoo of all that person is and has the potential to be, but simply a blank slate filled in only with that individual’s acts and deeds.
Someday, ne…
