Holocaust and Human Behavior

By Facing History and Ourselves

Holocaust and Human Behavior leads students through an examination of the history of the Holocaust, while fostering their skills in ethical reasoning, critical thinking, empathy, and civic engagement.

By focusing on the choices of individuals who experienced this history--through primary sources, eyewitness testimonies, personal reflections, poetry, and images-- students are given a lens to thoughtfully examine the universal themes and questions about human behavior inherent in a study of the Holocaust. Students are also prompted to draw connections between history and the world today.

Holocaust and Human Behavior has been fully revised in 2017 to reflect the latest scholarship on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, as well as incorporate new research from the fields of neuroscience and the psychology of bias and prejudice. This edition also features a new chapter on World War I.

In this edition you ll find a wealth of new materials to support your teaching, including more than 200 readings, maps, historical photographs, visual essays, and video and lesson plan recommendations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Facing History and Ourselves
• Release date: Apr 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781940457192

Facing History and Ourselves

Facing History and Ourselves is an international educational and professional development organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make connections between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives.

Book preview

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Chapter 1

The Individual and Society

Overview

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? How we answer these questions shapes how we think about, and how we behave toward, ourselves and others. And our answers to those questions are influenced by the society we live in. This chapter explores the relationship between the individual and society, and how that relationship affects the choices we make.

Getty Images / Jo McRyan

Essential Questions

What is the relationship between the individual and society?

What factors shape our identities? What parts of our identities do we choose for ourselves? What parts are determined for us by others, by society, or by chance?

What dilemmas arise when others view us differently than we view ourselves?

How do our identities influence our choices and the choices available to us?

Introduction

We begin to learn our culture—the ways of our society—just after birth. That process is called socialization, and it involves far more than schooling. Our culture shapes the way we work and play, and it makes a difference in how we view ourselves and others. It affects our values—what we consider right and wrong. This is how the society we live in influences our choices. But our choices can also influence others and ultimately help shape our society.

Imagine that you encounter a stranger walking down the street. How might you describe the person? What labels would you use? We know that every person is different from any other in countless ways, yet when we encounter others we often rely on generalizations to describe them. It’s a natural tendency, says psychologist Deborah Tannen. We must see the world in patterns in order to make sense of it; we wouldn’t be able to deal with the daily onslaught of people and objects if we couldn’t predict a lot about them and feel that we know who and what they are.¹

Our society—through its particular culture, customs, institutions, and more—provides us with the labels we use to categorize the people we encounter. These labels are based on beliefs about race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, economic class, and more. Sometimes our beliefs about these categories are so strong that they prevent us from seeing the unique identities of others. Sometimes these beliefs also make us feel suspicion, fear, or hatred toward some members of our society. Other times, especially when we are able to get to know a person, we are able to see past labels and, perhaps, find common ground.

The stories in this chapter explore some of the dilemmas people face as they establish themselves both as individuals and as members of a group, and as they define themselves and are defined by others. As the first step in the Facing History and Ourselves journey, this chapter introduces ideas about human behavior and decision making that will serve as a foundation for examining the historical case study in the chapters that follow. Teachers are encouraged to select the readings that match their objectives and the interests and needs of their students.

1 Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 16.

Reading 1

The Bear That Wasn’t

LESSON PLAN

Teach The Complexity of Identity

VIDEO

Watch The Bear That Wasn’t

VIDEO

Watch A Class Divided

No two people are exactly alike. Each of us is an individual with unique talents, interests, and values. Often, others do not recognize what is so distinct about us and instead attach labels to us that may differ from those we would choose for ourselves. Sometimes the labels others attach to us influence the way we think about our own identity. In the book The Bear That Wasn’t, author Frank Tashlin uses words and pictures to describe that process.

Once upon a time, in fact it was on a Tuesday, the Bear stood at the edge of a great forest and gazed up at the sky. Away up high, he saw a flock of geese flying south . . .

He knew when the geese flew south and the leaves fell from the trees, that winter would soon be here and snow would cover the forest. It was time to go into a cave and hibernate.

And that was just what he did.

Not long afterward, in fact it was on a Wednesday, men came . . . lots of men with steamshovels and saws and tractors and axes . . .

They worked, and worked, and worked, and finally they built a great, big, huge, factory, right OVER the TOP of the sleeping Bear’s cave.

The factory operated all through the cold winter.

And then it was SPRING again.

Deep down under one of the factory buildings the Bear awoke. He blinked his eyes and yawned . . .

He walked up the stairs to the entrance and stepped out into the bright spring sunshine. His eyes were only half opened, as he was still very sleepy.

His eyes didn’t stay half opened long. They suddenly POPPED wide apart. He looked straight ahead. Where was the forest? Where was the grass? Where were the trees? Where were the flowers?

WHAT HAD HAPPENED?

Where was he? Things looked so strange. He didn’t know where he was . . .

Just then a man came out of a door.

Hey, you get back to work, the man said. "I’m the Foreman and I’ll report you for not working."

The Bear said, I don’t work here. I’m a Bear.

The Foreman laughed very loud. That’s a fine excuse for a man to keep from doing any work. Saying he’s a bear.

The Bear said, But, I am a Bear.

The Foreman stopped laughing. He was very mad.

Don’t try to fool me, he said. "You’re not a Bear. You’re a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat. I’m going to take you to the General Manager."

The General Manager was mad, too. He said, "You’re not a Bear. You’re a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat. I’m going to take you to the Third Vice President."

The Bear said, I’m sorry to hear you say that . . . You see, I am a Bear.

The Third Vice President was even madder . . .

The Second Vice President was more than mad or madder. He was furious . . .

The First Vice President yelled in rage. He said, "You’re not a Bear. You’re a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat. I’m going to take you to the President."

The Bear pleaded, This is a dreadful error, you know, because ever since I can remember, I’ve always been a Bear.

Listen, the Bear told the President. I don’t work here. I’m a Bear, and please don’t say I’m a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat, because the First Vice President and the Second Vice President and the Third Vice President and the General Manager and the Foreman have told me that already.

Thank you for telling me, the President said. I won’t say it, but that’s just what I think you are.

The Bear said, I’m a Bear.

The President smiled and said, You can’t be a Bear. Bears are only in a zoo or a circus. They’re never inside a factory and that’s where you are; inside a factory. So how can you be a Bear?

The Bear said, But I am a Bear.

The President said, "Not only are you a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat, but you are also very stubborn. So I’m going to prove it to you, once and for all, that you are not a Bear."

The Bear said, "But I am a Bear."

AND SO THEY ALL GOT INTO THE PRESIDENT’S CAR AND DROVE TO THE ZOO.

"Is he a Bear? the President asked the zoo Bears. The zoo Bears said, No, he isn’t a Bear, because if he were a Bear, he wouldn’t be outside the cage with you. He would be inside the cage with us."

The Bear said, But I am a Bear.

. . . AND SO THEY ALL LEFT THE ZOO AND DROVE SIX HUNDRED MILES AWAY TO THE NEAREST CIRCUS.

"Is he a Bear? the President asked the circus Bears. The circus Bears said, No, he isn’t a Bear, because if he were a Bear, he wouldn’t be sitting in a grandstand seat with you. He would be wearing a little hat with a striped ribbon on it, holding on to a balloon and riding a bicycle with us."

The Bear said, But I’m a Bear.

. . . They left the circus and drove back to the factory.

And so they put the Bear to work on a big machine with a lot of other men. The Bear worked on the big machine for many, many months.

One day a long time afterward, the factory closed down and all the workers left and went home. The Bear walked along far behind them. He was all alone, and had no place to go.

As he walked along, he happened to gaze up at the sky. Away up high, he saw a flock of geese flying south . . .

The Bear knew when the geese flew south and the leaves fell from the trees, that winter would soon be there and snow would cover the forest. It was time to go into a cave and hibernate.

So he walked over to a huge tree that had a cave hollowed out beneath its roots. He was just about to go into it, when he stopped and said, But I CAN’T go into a cave and hibernate. I’m NOT a Bear. I’m a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat.

So winter came. The snow fell. It covered the forest and it covered him. He sat there, shivering with cold and he said, But I sure wish I was a Bear.

The longer he sat there the colder he became. His toes were freezing, his ears were freezing and his teeth were chattering. Icicles covered his nose and chin. He had been told so often, that he was a silly man who needed a shave and wore a fur coat, that he felt it must be true.

So he just sat there, because he didn’t know what a silly man who needed a shave and wore a fur coat would do, if he were freezing to death in the snow. The poor Bear was very lonely and very sad. He didn’t know what to think.

Then suddenly he got up and walked through the deep snow toward the cave. Inside, it was cosy and snug. The icy wind and cold, cold snow couldn’t reach him here. He felt warm all over.

He sank down on a bed of pine boughs and soon he was happily asleep and dreaming sweet dreams, just like all bears do, when they hibernate.

So even though the FOREMAN and the GENERAL MANAGER and the THIRD VICE PRESIDENT and the SECOND VICE PRESIDENT and the FIRST VICE PRESIDENT and the PRESIDENT and the ZOO BEARS and the CIRCUS BEARS had said, he was a silly man who needed a shave and wore a fur coat, I don’t think he really believed it, do you? No, indeed, he knew he wasn’t a silly man, and he wasn’t a silly Bear either.¹

Connection Questions

1. Create an identity chart (see example below) for the Bear. Which labels on the chart represent how he sees his own identity? Which ones represent how others in the story see him? When you are finished, create an identity chart for yourself.

2. Why do you think Frank Tashlin titled this story The Bear That Wasn’t? Why didn’t the factory officials recognize the Bear for what he was? Why did it become harder and harder for the Bear to maintain his identity as he moved through the bureaucracy of the factory?

3. What were the consequences for the Bear of the way others defined his identity?

4. Whose opinions and beliefs have the greatest effect on how you think about your own identity?

5. How does our need to be part of a group affect our actions? Why is it so difficult for a person to go against the group?

1 Frank Tashlin, The Bear That Wasn’t (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995). Text and images reproduced by permission from Dover Publications.

Reading 2

The Danger of a Single Story

LESSON PLAN

Teach The Complexity of Identity

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie describes the effects that labels can have on how we think about ourselves and others:

I’m a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call the danger of the single story. I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children’s books.

I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn’t have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to . . .

What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren’t many of them available, and they weren’t quite as easy to find as the foreign books.

But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.

Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.

I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn’t finish my dinner, my mother would say, Finish your food! Don’t you know? People like Fide’s family have nothing. So I felt enormous pity for Fide’s family.

Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my tribal music, and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.

What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.

I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn’t consciously identify as African. But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African . . .

So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate’s response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide’s family . . .

And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story . . .

But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.

I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.

It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo [a language spoken in Nigeria] word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is nkali. It’s a noun that loosely translates to to be greater than another. Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they’re told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, secondly. Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story . . .

When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.

But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.

All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.

I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.

So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide’s family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls a balance of stories.

What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don’t read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them . . .

Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers[?]

What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband’s consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition?

Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories . . .

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.

The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained. I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.²

Connection Questions

1. Create an identity chart for Chimamanda Adichie. Which labels on the chart represent how she sees her own identity? Which ones represent how some others view her?

2. What does Adichie mean by a single story? What examples does she give? Why does she believe single stories are dangerous?

3. Is there a single story that others often use to define you? Can you think of other examples of single stories that may be part of your own worldview? Where do those single stories come from? How can we find a balance of stories?

4. Adichie herself admits to sometimes defining others with a single story. Why is it that people sometimes make the same mistakes that they so easily see others making?

2 Chimamanda Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story, TED video (filmed July 2009, posted October 2009), 18:49, accessed March 28, 2016, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en.

Reading 3

Names and Identity

According to American author Ralph Ellison, It is through our names that we first place ourselves in the world. Our names, being the gift of others, must be made our own.³ Indeed, when we meet someone new, our name is usually the first piece of information about ourselves that we share. What does our name reveal to others about our identity?

At the age of seven, Jennifer Wang came to the United States from Beijing, China, with her family. At 17, she wrote an essay called Orientation Day that explores the relationship between her name and her identity. It is a response to a familiar experience: introducing oneself to a group of strangers. Wang writes, in part:

Something about myself? How do I summarize, in thirty seconds, everything which adds up and equals a neat little bundle called Me? How do I present myself in a user-friendly format, complete with Help buttons and batteries? Who am I, and why do I matter to any of you?

First of all, I am a girl who wandered the aisles of Toys R Us for two hours, hunting in vain for a doll with a yellowish skin tone. I am a girl who sat on the cold bathroom floor at seven in the morning, cutting out the eyes of Caucasian models in magazines, trying to fit them on my face. I am the girl who loved [newscaster] Connie Chung because she was Asian, and I’m also the girl who hated Connie Chung because she wasn’t Asian enough. . . .

During that time I also first heard the term chink,* and I wondered why people were calling me a narrow opening, usually in a wall. People expected me to love studying and to enjoy sitting in my room memorizing facts for days and days.

While I was growing up, I did not understand what it meant to be Chinese or American. Do these terms link only to citizenship? Do they suggest that people fit the profile of either typical Chinese or typical Americans? And who or what determines when a person starts feeling American, and stops feeling Chinese?

I eventually shunned the Asian crowds. And I hated Chinatown with a vengeance. I hated the noise, the crush of bodies, the yells of mothers to fathers to children to uncles to aunts to cousins. I hated the limp vegetables hanging out of soggy cardboard boxes. I hated the smell of fish being chopped, of meat hanging in a window. I hated not understanding their language in depth—the language of my ancestors, which was also supposed to be mine to mold and master.

I am still not a citizen of the United States of America, this great nation, which is hailed as the destination for generations of people, the promised land for millions. I flee at the mere hint of teenybopper music. I stare blankly at my friends when they mention the 1980s or share stories of their parents as hippies. And I hate baseball.

The question lingers: Am I Chinese? Am I American? Or am I some unholy mixture of both, doomed to stay torn between the two?

I don’t know if I’ll ever find the answers. Meanwhile, it’s my turn to introduce myself . . .

I stand up and say, My name is Jennifer Wang, and then I sit back down. There are no other words that define me as well as those do. No others show me being stretched between two very different cultures and places—the Jennifer clashing with the Wang, the Wang fighting with the Jennifer.⁴

Connection Questions

1. What words or phrases does Jennifer Wang use to describe her identity? What words or phrases does she use to describe her attitude toward her identity?

2. What does Wang mean when she says the ‘Jennifer’ clashing with the ‘Wang,’ the ‘Wang’ fighting with the ‘Jennifer’? What examples does she provide to support this description of her name?

3. What might your name tell others about your identity? What stories about you or your family might your name reflect? What about your identity is simplified, hidden, or confused by your name?

3 Ralph Ellison, Hidden Name and Complex Fate: A Writer’s Experience in the United States, in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 192.

4 Jennifer Wang, Orientation Day, in YELL-Oh Girls! Emerging Voices Explore Culture, Identity, and Growing Up Asian American, ed. Vickie Nam (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 199–200.

Reading 4

Finding One’s Voice

How much of our identities can we define for ourselves, and how much is determined by other influences, such as our families, our culture, and the circumstances of our lives? Writer Julius Lester defied other people’s expectations on his journey toward understanding and defining his identity. Here, he reflects on the way violence and humiliation affected his childhood:

I grew up in the forties and fifties in Kansas City, Kansas, and Nashville, Tennessee, with summers spent in Arkansas. The forties and fifties were not pleasant times for blacks and I am offended by white people who get nostalgic for the fifties. I have no nostalgia for segregation, for the No Colored Allowed signs covering the landscape like litter on the smooth, green grass of a park, I have no nostalgia for a time when I endangered my life if, while downtown shopping with my parents, I raised my eyes and accidentally met the eyes of a white woman. Black men and boys were lynched for this during my childhood and adolescence.⁵

Lester describes the way he survived those years as follows:

I grew up in a violent world. Segregation was a deathly spiritual violence, not only in its many restrictions on where we could live, eat, go to school, and go after dark. There was also the constant threat of physical death if you looked at a white man in what he considered the wrong way or if he didn’t like your attitude. There was also the physical violence of my community . . . What I have realized is that on those nights I lay in bed reading westerns and detective novels, I was attempting to neutralize and withstand the violence that was so much a part of my dailiness. In westerns and mysteries I found a kind of mirror in which one element of my world—violence—was isolated and made less harmful to me.⁶

Not surprisingly, Lester found his voice in a book. He explains:

One of the pivotal experiences of my life came when I was eighteen. I wandered into a bookstore in downtown Nashville one frosted, gray day in late autumn aware that I was looking for something: I was looking for myself, and I generally find myself while wandering through a bookstore, looking at books until I find the one that is calling me. On this particular day I wandered for quite a while until I picked up a paperback with the word Haiku on the cover. What is that? I wondered. I opened the book and read,

On a withered branch

a crow has settled —

autumn nightfall.

I trembled and turned the pages hastily until my eyes stopped on these words:

A giant firefly;

that way, this way, that way, this —

and it passes by.

I read more of the brief poems, these voices from seventeenth-century Japan, and I knew: This is my voice. This simplicity, this directness, this way of using words to direct the soul to silence and beyond. This is my voice! I exulted inside. Then I stopped. How could I, a little colored kid from Nashville, Tennessee—and that is all I knew myself to be in those days like perpetual death knells—how could I be feeling that something written in seventeenth-century Japan could be my voice?

I almost put the book back, but that inner prompting which had led me to it would not allow such an act of self-betrayal. I bought the book and began writing haiku, and the study of haiku led to the study of Zen Buddhism, which led to the study of flower arranging, and I suspect I am still following the path that opened to me on that day when I was eighteen, though I no longer write haiku.

I eventually understood that it made perfect sense for a little colored kid from Nashville, Tennessee, to recognize his voice in seventeenth-century Japanese poetry. Who we are by the sociological and political definitions of society has little to do with who we are.

In the quiet and stillness that surrounds us when we read a book, we are known to ourselves in ways we are not when we are with people. We enter a relationship of intimacy with the writer, and if the writer has written truly and if we give ourselves over to what is written, we are given the gift of ourselves in ways that surprise and catch the soul off guard.⁷

Connection Questions

1. What barriers did society place in the way of Julius Lester’s becoming the kind of person he wanted to be? How did he overcome these barriers?

2. When Lester found a book of haiku in the bookstore, why did he almost put it back?

3. Lester writes that when he found the book of haiku, I knew: This is my voice. Have you ever found your voice in a work of art, music, literature, or film?

5 Julius Lester, Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky (New York: Arcade, 1990), 69.

6 Ibid., 71–73.

7 Lester, Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky, 71–73.

Reading 5

The Eye of the Beholder

The Twilight Zone, a popular TV show that ran from 1959 to 1965, blended science fiction with fantasy and horror. The episodes often had familiar settings and featured characters that seemed quite ordinary. But the stories were far from ordinary because they took place in an imaginary world just beyond our own—the twilight zone. In creating the series, producer and writer Rod Serling hoped these stories would prompt thoughtful discussions of social issues. Eye of the Beholder, one of Serling’s most provocative episodes, probes our ideas about what is normal and how those ideas influence the way we think about ourselves and treat others.

The following paragraphs provide a synopsis of the story:

Meet the patient in room 307, Janet Tyler. A rigid mask of gauze bandages covers her face. Only her voice and her hands seem alive as she pleads with a nurse to describe the weather, the sky, the daylight, clouds—none of which she can see. The nurse, visible only by her hands, answers kindly but briefly.

When will they take the bandages off? Janet asks urgently. How much longer?

When they decide they can fix your face, the nurse replies.

It’s pretty bad, isn’t it? Ever since I was little, people have turned away when they looked at me. . . . The very first thing I can remember is another little child screaming when she saw me. I never wanted to be beautiful, to look like a painting. I just wanted people not to turn away.

With a consoling pat, the nurse moves away.

A doctor enters Janet Tyler’s room. We see only his hands, his shadow, his back as he looks out a window. Janet questions him with a mixture of fear and hope. When will he remove the bandages? Will her face be normal?

The doctor tries to comfort her. His voice is gentle. Perhaps this time the treatment will be successful. But he also issues a warning. He reminds her that she has had treatment after treatment—eleven in all. That is the limit. If this effort fails, she can have no more.

Each of us is afforded as much opportunity as possible to fit in with society, he says. In your case, think of the time and effort the state has expended, to make you look—

To look like what, doctor?

Well, to look normal, the way you’d like to look. . . . You know, there are many others who share your misfortune, who look much as you do. One of the alternatives, just in case the treatment is not successful, is to allow you to move into a special area in which people of your kind have congregated.

Janet twists away from the doctor. People of my kind? Congregated? You mean segregated! You mean imprisoned! You are talking about a ghetto—a ghetto for freaks! Her voice rises in a crescendo of anger.

Miss Tyler! the doctor remonstrates sharply. You’re not being rational. You know you couldn’t live any kind of life among normal people. His words are harsh, but his voice is sad and patient.

Janet refuses to be mollified. Who are these normal people? she asks accusingly. Who decides what is normal? Who is this state that makes these rules? The state is not God! The state does not have the right to make ugliness a crime. . . . Please, she begs. Please take off the bandages. Please take them off! Please help me.

Reluctantly the doctor agrees, and the staff prepares for the removal. Bit by bit, he peels the gauze away. She sees at first only the light, then the shadowy forms of the doctor and nurses. As the last strip of gauze comes off, the doctor and nurses draw back in dismay. No change! the doctor exclaims. No change at all!

Janet Tyler gasps and raises her face. She has wide-set eyes, delicate brows, fine skin, and regular features, framed by wavy blonde hair. She begins to sob and struggle away from the nurses.

Turn on the lights, the doctor orders. Needle, please!

As the lights come on, the doctor and nurses are clearly visible for the first time. Piglike snouts dominate their lopsided, misshapen features. Their mouths are twisted, their jowls sag.

Janet runs through the hospital in a panic, pursued by nurses and orderlies. She passes other staff and patients. Each face is a little different but all share the same basic pattern—snouts, jowls, and all. She flings open a door and freezes in sudden shock. The doctor and another man are in this room. She sinks down by a chair and hides her face in fear.

Miss Tyler, Miss Tyler, don’t be afraid, the doctor urges. He’s only a representative of the group you are going to live with. He won’t hurt you. . . . Miss Tyler, this is Walter Smith.

Walter Smith steps forward, and Janet Tyler cringes away. He too has regular features, lit by a friendly smile. A stray lock of dark hair curls over his forehead. We have a lovely village and wonderful people, he tells Janet. In a little while, a very little while, you’ll feel a sense of great belonging.

She looks at his face. Why do we have to look like this? she murmurs.

I don’t know, I really don’t, he replies with sadness. But there is a very old saying—beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Try to think of that, Miss Tyler. Say it over and over to yourself. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

He holds out his hand to her. Slowly, hesitantly, she takes it, and they walk away together, through a corridor lined with pig-faced spectators.⁸

Connection Questions

1. What is the twist in this episode of The Twilight Zone? What might creator Rod Serling be trying to communicate with this unexpected twist in the story?

2. Where do we get our ideas about beauty? How do we learn what is normal?

3. How would you adapt Eye of the Beholder to today’s world? What changes would you make in the story?

8 Marc Scott Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 2nd ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1989), 144–45.

Reading 6

Gender and Identity

Sometimes our assumptions and expectations about others prevent us from seeing who they really are as individuals. Some of the most powerful expectations about people that we learn from our culture are about gender. A person’s sex often leads us to make assumptions about that person’s identity. Martha Minow, a legal scholar, explains:

Of course, there are real differences in the world; each person differs in countless ways from each other person. But when we simplify and sort, we focus on some traits rather than others, and we assign consequences to the presence and absence of the traits we make significant. We ask, What’s the new baby?—and we expect as an answer, boy or girl. That answer, for most of history, has spelled consequences for the roles and opportunities available to that individual.⁹

Schoolchildren dressed in Halloween costumes: Spiderman for boys and Hello Kitty for girls.

Frederic J. Brown / Staff / Getty Images

American author Lori Duron and her husband, Matt, have two children, both boys. She writes about what happened the first time her younger son, C.J., got a Barbie doll:

For days after C.J. discovered her, Barbie never left his side. When I’d do a final bed check at night before I retired for the evening to watch reality television and sneak chocolate when no one was looking, I’d see his full head of auburn hair sticking out above his covers. Next to him there would be a tiny tuft of blonde hair sticking out as well.

The next time we were at Target near the toy aisle—which I’ve always tried to pass at warp speed so the kids don’t notice and beg me to buy them something—C.J. wanted to see Barbie stuff. I led him to the appropriate aisle and he stood there transfixed, not touching a thing, just taking it all in. He was so overwhelmed that he didn’t ask to buy a single thing. He finally walked away from the aisle speechless, as if he had just seen something so magical and majestic that he needed time to process it.

He had, that day, discovered the pink aisles of the toy department. We had never been down those aisles; we had only frequented the blue aisles, when we ventured down the toy aisles at all. As far as C.J. was concerned, I had been hiding half the world from him.

I felt bad about that, like I had deprived him because of my assumptions and expectations that he was a boy and boys liked boy things. Matt and I noticed that C.J. didn’t really like any of the toys we provided for him, which were all handed down from his brother. We noticed that C.J. didn’t go through the normal boy toy addictions that Chase [C.J.’s older brother] had gone through: he couldn’t care less about balls, cars, dinosaurs, superheroes, The Wiggles, Bob the Builder, or Thomas the Tank Engine. What did he like to play with? We didn’t worry ourselves much about finding the answer (a case of the second-born child not getting fussed over quite like the first-born); we trusted that in time something would draw him in. Which it did. It just wasn’t at all what we were expecting.

At about the eighteen- to twenty-four-month mark of a child’s life, the gender-neutral toys disappear and toys that are marketed specifically to boys or to girls take over. We didn’t realize it until later, but that divide in the toy world and our house being filled with only boy toys left C.J. a little lost at playtime. We and the rest of society had been pushing masculine stuff on him and enforcing traditional gender norms, when all he wanted was to brush long blonde hair and dress, undress, and re-dress Barbie. . . .¹⁰

Reflecting on C.J.’s identity, Duron concludes:

On the gender-variation spectrum of super-macho-masculine on the left all the way to super-girly-feminine on the right, C.J. slides fluidly in the middle; he’s neither all pink nor all blue. He’s a muddled mess or a rainbow creation, depending on how you look at it. Matt and I have decided to see the rainbow, not the muddle. But we didn’t always see it that way.

Initially, the sight of our son playing with girl toys or wearing girl clothes made our chests tighten, forged a lump in our throats, and, at times, made us want to hide him. There was anger, anxiety, and fear. We’ve evolved as parents as our younger son has evolved into a fascinating, vibrant person who is creative with gender. Sometimes, when I think of how we behaved as parents . . . I’m ashamed and embarrassed.¹¹

Connection Questions

1. What are the differences between the toys in the pink aisle and the toys in the blue aisle? What assumptions do the toys in those aisles reflect about what it means to be a boy or a girl?

2. How do you explain the anxiety, anger, and fear Duron felt when C.J. started playing with girl toys? How did her feelings change?

3. What are some other stereotypes about gender in your world? How do you respond to the assumptions people make about you because of your gender? To what extent do you accept or reject those assumptions?

9 Martha Minow, Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 3.

10 Lori Duron, Raising My Rainbow: Adventures in Raising a Fabulous, Gender Creative Son (New York: Broadway Books, 2013), 9–10.

11 Ibid., 4.

Reading 7

Defining Race

Imagine that you apply for a copy of your birth certificate, and when you receive it you discover that it lists your race as something other than what you and everyone else have always considered it to be. You are white and it says you are black, or you are black and it says you are white. That is exactly what happened to Susie Guillory Phipps, a woman who had always considered herself white, as did almost everyone she met. Sociologist Allan G. Johnson explains:

She had twice married white men, and her family album was filled with pictures of blue-eyed, white ancestors. The state of Louisiana, however, defined her as colored.

When she protested to state authorities, they carefully traced her ancestry back 222 years, and found that although her great-great-great-great grandfather was white, her great-great-great-great grandmother was black. Under Louisiana law, anyone whose ancestry was at least 3 percent black was considered black. Thus, even with an ancestry 97 percent white, the state defined her as black.

Susie Phipps spent $20,000 to force Louisiana to change her birth certificate, and in 1983 Louisiana repealed the law. Why did she go to such expense? Beyond the obvious shock to her identity, there are larger issues. Why does the state have a formula for officially deciding what each person’s race is? Why would a tiny percentage of black ancestry cause her to be considered black, while an overwhelmingly white ancestry could not mean she is white?

The key lies in the word mean in the previous sentence, for . . . what things objectively are is often less significant to human beings than what things mean in cultural frameworks of beliefs, values, and attitudes."¹²

Susie Phipps’s dilemma had little to do with biology or genetics and everything to do with the meaning the state of Louisiana attached to the word race. The way race is defined in the United States has often been in flux. Writer Bonnie Tsui explains:

In 1870, mixed-race American Indians living on reservations were counted as Indians, but if they lived in white communities they were counted as whites. Who was white evolved over time: From the 1870s to 1930s, a parade of court rulings pondered the whiteness of Asian immigrants from China, Japan and India, often changing definitions by the ruling in order to exclude yet another group from citizenship. When mixed-race people became more prevalent, things got murkier still. Who the U.S. Census Bureau designated colored or black varied, too, before

and after slavery, and at times including subcategories for people of mixed race, all details often left up to the whims of the census taker. In 1930, nativist lobbyists succeeded in getting Mexicans officially labeled nonwhite on the census; up until then, they were considered white and allowed citizenship. By 1940, international political pressure had reversed the decision. It wasn’t until 2000 that the Census Bureau started letting people choose more than one race category to describe themselves, and it still only recognizes five standard racial categories: white, black/African-American, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.¹³

Connection Questions

1. Like the Bear in The Bear That Wasn’t, Susie Phipps was told that she wasn’t who she thought she was. What did she think? What was she told? By whom?

2. Why did Phipps go to such trouble and expense to change a word on her birth certificate? Why do you think she wanted the government to agree with her personal understanding?

3. What does Susie Phipps’s story reveal about the concept of race?

4. Who defines race? How does Bonnie Tsui help you understand why it matters?

12 Allan G. Johnson, Human Arrangements: An Introduction to Sociology (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 353.

13 Bonnie Tsui, Choose Your Own Identity, New York Times, December 14, 2015.

Reading 8

The Social Reality of Race

Race is a category that we often use to describe and explain many of the differences between people. Yet the criteria used to categorize individuals as belonging to one race or another are different in different societies and cultures. This is what American Barbara Katz Rothman discovered when her family spent six months in the Netherlands. Fearful that her then five-year-old daughter Victoria would be the only black kid in her class, Rothman was told her concerns were unfounded. Yet, Rothman writes:

She was the only black kid in her class. She was the only black kid I saw anywhere in that school. If I hadn’t been reassured by people I genuinely like and trust, I’d have just been angry. As it was, I was puzzled. I walked over to a wall of photographs of the school going back for years and years, group after group of class photos. No black kids. I didn’t say anything, just kept watching, thinking about it. A few days later, light dawned for me: there were dark-skinned kids from India and Pakistan in all the classes. Black kids. European-style black kids.

For an American, with an American sensibility of race, Indian and African kids are not both black. For a Dutch person, with a different race system in his head, these were all black kids.

So what does that story prove, anyway? That the Dutch draw a different line? Maybe between the Dutch and everyone else? Not being Dutch, are all the blacks, well, black? The Indian kids in her class could see what my kid and I could see, the distinctiveness of African features over and above the similarity of skin color.

So does the story tell us that race is a socially constructed category, constructed differently in different places? Or does it tell us that the Dutch draw their lines so tightly around themselves that they don’t bother to make finer discriminations—not that they don’t see or experience the distinction as existing, but that they don’t see why it should matter.

And is that what white Americans do when they see a black kid whose family has been in the United States since slavery days, a black kid whose family arrived two generations ago from Haiti, and a black kid who just immigrated here from Nigeria, and calls them all African American, seeing no meaningful differences?¹⁴

Connection Questions

1. What does Barbara Katz Rothman mean when she says that race is a socially constructed category?

2. After describing her experiences with Dutch schools, Rothman asks, So what does that story prove, anyway? What do you think her story proves? What does it reveal about the concept of race? Does this story connect with anything in your own experience?

3. People often think of race as having an unchangeable definition and that races are defined the same way over time and in all places. How does Rothman’s story challenge those assumptions?

14 Barbara Katz Rothman, The Book of Life: A Personal and Ethical Guide to Race, Normality, and the Implications of the Human Genome Project (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001), 51–52.

Reading 9

The Consequences of Stereotyping

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Watch How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do

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Watch Jonathan Lykes Performs Perception

Psychologist Deborah Tannen writes:

We all know we are unique individuals, but we tend to see others as representatives of groups. It’s a natural tendency, since we must see the world in patterns in order to make sense of it; we wouldn’t be able to deal with the daily onslaught of people and objects if we couldn’t predict a lot about them and feel that we know who and what they are. But this natural and useful ability to see patterns of similarity has unfortunate consequences. It is offensive to reduce an individual to a category, and it is also misleading.¹⁵

A stereotype is a belief about an individual based on the real or imagined characteristics of a group to which that individual belongs. Stereotypes can lead us to judge an individual or group negatively. Even stereotypes that seem to portray a group positively reduce individuals to categories and tell an inaccurate single story. Prejudice occurs when we form an opinion about an individual or a group based on a negative stereotype; the word prejudice comes from the word pre-judge. When a prejudice leads us to treat an individual or group negatively, discrimination occurs.

Writing in 1986, journalist Brent Staples described his experiences walking the streets of Chicago and New York in the 1970s and 1980s. Here he talks about the effects of stereotypes and how he tried to counter the prejudices that strangers had about him:

I came upon her late one evening on a deserted street in Hyde Park, a relatively affluent neighborhood in an otherwise mean, impoverished section of Chicago. As I swung onto the avenue behind her, there seemed to be a discreet, uninflammatory distance between us. Not so. She cast back a worried glance. To her, the youngish black man—a broad six feet two inches with a beard and billowing hair, both hands shoved into the pockets of a bulky military jacket—seemed menacingly close. After a few more quick glimpses, she picked up her pace and was soon running in earnest. Within seconds she disappeared into a cross street.

That was more than a decade ago. I was twenty-two years old, a graduate student newly arrived at the University of Chicago. It was in the echo of that terrified woman’s footfalls that I first began to know the unwieldy inheritance I’d come into—the ability to alter public space in ugly ways. It was clear that she thought herself the quarry of a mugger, a rapist, or worse. Suffering a bout of insomnia, however, I was stalking sleep, not defenseless wayfarers. As a softy who is scarcely

able to take a knife to a raw chicken—let alone hold one to a person’s throat—I was surprised, embarrassed, and dismayed all at once. Her flight made me feel like an accomplice in tyranny. It also made it clear that I was indistinguishable from the muggers who occasionally seeped into the area from the surrounding ghetto. That first encounter, and those that followed, signified that a vast, unnerving gulf lay between nighttime pedestrians—particularly women—and me. And soon I gathered that being perceived as dangerous is a hazard in itself. I only needed to turn a corner into a dicey situation, or crowd some frightened, armed person in a foyer somewhere, or make an errant move after being pulled over by a policeman. Where fear and weapons meet—and they often do in urban America—there is always the possibility of death . . .

In that first year, my first away from my hometown,