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Civil rights movement

A False Rhetoric

by Sid Parham on March 3, 2010 · Comments

in Politics, Teaching and Learning

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In my last post “An Old Turk” I talked about mt involvement in the politics of the 1960’s and early 70’s. I also spoke about my school’s struggle with a children’s liberation group CAFETY. In this post, I want to examine the rhetoric and ideas behind “child rights”. This rhetoric seems a natural extension of the rhetoric of the civil rights movement and later of the women’s movement. This way of talking has become so pervasive and so natural that we are led to accept premises that we should stop and examine.

Racism and sexism depend on establishing a group based on some external characteristic–gender, skin color, or nose shape, etc. This group is then either demonized or infantilized. The fact that the group is composed of fully functioning human beings is disguised and many laws and social strictures are created “for their own good.” Since the 19th century pseudo-science has been created to justify racism and sexism. The work of the French scientist Arthur de Gobineau is the beginning of a long European and American pseudo-science of race. It is important to note that the rhetoric of racial or gender difference applied equally to adults and children.

The movements of the last half of the 20th Century deconstructed this rhetoric, Both the demonizing and infantilizing of the groups was labeled and deplored. Race and to a lessor extent gender (as opposed to sex) is a social construction and therefore can be changed.  Throughout all of this struggle the new sciences of genetics and brain research showed the lack of natural basis for these social divisions.

I  first heard of the children’s rights movement in the 1980’s.  A colleague at St Cloud State  University was active in this area and presented these ideas as a natural extension of the line of thought I presented above–Children are an arbitrarily created social class, we have “infantilized” them and therefore they should have “rights.”  He would have given the vote to eight year-olds.  I suspect this was just rhetorical exaggeration.  It seemed to me at the time that this argument  flew in the face of all we knew about human development.

Thirty years later, this objection seems stronger because of the last ten years of brain research.  We know that the frontal cortex does not fully develop until a persons early twenties.  To argue, as CAFETY does, that 13 year-olds have the right to decide not to live at home, to refuse treatment parents believe necessary, or to refuse to attend private schools the parents choose flies in the face of our best and most humane science. These arguments also strike at the roots of parental responsibility and the state’s obligation to support parents and children

Anyone who has had teen aged children knows the struggle to set limits and boundaries that are appropriate and allow the teen to move toward independence is difficult and personal. Teens can reason well, but cannot fully see consequences, resist peer presasure, or control impulsivity.  The state’s interest should be to keep the child safe. None of this is to say that children don’t have rights.  That will be the topic of a later post.


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The “N” Word

by Sid Parham on November 26, 2009 · Comments

in cultural studies

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Image by Leo Reynolds via Flickr

As one who tracks our alumni on facebook I am exposed and frequently entertained by the slang of college students.  No change seems to strike me more viscerally than their casual  use of the “N” word.  My reluctance to spell it speaks to its taboo nature.  As one who grew up in the South of the 1950’s and lived through the civil rights movement, the word carries considerable moral and historical weight for me which makes its current uses difficult.  Are we seeing a reversion to older forms of discrimination or a genuine shift in racial attitude?

I have defended teaching Huckleberry Finn even as I had wished Twain had written “Slave Jim” instead of “Nigger Jim.”  I have come to understand the multiple uses of this word within the African American community.  Claude Brown’s wonderful essay from the 1970’s on the “soul word” is perhaps the finest balance of intelligent linguistics and felt personal experience about this topic.  But I knew that as a white I was barred from this discourse.

Hip hop culture seems to have changed all this. Young white people–mostly men–refer to each other an “my niggah” as if the “ah” erased much of the word’s evil history.  At first, I saw this phenomenon as  simply disaffected, but relatively privileged, white youth claiming an outsider position.  As one who spend the summer of 1968 in San Francisco,  I can assure them that this is not a productive political move. Then across my facebook wall I watched a white student call his African American friend “my Niggah,” and saw the African American reply with friendship and no sense of insult.  I was shocked.  Had the world of my students so changed that this was possible?

Chuck Berry and Motown are credited with moving the civil rights agenda forward. On reflection, I see that America has accepted the cultural prominence of Black people long before it has included them in America’s material prosperity.  This morning’s Washington Post reports that the unemployment crises as hit African American men 3 times harder than their white counterparts.  The divisions remain, yet this new use of the “N” word seems to imply that generational solidarity may be more important than race .  Also this usage marks an era of greater friendship and contact between the cultures.

So maybe this usage is a good thing or maybe I’m just too old to accept a world  in which I cut on my computer and am greeted with “Good Morning my Twiggahs.”

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