In my last blog, I spoke about my upbringing and the prejudices that were formed because of it. I went to John Carroll because of its reputation and because of scholarship opportunities. I had experienced a great education so far: I was near the top of my class in high school, I had already been accepted into pre-semianry programs, I enjoyed learning, studying, doing well on exams, the whole academic "atmosphere" excited me to no end. I also dreamed of being a teacher now and that was exciting in itself. The freedom I experienced also had its perks and I was "riding high" with expectations for the future.
Little did I know that a different type of education awaited me. At JCU I experienced a diverse classmate population for the first time. Here were African-Americans in my classes that many times made better grades than I. What a shock--was it possible?? I prided myself on trying to be more open with others and shedding my formed prejudices, but it was much harder to actually do than I thought. By the end of my sophomore year, I was speaking openly to African-American classmates and starting to see things radically different from my upbringing. My political science, history, sociology, and psychology classes began to challenge my prejudices and educate me as to the reasons neighborhoods were deteriorating--and it wasn't just because the inhabitants were lazy. I had to realize that many landlords were not as conscientious as my father in keeping their properties up in the inner city and were often taking advantage of their renters.
I learned so much, but it was only slowly sinking in.
I came in contact for the first time with Jews, atheists, libertarians, gays and lesbians, liberals and conservatives thinking in ways that were very different from me. My reaction to many of them was to often write them off--often with wry humor--and to stay with "my group." I remember when a college friend, with whom I had been in class for three years, a fellow history major, first told me he was a Jew. I remember being stunned. I had never considered it. Not that it should have made a difference, but I remember now that it did. We slowly grew apart and I cannot help but think now that my subconscious played a part in that.
As I was in my first two years of JCU, I prepared to enter the monastery: a place that was filled with people who thought like me and most of whom shared my ethnic background. In fact, sharing a common ethnic background was one of the main reasons for which I was joining. I had known many of these priests and monks since I was a child. My father was known to them and they worked side-by-side in promoting Slovak-American affairs. Imagine my surprise when I entered with an African-American young man 13 years my senior (I was 19)! Needless to say, there was going to be alot of adjusting for me and him over the next several years.
In hidsight, I now realize that, although I tried to reach out, there was plenty of baggage to get through. But I have to admit, I tried and I tried hard to move through it all. We engaged in many conversations about our past and our experiences. He was from southern Ohio (Dayton area) and had lived a life under a military father who had been stationed in Texas, the Southwest USA and eventually in Dayton. We both had a liking for classical music and we often shared these events and concerts together. But the ethnic elements of the monastery and in my own psyche came out time and again. The subconcious had to be emptied slowly, but it was a trying process. This classmate in monastic life was the first African-American to visit my family home, the homes of my relatives--I dare say the first ever to step foot in my neighborhood or my street. Of course, I didn't live with my parents anymore. I was now a citizen of Cleveland, the southeast side my family had left in 1970. I began to see positives and negatives with the neighborhoods and began to learn much more about the urban situation. Unfortunately, I thought this classmate would be as interested in his African-American culture as I was in my Slovak heritage. I was wrong. Although there was a respect there, and a sense of belonging to many African-American cultural things, the desire was not there as mine was to me. I could not understand it. But I eventually realized, after a number of years, that people often think differently about their own culture and that sometimes people can feel embarrassed by their culture and the negatives that can spring from it.
Spending more and more time in preparation to be a faculty member at the high school the monastery operates, I began to realize the different dimensions of the African-American culture--and other interpretations of culture from other peoples and backgrounds. I am much less likely to judge other people and cultures now, but every so often I catch myself with a subconscious notion that needs to be "redeemed" to a wider perspective. It has been difficult, but progress has been made and the discerning movement between cultures is more easy now than 18 years ago when I first began teaching full-time. As an administrator, I pay much more attention to the way people treat each other in the school, and I can see that I have not been alone in the experiences I grew up with, the prejudices which helped to shape me, and the challenges of learning to respect, work with, appreciate and understand other cultures and people's experiences. May the journey I have been on and continue to experience help bear fruit in the experiences of others who may share the same struggles.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Segregated past; truncated viewpoint
In reflecting on my past with the help of a number of issues in class, I now realize that, even though my education background has been rather good, my formative years in grade school and high school were definitely exclusive of minority experiences. Not only that, I can see quite clearly how events during these years definitely affected the viewpoints I have had toward minorities, both subconsiously and consciously.
My father was an immigrant to this country. Born in Czecho-Slovakia in 1930, by the age of 10, he began to endure the horrors of World War II in a country that had been torn apart by Hitler at the Munich Pact. Being forced to study German in school, he hated every minute and yearned to be free of this oppressive menace. As the war ended, however, the Soviet influence of the Iron Curtain faced Eastern Europe with the reality of communist governments that were anything but free.
Defiantly refusing to enter the communist-sponsored army at the age of 18, my father escaped from the country with his best friend and ended up in an American camp for displaced persons in West Germany outside of Frankfurt. From there he emigrated to Canada, where he eventually ended up in Toronto working in a glass manufacturing plant, since he had be apprenticed as a glass cutter in Europe. Not satisfied with the work or the profession in Toronto, my father eventually got into the printing business as a linotype operator. There was plenty of work and great demand for his talents. He worked for ethnic daily newspapers, setting type and proofing paginations due to his fluency with Slavic languages. Eventually, he followed his friend to Cleveland, then known as the printing capital of the US.
My father always spoke of the discrimmination he suffered at that hands of others and the struggle he had to learn English and to speak without an accent. He also spoke to us often about hard work and the necessity to do your best in everything, because that is how you can prove your worth and be successful.
After living on the Cleveland/Garfield Heights border until I was half-way through Kindergarten, we moved to the suburbs in March of 1970. It was different overnight. Our apartment in Cleveland was part of a four-family house that my father owned. He continued to own it for the next 40 years. Now we had a spacious yard and a much larger house. Things were much more spread out and there was "elbow room." As my father still owned the other house and rented it out, I remember a few observations about the old neighborhood as the 1970s progressed.
The first was my observation that some people we rented to lived in squalor and didn't care at all for the hard work my father and we children did to fix the house up as best as possible. Although my father tried to rent to the best people possible (and there were some very nice people that lived in those apartments through the years), my most vivid memories were of those whom my father had to evict and who trashed the place, leaving us so much more clean-up to do. I couldn't believe that people would live this way. Secondly, I remember the deterioation of the neighborhood as more and more African-Americans moved in as more and more whites left. My father refused to rent to African-Americans and his explanation of why was evident in the deterioration I witnessed myself in the souteast side of Cleveland as the 1970s and 80s progressed.
Therefore, I was taught that African-Americans were no good. Since I had no positive experiences with them to say otherwise, I grew up with this prejudice. Keep in mind also that I grew up in the Parma-Seven Hills area, which is very ethnic Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, etc. I had no African-American classmates in gradeschool or high school, and these prejudices were simply reinforced by the neighborhood and my classmates. Perhaps the most tragic expression of this was the only African-American I can remember from this time period. He was a grade school student about four grades behind he in school. All I remember was that he was an adopted child and that his family (white) had him baptized in front of the whole school. Unfortunately, the prejudice took over and everyone began to call him "nigger" Nelson, and to this day I cannot recall his first name. The tragedy was that he was only in the school for one year and was probably forced out by the prejudice that was rampant at that time.
My father was an immigrant to this country. Born in Czecho-Slovakia in 1930, by the age of 10, he began to endure the horrors of World War II in a country that had been torn apart by Hitler at the Munich Pact. Being forced to study German in school, he hated every minute and yearned to be free of this oppressive menace. As the war ended, however, the Soviet influence of the Iron Curtain faced Eastern Europe with the reality of communist governments that were anything but free.
Defiantly refusing to enter the communist-sponsored army at the age of 18, my father escaped from the country with his best friend and ended up in an American camp for displaced persons in West Germany outside of Frankfurt. From there he emigrated to Canada, where he eventually ended up in Toronto working in a glass manufacturing plant, since he had be apprenticed as a glass cutter in Europe. Not satisfied with the work or the profession in Toronto, my father eventually got into the printing business as a linotype operator. There was plenty of work and great demand for his talents. He worked for ethnic daily newspapers, setting type and proofing paginations due to his fluency with Slavic languages. Eventually, he followed his friend to Cleveland, then known as the printing capital of the US.
My father always spoke of the discrimmination he suffered at that hands of others and the struggle he had to learn English and to speak without an accent. He also spoke to us often about hard work and the necessity to do your best in everything, because that is how you can prove your worth and be successful.
After living on the Cleveland/Garfield Heights border until I was half-way through Kindergarten, we moved to the suburbs in March of 1970. It was different overnight. Our apartment in Cleveland was part of a four-family house that my father owned. He continued to own it for the next 40 years. Now we had a spacious yard and a much larger house. Things were much more spread out and there was "elbow room." As my father still owned the other house and rented it out, I remember a few observations about the old neighborhood as the 1970s progressed.
The first was my observation that some people we rented to lived in squalor and didn't care at all for the hard work my father and we children did to fix the house up as best as possible. Although my father tried to rent to the best people possible (and there were some very nice people that lived in those apartments through the years), my most vivid memories were of those whom my father had to evict and who trashed the place, leaving us so much more clean-up to do. I couldn't believe that people would live this way. Secondly, I remember the deterioation of the neighborhood as more and more African-Americans moved in as more and more whites left. My father refused to rent to African-Americans and his explanation of why was evident in the deterioration I witnessed myself in the souteast side of Cleveland as the 1970s and 80s progressed.
Therefore, I was taught that African-Americans were no good. Since I had no positive experiences with them to say otherwise, I grew up with this prejudice. Keep in mind also that I grew up in the Parma-Seven Hills area, which is very ethnic Slovak, Polish, Ukrainian, Italian, etc. I had no African-American classmates in gradeschool or high school, and these prejudices were simply reinforced by the neighborhood and my classmates. Perhaps the most tragic expression of this was the only African-American I can remember from this time period. He was a grade school student about four grades behind he in school. All I remember was that he was an adopted child and that his family (white) had him baptized in front of the whole school. Unfortunately, the prejudice took over and everyone began to call him "nigger" Nelson, and to this day I cannot recall his first name. The tragedy was that he was only in the school for one year and was probably forced out by the prejudice that was rampant at that time.
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