Tolerance!!!

Yes, it’s true, I’m a private school brat; I even went to a private play school as a toddler. While I know I was lucky to have received such an exclusive education during my formative years, I have to admit a great deal of what was impressed upon me was often confusing and anxiety-laden. Aside from history, arithmetic and art classes, I found that an exorbitant amount of time was spent on preening the student body to be tolerant, accepting and peace-keeping—us predominately white, rich children—working toward creating a utopian social bubble in which racism, classism, gender and sexual orientation are no longer pressing social issues. And as wonderful as all this idealism is, I often wondered then, as I frequently wonder now, whether all this insistence on tolerance really did any good.

My high school was hysterical about being ethnically diverse, in mind, but not in enrollment statistics; at least half of our curriculum was geared towards discussions and focus groups to try and locate any aroma of hatred or anti-communal attitudes.

But when all the lectures were over and class had ended for the day, true feelings would reveal themselves, and the social issues we were encouraged to overlook often surfaced. For all of their insistence and hysteria and anxiety, did it stop a boy in my class from telling an African American student to “go back to the jungle” during math class? Did it ever make it possible for the handful of gay and lesbian students to have a gay/straight alliance without the threat of ridicule? Did it save me from nearly being pushed down a flight of stairs by four boys because of something as ridiculous as my musical taste? No. Because if you asked anyone, violence, anger and hate did not exist within those four walls, and—of course—who was I to tread on utopia?

Most bullies got off relatively free; a slap on the wrist was all, and then back to another reinforcing lecture on tolerance and diversity. Real punishment meant an undesirable reputation for the school, and a possible loss of enrollment funds, and so it was this attitude that allowed the unconscious to triumph over all they had enthusiastically taught us earlier. It would seem that a combination of affluence and privilege with social education produces a lot of people who feel entitled to being better than everybody else, and who ultimately are brilliant in their performance of reading from a very well-written script. We did not learn how to be better people. We simply were instructed on the correct way to be white.

Learning how to love your fellow man is an important and wonderful thing, and I wish it was so easily learned, especially by those that seem to have everything. But one must be conscious of those you are educating. Façades are the simplest things in the world to put on, and when the day is done, most kids become shadows of their parents rather than their educators. It was our responsibility to learn how to be social guardians and peace-keepers, or at the least behave in a like manner, but this was a mask I simply didn’t have the energy to wear so arbitrarily. A love of community is far too precious to be wasted on false conviction.

illustration by Amanda Sukenick

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