Page 13 - Reflections on the Danger of a Single Story

Icome from a family of multiple religions—my mother is Catholic (nonpracticing) and my father is Jewish (actually quite religious). I now consider myself Jewish as I got a bat mitzvah in Israel as an adult, but I am nonpracticing, and I will ALWAYS celebrate (and decorate for and participate in) Christmas. As a child, I didn’t realize that everyone didn’t get to celebrate Chanukah and Christmas; that everyone else in my town was of a Christian denomination, and that my father was the ONLY Jewish person in our town. In elementary school, and even most of middle school, I never remember it being an issue. My mother (the Catholic) would come into my elementary school (and then again for my brother) to teach children about Chanukah. My close friends would come over for Passover and be told we wouldn’t be having any type of bread, but instead, gefilite fish, or cow tongue, or lox, or chicken liver—all things that were normal things that I ate, but no one else did. It wasn’t until high school that I felt what it was really like to be thought of as a single story.
In high school, while there were more Jewish people than had been in my elementary and middle schools, there still weren’t a lot—and I went to a high school of 2,500 students. As I started to make new friends, and date new boys, I began to see what it felt like to be different. For growing up in New Jersey, there was a lot of anti-Semitism in my high school. Certain people wouldn’t talk to me, certain boys wouldn’t date me. While this wasn’t the majority, it was something I had only ever heard about. I had never experienced discrimination. I had never been put into a single category that people couldn’t look away from. I don’t think I ever really talked about it with my Dad, because at the time, I felt ashamed and embarrassed. To this day, I am often still hesitant to tell certain people that I am Jewish, because I never know how people are going to react. And while it’s not so much that I’m worried about what people will think, but in today’s current political and racial climate, I’m more worried about what someone will do.
I have always worked with underserved, underprivileged children. I started my career as a teacher and then a counselor in Philadelphia. My first mental health counseling job was at night, after teaching all day, running groups for teenage boys who had adult felonies and straddled the worlds of formal education and incarceration. Almost all of my boys were of color, from rough neighborhoods in Philadelphia, and I will admit, I had many single stories about those boys as I began to meet them. I assumed these boys were violent, wouldn’t listen to a white woman (right away at least), and were awful students (from the ways they talked about their teachers). I ran 3 hour groups, 3 days a week with the same boys (sometimes new depending on who had been arrested and charged, but I had my core 10). These boys taught me more about myself and children than any teaching experience ever did (and probably ever will). These boys reminded me that they were just boys—not adults because of the color of their skin—not monsters because of the actions they took—but simply boys, who will always be targeted due to their skin color and the neighborhoods in which they come from. They did not feed into stereotypes, but were surviving and growing just like anyone else. Most of them had never had an adult listen to them, speak to them, and ask them for their opinions. These boys were used to being told they were disrespectful and dangerous. This single story is pervasive in our country, and it is killing young men of color at alarming rates. While I hate that I played into/believed that story of teenagers of color, I did. But those boys forever changed me, and I know that I forever changed them. (Sorry, that was a cliché ending, but, also very true.)
CARLY WEISEL