Language Socialization

Warning: I'm in the middle of writing seminar papers and my brain is full of things I want to write but can't seem to get it on the page coherently. Writing a blog is a momentary break from the scholarly, but I fear the topic of this blog will encourage my nerdy-ness to emerge between the lines.

I'm writing two papers. One is on affirmative action rhetoric and the colorblind racism that contributes to such comments as, "Affirmative action is reverse racism because it dimishes the chances for white men." Um, you can't discount the continuing effects of historical inequities of white/nonwhite on social, political, and institutional levels. My other paper is about my ethnographic study on how racial scripts (the ways of talking about race that we are socialized in through our folks and teachers in childhood) inform our sense of positive/negative white racial identity formation. Basically, everything said around a child is formative. It shapes the way he makes meaning of the world and those within the world. It teaches him how to empathize, sympathize, understand, love, fight, care. Through our rhetoric children learn what we value and what we do not value, even if they are not privy to the why part of that value system. OK, so that is the context for the story to follow.

Turner and I walk out of school this afternoon. As we approach the truck the sprinkler system fires up on the lawn in front of Catalina. Turner's eyes dart to mine and before he asks I know what is to come. I know his moods, his quirks, his expressions, and can, with some accuracy, use these things to predict his next move. "Yes, Turner, you may run through the sprinkler." It was a day of good news and happiness and hard work on my paper. It was hot outside. It was the perfect opportunity to do something that my mom (and most others I know) never would have let me do. We grabbed hands and ran through the front yard of his school giggling and squealing as water soaked us both. People were coming out of the library across the street, tired parents were securing their children in car seats, and some of the faculty from Turner's school were scooting into their cars thankful it was Friday. And there I stood on the sidewalk, water puddling below my feet as I watched Turner full of delight and laughter running with his arms wide open, head thrown back, mouth hanging open. Most of the onlookers found our laughter contagious; what more could one ask for? I never would have done this in Lexington. I would have been afraid of someone seeing me or worried about what kind of crazy they might consider me to be. This afternoon, however, crazy seemed relative and our experiences have taught me that people here are inundated with difference such that they appreciate difference as simply different, rather than difference being not normal (or considered bad). When we got in the car and were heading home, I began to wonder what memory Turner would pull from this event and how that memory would encourage or discourage him in the future to be less cautious and more full of life.

Later at home, Turner and I sit down to our picnic dinner. He has a bite. I have a bite. I smile at him. He closes his eyes in that dramatic fashion and says, "Mom. Thank you for cooking such a delicious dinner." (It was scrambled eggs and vegetarian sausage...fried). I smiled very big and realized that Turner, in the absence of Andy, always compliments my cooking. Sitting at the dinner table with his two parents, listening to one compliment the other, has socialized him to see this as appropriate, perhaps even necessary, first-of-dinner conversation. After we got the cordials out of the way, Turner and I moved into our next discourse of what did you do today and what did you learn today, where we both share our experiences. This process is more than a habit. It is an exchange that Turner has learned and will replicate at other dinner tables because it will seem "normal" to him. We have socialized him to expect more from the dinner table than just dinner, and I am SO grateful to share in that each night. More so, I am very grateful for the happiness it will extend into his family someday when he has one. The favorite times of my childhood are sitting at the lake eating semi-soggy sandwiches, munching potato chips and hearing my dad say to my mom, "Good lunch Mom." Come to think of it, there were many dinners where the women talked and my dad said little more than "Good dinner Mom" as he pushed his plate to the center of the table. The dinner conversation of our (Andy and I) table blends nicely that disourse of the Klapheke household and the Wray household. I figure there was a lot of talk across the Klapheke table about things that may have seemed grown up (politics, for example) where adults and kids shared their days with one another. My childhood table was filled with family news (who had died, who had what in their garden, what girl drama I had to look forward to in eight years) and compliments about good food. Turner benefits equally from these legacies, and I am silenced by the amount of things Andy and I know, understand, and believe that no one ever explicitly taught us; we just came into knowing these things based upon the language that filled our ears as kids. I can only hope that Turner is able to decipher the good from the bad, omitting that which we did not intend and clinging to that which is inclusive, sympathetic, and beneficial.