316. "Suppose the trash happens to be a minority?"

I had, in my last post, justified "trash" as a shorthand judgment of a group of people.  Yes, it was hasty and inaccurate but under the constraints of daily life understandable and surely forgivable.  Judgments that are necessary — as to a parent obliged to warn — should not be condemned as signs of prejudice.  The word "bigots," as used by Harper Lee in Go Set a Watchman for the group she sees her father associating with is in the same class as "trash."  Both Lee and the parents are being as accurate as, under the circumstances, they can be.

I think it was accepted that calling people a bad name like "trash" would, as with any number of bad names — "barbarians," "savages," "racists," "primitives," "decadents" — hurt their reputation and, if they heard it, hurt their feelings.  Hurtful, but given the alternative, acceptable as a necessary price.  Forego it and you'll have a child descending into — whatever.  And you won't be any help to other parents, who, unable to make a study (no personal trip down to the Roller Rink), are guided by reputation.  Yes, "reputation," that gossip-stained, stereotype-making thing to which, in the hurly-burly of parenthood there is, as so often in the daily world, no alternative. 

In Norwood, a lily-white suburb, the Roller Rink was frequented by a white sub-group, kids who had "gone wild," children whose parents had let them go wild.  That is, parents who, it was assumed, weren't worried about a child getting, or getting another child, pregnant, and so not being able to go to college and having to settle for a job in the dime store.  Good parents identified the hazard with one word.

Now comes this seminarist with the question, "Suppose the trash happens to be a minority?"  You know, not a white sub-group but a real minority. 

That's moving the challenge into college.  "Adjust vocabulary as necessary.   At a minimum identify the forces at work.  Allow thirty minutes for the question."  In the street it's likely to be, "Why do you hold back your freely used bad name when you get to blacks?"  Which is exactly what I did in Post 311 when I couldn't bring myself to connect blacks with the gangsta rap I was calling "barbaric."  From further down the street I hear, "Why are you such a wimp?  Trash is trash."  An equal-opportunity human category.

I will begin at the lower end of the street.  "I am a wimp because I am a graduate of the Good Shepherd Episcopal Sunday School, the last place you could ever use derogatory words about a group."  Respect for every  human soul reigned in that Sunday School as respect for skill reigned on the ball field.  As, I think, it reigned, or came close, in other Norwood Sunday schools.  Children in Norwood, if they wanted their Sunday-school teachers to respect them, had to be careful not to hurt the weak and vulnerable.  They had to speak lovingly.

And why am I still unhappy after I hold back the bad name and have my Sunday school teachers thinking well of me? Because I am a graduate and postgraduate of an American university who wants his teachers there to respect him.  For that I have to speak accurately.  Trash is trash, shirt-tails are out, and hazards are hazards.  Determine it carefully, say it without fear or favor.

There's the mischief in the seminarist's question.  Minorities are weak and vulnerable.  Introduce them into the equation  and your calm at the blackboard is shattered.  How can I come out with the respect of both sets of my former teachers?

You can think of my problem as the problem of the American liberal but I think that's too confining.  It's the problem of a host of American citizens wanting the best for their country.  And it's worthy of debate by our most careful thinkers.  How, at this time, can the need to speak accurately be reconciled with the need to speak lovingly?