Magical Realist said:
I don't think it's an indication of immaturity to be wounded or effected deeply by hate speech.
In the rural Pacific Northwest in the 1980s, there were plenty of defenses of ugly speech. I had an elementary school principal whose answer to racism was to tell our one African-American student and two Asian-American students that the solution to racism was to try harder to fit in.
And then he told the kids the story of a guy named Detlef Schrempf, who worked really hard to get rid of his German accent until people stopped making fun of him.
What he never explained to us is why anyone would pick a fight with a 6'10, 235 lb. white guy.
And the coming NBA contract didn't hurt, either.
But it never has made sense; I asked my dad if he remembered the episode, and he did. And then he told me a couple other stories, like the time the guy tanked the Little League All-Star team so he could take all his players; they didn't make it out of the county. But I do remember the time he assaulted one of his students during a baseball game; in those days, that kind of shit was acceptable, apparently.
Nobody ever did explain, though, why he picked a six-foot-ten white guy as his example of the oppressed, especially on the heels of a student being assaulted by several older, larger students.
In later years, I found out about our nasty, northwestern white supremacist movement, and yeah, it made sense. No wonder he picked an about-to-be-rich, outsized white guy as his example.
At least he didn't pick Conan the Barbarian.
Just
once I want to hear Conan do a Roseanne impersonation:
Fuck with me, Arsenio! I dare you!
You know, the flip side of that elementary school story is one I've told before. In the 1990s I lived in Oregon, and one of the Portland affiliates ran this story about local Asian-Americans going to extreme lengths to look white. Not just contact lenses and bleach jobs, but freaking plastic surgery and skin bleaching. Round the eyes, alter the cheekbones, sharpen the chin and nose, lighten the tone. And they used words like
shocking to describe the trend.
I don't know, maybe they found five people in the greater Portland area who did this.
However, we might call it any number of things.
Appalling comes to mind. But it was only
shocking to those who weren't paying attention. An entire generation of nonwhites was raised on the idea that all they had to do was try harder to fit in, and then the hatred would stop.
And when I was a kid, they always lectured minorities on how to be more like white guys nobody would fuck with.