My Children's World

I haven’t been blogging recently because of deadlines, but I read an article today that I thought was worth chewing over. It is entitled, The Curse of Chief Wahoo.

To begin: 

BACKGROUND POINT #1:  Anyone who has bothered reading my blog will already have figured out that I am a U.S. citizen of European decent. In other words, I’m so white, I’m practically transparent. My own diversity comes from the sheer quantity of different countries to which I can trace my lineage (I will spare you the enumeration). My children, on the other hand, have a lot more on their genetic plate, so to speak. In addition to the European Caucasia-palooza that I have passed on to them, they also have Mexican, Nicaraguan, and Native American bloodlines.

BACKGROUND POINT #2:  I currently live in Cleveland, Ohio, where baseball is a favorite sport and where the local team is the Cleveland Indians. The team’s logo is Chief Wahoo.

So that’s the background.

I am the first to admit that I didn’t always understand why Native Americans bothered to protest Chief Wahoo every year on Opening Day. I honestly didn't think it was a big deal. But then, when I was younger, I did not differentiate between races or creeds. I had never been taught that there were any differences between people based on the color of their skin or their cultural heritage. 

I was wrong. There ARE differences. The most glaring difference is that as an educated, middle-class white girl, I had no appreciation for what it felt like to be on the receiving end of another person's prejudice.

I never had to worry about being discriminated against when I was growing up. It was the 1970s and, while women were certainly still fighting for equal treatment, my own mother was a successful professional. Whatever the reality was for the rest of the nation, in my house, my gender was not a limiting factor. 

I was raised in the religion that was most dominant in my neighborhood. Even in my extended family, everyone was one version of Christian or another, so the concept of religious persecution was completely foreign to me.

Further, my family was financially comfy without being wealthy, so while I played with friends from both poorer and richer backgrounds, there was nothing to prompt me to notice one way or another.

In other words, my ignorance on the subject of discrimination stemmed directly from my ignorance of prejudice itself.

Of course, as I grew older, my innocence got banged up a bit and I eventually realized that there were some whack-jobs out there who really did think that skin color or gender or sexuality or religion were perfectly legitimate reasons to judge, hate, and even kill another person. I was completely flummoxed by this, and honestly still am.

Here’s what happened:

First, I befriended a girl in grammar school who was picked on mercilessly. She came from a particularly poor background, and our spoiled suburban classmates constantly tormented her for her lack of designer clothing and general polish.

Then, a boy in my class told me I was stupid because I was a girl. I must say that my reaction was not particularly mature, but he did eventually get off the floor and stop crying. Two words: saddle shoes.

Next, my teenage years brought me my first close friendships with people from non-Christian backgrounds. This marked the first time that my assumptions about religion were really challenged, but it was generally a very kind and gentle process, if occasionally a bit awkward.

I went on to college and eventually brought home a cute Hispanic boy to meet my parents. He was sweet and played guitar and sang me love songs in Spanish and was everything I hadn’t known I had been looking for, so I married him. 

Not long after we brought home our first baby from the hospital, I had one of those defining moments when everything shifts. After observing a group of Hispanic men walk past, an acquaintance of mine turned to me and said, “I hate Mexicans.”

Blink. Blink. What?

Excuse me - that’s MY CHILD you just spewed blind hatred at!

So back to Chief Wahoo.

It’s just a baseball team logo. Does it matter enough to make a fuss over? 

In the article, Marjorie Villafane, a Sioux, is quoted as saying: "I'm here so my grandchildren can be proud of their heritage. People act like we're trying to take their baseball away from them, but we're not. It's just, why do they have to turn us into Chief Wahoo?"

Here’s what I have to say about this: 

It absolutely matters.

Chief Wahoo is a logo. It is a marketing gimmick. It is used for entertainment purposes. It could be replaced.

My children are unique and wonderful. They are human beings who have the innate right to feel proud of their heritage. They are individuals who deserve to have their bloodlines treated with the same respect as any others. They ABSOLUTELY deserve not to be judged negatively for the color of their skin or their cultural heritage. And what my children deserve is what all children deserve – the chance to grow up and learn about your family background and feel proud of where you come from.

As pretty much the entire planet has realized by now, there are MANY, MANY, MANY things wrong with prevailing attitudes in the United States. One of those things is the sad truth that a cartoon created to promote a group of overpaid men in tights who hit balls with wooden sticks is seen as more important than an entire population of indigenous people who only want to see their children walk tall. And that makes so little sense that I can’t even begin to reason it out.

I'm sad that I have to raise my children in a world in which they will be valued less than a baseball mascot. All I can do to fight that, however, is to raise my boys to change the world and hope that my children's world will someday be a better place.

Momma says I'm more important than baseball.

More of a Project Pony than a Plot Bunny

So I have gotten nothing accomplished recently. This is very frustrating for me, since I had planned to have taken over at least a portion of the world by now.

Since my world domination plans need to be readjusted, I thought I’d take a few minutes to write another blog post.

The reason I am so behind schedule is simple. If David Tennant had had the decency to be a lousy Doctor Who, then I wouldn’t have gotten sucked in to watching the last six seasons on Netflix. My children then got sucked in themselves because they’re nosy little things who always have to know what I’m watching; in the interest of family togetherness, I was practically forced to watch all six seasons all over again with them at their insistence. Then we started watching the classic series from my childhood. My youngest son has named Tom Baker the “Disco Doctor,” and my teenager is completely appalled at what passed for special effects back in the day.

We all loved Christopher Eccleston, of course, but it was David Tennant who really captured my boys’ hearts. Of course, he compounded this sin by being charming in interviews, witty on British television programs, and having the audacity to continue acting in other roles in a generally talented and engaging manner. So, David, if you’re out there – my schedule is shot to hell, and it is entirely your fault. Hang your head in shame.

One of the programs Mr. Tennant did as part of his evil campaign to turn my calendar into an absolute mess was called “Who Do You Think You Are?” His bit was “So You Think I’m Scottish?” This program interested me for several reasons, the first being that I dearly love a good story, and generally you get a good story if you dig into your family background as he was doing. It was also an excellent way to teach my boys a bit about their own heritage and give them a sense that they are here today because of the countless choices and challenges in their ancestors’ lives.

What grabbed my interest in particular when watching this program was the idea that what we consider “history” really happened to people and that events like the Clearances in Scotland, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and countless other significant points in time that we study at school directly impacted who we were destined to become. For example, had my own ancestors not been religious dissenters, they would not have hopped on the Mayflower. Who would I have been then? Well, that's easy - I would never have existed, since the intermarriage between other nationalities that has gone on in my family tree since we set foot on Plymouth Rock would never have happened. In fact, I have so many different nationalities in my background that my children tend to refer to my side of the family as simply “European.” At any rate, when you look back at a specific person from your family tree and learn about who they were and what their life was like, it brings their humanity into sharp relief, and you begin to see them as a fully three-dimensional human being, which in turn gives you unexpected insight into the person you are.

So I was thinking about this in terms of my writing and the creation of fully-actualized characters. I do become impatient with books that give the protagonists one central idea that motivates and informs all of their decisions and actions throughout the story; to me, that seems to be over-simplifying how people work. If writers could “discover” their characters in much the same way we learn about our ancestors through research and legwork, I think that it would make for much more dramatic and believable characterizations. I know that all writers work differently, and so I can only speak for myself. Generally, I will get a plot idea and develop it in my head before creating characters to fill the various necessary roles within the story. But what would happen if I constructed the person before I constructed the plot? How would that impact the finished book?

One of my cousins has suggested that I should write the story of our family, particularly that of our grandparents. I have shied away from tackling this project in the past because I really could not figure out how to even begin, but now that rascally David Tennant has given me an idea. As my fellow novelists know, an idea is a very, very dangerous thing in an imaginative mind. I have some other pieces that are currently in progress and must be completed, but once those are taken care of, I am considering tackling a new project based on the idea of a story driven entirely by history rather than characters bending to the will of the plot. I think this might make for an interesting string of blog entries as well. Guess we’ll have to wait and see! If it results in anything worth publishing, I’ll have to dedicate it to Mr. Tennant.

That little troublemaker.