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You've got to be carefully taught

The musical, "South Pacific", earned a Pulitzer Prize for Drama
in 1950, in the same year in which Eatonville High School
awarded me a graduation certificate that I had not earned. 

Yesterday, Mari and I went to the Ordway Theater in St. Paul
to see the new Lincoln Theater Production of Rodgers and
Hammerstein's gorgeous and powerful story of racial prejudice
set in World War II.  Nellie, a military nurse from Alabama,
fell in love with Emile, but turned away from him when she learned
that he had two children from his marriage to a native woman.
She could not overcome what she had learned, all her life,
about racial intermarriage.  At the same time, Lieutenant Joe
Cable, turned his back on a Tonkinese girl, for essentially
the same reasons.  In a meeting between the two men, Joe
said that racism is not born in people.  It happens, he said,
after you are born.  It is something you learn.

Then he sang, "You've got to be carefully taught".

You've got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You've got to be taught
From year to year,
It's got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,
You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

Yeah.  It is something you have to learn
from your family, and friends, and community. 

Where, do you suppose, the people who paint Nazi signs
for Tea Party rallies learned to hate like that?  Why is it
that so much ill-disguised racial hatred shows up with
Barack Obama's face on their signs?  People learned it,
not from their enemies, but from their family, and friends,
and community.  You have to be carefully taught.

Do you really believe that what is happening in Arizona,
right now, with a law that pretends it is protecting us from
crime and drugs and low wages is about crime and drugs?
No.  You have to be carefully taught to be afraid
of people whose skin is a diff'rent shade:  you have to be
carefully taught. 

Joe Cable was killed in the story of "South Pacific". 
Emile de Becque survived their dangerous expedition. 
Nellie Forbush learned that she had learned to hate,
and that Ngana and Jerome were children; just children.
Ngana and Jerome sang a children's song, in French:

Dites-moi, pourquoi la vie est belle
Dites-moi, pourquoi la vie est gaie
Dites-moi pourquoi, chere mademoiselle
Est-ce que, parce que
Vous m'aimez?

It translates something like this: 

Tell me why life is beautiful
Tell me why life is gay
Tell me why, my dear lady
Is it because
You love me?

It is.  You learn that, too.

Comments

  1. Conrad RøyksundNovember 22, 2010 at 7:46 PM

    I do not know who found this posting, after all these months, but I hope that, in reading it, you, too, know how carefully we have been taught. Thank you!

    ReplyDelete

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