Do I need to feel shame or guilt about having been dragged, kicked, and beaten outside of Garfield High School as a teenager just because the incident does not fit into the Political Correctness of Seattle over the past 40 years?
Society blames the victims...
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Tell
The Stranger this:
I came out of the closet. I am coming out of the closet. I will come out of the closet.
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I was traumatized as a 15-year-old.
At Meany Middle School and at Garfield High School here in Seattle I was shoved, pummeled, kicked in the stomach, knocked to the ground, and once poked with umbrellas by roving bands of young African-Americans in the hallways, bathrooms, and grounds of the schools. No one came to our aid, the teachers being too concerned for their own physical safety and being obviously unprepared to deal with this kind of mass violence.
Other incidents of physical violence occurred, as well, not just to me but it happened to anyone who was not black. I did not fight back (I remember just curling up into an inert ball) but I was scared and unconsciously made a decision to do everything to avoid it happening to me again.
What happened to me probably happened to hundreds of thousands of students in junior and senior high schools across America, especially in cities with any sizable presence of African-Americans. Seattle, long considered "one of the whitest" of American cities (at least 85% then), experienced relatively "mild" race riots, what about Los Angeles, Houston, Detroit, Cleveland, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, etc.?
Though I've lost contact with classmates from that era, I did bump into the sister of one sibling's friends at a party a few years ago. She teaches in a middle school in Seattle and mentioned that she is teaching the children of black people who had beaten her up years ago.
At the downtown YMCA, for at least a couple of years, I was subjected to verbal and emotional abuse by members (strangers). Except for one instance, I did not report these incidents, thinking at the time that either nothing would be done or that instead of the perpetrators being identified and punished, I would be blamed.
Do I need to feel shame and/or guilt in addition to the pain already buried inside of me?
As long as society does not recognize or account for the scars left by these experiences, many, many Americans will have difficulty healing and dealing with the shame, pain, and guilt associated with those experiences. Through no fault of their own, they were subjected to terrible beatings. I think they continue to try to "atone" for things they were not responsible for (slavery, the second-class citizenship blacks experienced in the South).
It was if because their skin was not black, they (white, Asian...), they had to wear a badge of shame the rest of their lives, shackled and punished by "conscience." I would call these things undeserved guilt.
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Silencing the voices of those who have been damaged just because their voices do not reflect the political arrangements of the day is like depriving a child of his spontaneity, spontaneity the raison d'etre of having a life at all.
