On November 24, 2020, on Jimmy Kimmel's TV show, James Taylor performed a song from the 1949 musical "South Pacific," "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught":
This was a daring song in its time, Wikipedia notes:
[The song was] judged by some to be too controversial or downright inappropriate for the musical stage. Sung by the character Lieutenant Cable, the song is preceded by a line saying racism is "not born in you! It happens after you’re born..."...
James Michener, upon whose stories South Pacific was based, recalled, "The authors [of the musical, Rodgers and Hammerstein] replied stubbornly that this number represented why they had wanted to do this play, and that even if it meant the failure of the production, it was going to stay in."
I love James Taylor — the warmth, the non-corny sincerity — and I don't know why he selected that song from the set of things he put on his "American Standard" album. The album came out November 1, 2020, and the performance was shortly after the election. I imagine the choice had something to do with the idea that Americans had just voted out a President who, for many people, embodied a message of racial hatred.
But YouTube pushed it at me the other day, as I was reading about recent efforts to teach young children about racism and thinking how sad — how immoral — it was to be teaching children that they are hated, that they are repositories of hate, and that you need to understand — whether you can see it yet are not — that this is a world of hate.
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 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
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4 comments:
Amadeus 48 writes:
My nephew, born in 1984, saw a revival of South Pacific about 15 years ago and thought, what’s the big deal? She loves him, he loves her, and there are a bunch of cute kids. He went through school before the current mania for dividing us all up because there are the oppressors and the oppressed. My nephew would have to be carefully taught to be anti-racist, I guess.
The Wikipedia discussion of Michner’s Tales from the South Pacific makes it all a bit rawer, with Emile having cohabited with many native women and fathered many daughters, some of whom were a bit —ahem— darker than others, which proved to be a challenge for Nellie, from rural Arkansas. But it is a challenge she overcame in her own benighted way and they lived happily ever after. She had to be taught to judge people by the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin, I guess.
You think something is a problem only of the distant past, but it can come back.
Lloyd writes:
"The words imply the default or natural setting for human beings is freedom from hate and fear of others. I would think there's very little evidence of that. The proliferation of languages was a way of making distinctions, sometimes subtle distinctions, with the people across the river, reinforcing hatred and fear of them. Poets and religions keep promising to reveal what unites us all, and allows for love or at least acceptance. Show business people talk as though they are spreading love. Maybe you can see different people as more or less the same if you add a sentimental, distorting filter. Disney and the movie Avatar. As I understand it, in Avatar the warrior from earth is a better or more ruthless fighter than the blue people, so they need him for a while. A mercenary killer. In order to be with the blue woman he loves, and live on her planet, he has to change somehow into a blue person, so he can never go back to being an earthling. This I think is the real direction of progressive politics: not to love human beings as they are, but to wish they were entirely different, and foster some dream of escaping the planet with all its problems. The great thinkers seem to be remarkably free from bigotry, but whatever victory of reason they might achieve is not the default for human beings. Something like hunter-gatherer cunning is the default. Socrates may have had more of a cheerful acceptance of people as they are than almost anyone has ever had."
Temujin writes:
This was always one of my favorite plays. (and a good movie). It also gave us "There is nothing like a dame', which I still sing in my head and chuckle about how the times have changed (I never sing it out loud), 'A cockeyed optimist', "I'm gonna wash that man right outa my hair' and so many other wonderful and/or beautiful songs. I miss theater like that.
Which is why I have a difficult time swallowing the shallow sounding musicals we're served up today.
Taylor, I'm sure, was making a statement. But James Taylor has a lifelong pass in my book. He's given me too many years of great music, music that meant a lot at a given time, for me to cancel him for his political views. Springsteen, yes. Taylor, no.
MikeR writes:
"You've got to be taught to hate and fear". Good song, but: Would that it were true. Hate and fear of the Other is genetic and real. You've got to be taught to be civilized. That's why almost none of humanity was civilized till recently, and why when we find enclaves of native peoples they are frequently conscienceless murderers of outsiders.
It's the part of it that's taught that is most reprehensible and that we have the most power and obligation to change. To say it's *all* taught is to impose heavy blame on everyone who hasn't risen above it.
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