A good weekend all around. We went to see Venus last night; Peter O’Toole was indeed as terrific as advertised. I enjoyed the film more than my wife did; as hostile as I generally am to older men-younger women romances, I bought the challenging, often squirm-inducing aspects of the story. And I appreciated that it was surprisingly unsentimental.
I’m thinking this morning about handshakes, perhaps because I dreamt about them last night.
Actually, I’m thinking less about handshakes and more about manners. I grew up in a family in which manners were very much part of our civil religion. “A gentleman always makes other people feel comfortable” was a central maxim of my childhood. There was a good deal more about making others feel relaxed and welcomed than there was about “standing up for the truth”. Our kind of people could hold a wide variety of views on religious and political matters, but OKOP always were raised to master the social graces. (My dear uncle Stanley, a noted Communist and philosopher whose work is still widely read, regularly went to meetings of the radical left dressed impeccably in a Brooks Brothers suit. He could betray his class, but not his upbringing — if that makes any sense.)
In my childhood, we were regularly told that “if you have good manners, you can go anywhere.” My grandmother told us that a gentleman (or a lady) should be able to have tea with the Queen in Buckingham Palace; a gentleman or a lady should feel equally at home on a stool in a dive bar in the Mission District. “If you have lovely manners”, she told us, “you can go anywhere and fit right in.” (I’ve sat on a lot of barstools in my nearly forty years. I still await my invitation from Her Majesty, but my grandmother’s point is well-taken.)
I think manners popped into my head because I was also thinking about race, particularly after reading this article in yesterday’s paper about interracial relationships on television. It’s an interesting piece about the ways in which the current crop of television depictions of interracial romances tend to minimize or even ignore some of the very real pitfalls that such relationships can present.
I’m married to a woman who is of mixed ancestry; she can “pass” for white, black, or Hispanic. Our children, when they are born, will be a glorious mix: indigenous Colombian, Jewish, English, Scots-Irish, Croatian, Nigerian, German, Flemish, Welsh, Czech, Spanish. And I can’t help but wonder whether or not they will they will appear “white”. My love, of course, is not conditional on race or appearance. But I know that we live in a world where perceptions about race can still be very powerful. I know that we live in a world where “blackness” is still charged with significance. And I know that if my children appear to be black, they may face a certain set of obstacles in the world that they will not face if they more closely resemble their European heritage.
What does this have to do with manners? In my family (which was entirely white in my childhood, much less so now), we were told again and again that “if you have good manners, people will welcome you anywhere you go.” I’ve been to five continents and most corners of this country, and I’m happy to say that my grandmother’s words have proved true. But I also know that folks around the globe notice my pale blue eyes before they notice my manners. I have had friends very close to me whose skin is darker than mine and whose easy graciousness surpasses my own. They have not always had the welcomes I have had.
I will teach my children many of the lessons I learned. We will work on chewing with the mouth closed; we will learn to master increasingly complex table settings. We will learn that the key to good party manners is not being interesting, but being interested. We will definitely devote several hours to handshake instruction, teaching that firm, polite grip that avoids the twin disasters of the “dead fish” or the “bonecrusher.” And if they’re like their father was, my children will find the lessons boring and exasperating at the time they are taught; they will come to be immensely grateful for them. And oh God, how I hope that they will live in a world where whatever their outer appearance, those manners will serve them well and cause them to be welcomed wherever they go.
And just maybe, they’ll get invited to Buckingham Palace.
Good post, but I was hoping it would be about polite behavior at running events.
Seriously, the interpretation of “manners” can cause problems. When I was in college (yes, they had electricity), the black students (see, it was a long time ago) complained to me, as the chair of the student government’s student groups committee, that the white students never said “hello” as they passed. This was interpreted as a racial slight.
Interestingly, most of the white students didn’t say “hello” to anyone as they walked by, unless they knew them fairly well. What was interpreted as a racial put-down was simply a matter of different cultural norms — most whites at the university were from the north, while most blacks were from the south.
The blacks felt that whites should change and say “hello” to the black students to prove the snubs weren’t racially motivated. The blacks refused to say “hello” first, to possibly instigate a cultural change. They wanted to wait and find out if the whites were racist. They actually said that. When I brought this problem to my Black Studies instructor, he simply shook his head and got this really depressed look on his face.
I never solved the problem. Even after the Association of Black Students invited IVCF to co-host an event, I couldn’t get IVCF to work with the ABS. ABS: “Hi! We want you to try to evangelize us!” IVCF: “We’ll pray about it and when God sends a fiery pillar to tell us what to do, we’ll call you to let you know.” Ok, no one quite said it that way, but they should have. It would have been more honest.
My tenure as committee chair was not one of the great moments in student government. And I’m not bitter at all.
And yes, I took several classes in the Black Studies department while having no idea I had a sub-saharan African background. Weird.
My sister and I are the children of a northern european man and a nearly full-blood native american woman.
I can tell you that your fears are totally justified, and I’m sorry to do that. My sister and I inherited many of the same traits - thick black hair that depressingly falls straight no matter what we do, black eyebrows that are nigh unto untameable, a low tolerance for alcohol, rich throaty tenor voices… but what we don’t share is the same skin tone.
Oh - I do tan much darker than one would expect for how pale I am. If I spend enough time outside, I turn quite caramel colored - but my aversion to skin cancer and northern local generally prevent this. On the other hand, my sister spends all of her time the color of my darkest tan - and since we both have those other colors - dark eyes (although mine are green and hers almost ink colored), black hair and eyebrows - most people assume she is hispanic. To the point that her school district has assigned her ESL kids because the principal assumed she was bilingual. She has gotten alot of shit about being a “traitor” because she doesn’t speak spanish.
On the other hand, mostly I have to deal with people telling me how much prettier I would be if I’d just get a tan, because with all that dark hair I just don’t look “healthy.” Or I get people who assume I’m dying it that dark to go for the goth look.
And yeah - more than once, we’ve definitely gotten different treatment when we go out shopping - together. It always surprises the fuck out of people when I tell them that the person they were just being an ass to is my sister. Which proves to me they aren’t looking beyond skin color, because we actually look alot alike.
We will definitely devote several hours to handshake instruction, teaching that firm, polite grip that avoids the twin disasters of the “dead fish” or the “bonecrusher.”
Well, they’ll end up hurting a lot of people’s hands unintentionally if they go to many places in Southeast Asia - the “dead fish” shake is actually the preferred method, and it’s a bonus if one places the shaken hand to his or her heart.
The point is this - one also has to be open to other possibilities of what exactly constitutes “good manners” in some cultural/social context. I think one truly has impeccable manners if one can easily adapt in any cultural context, even if some of the larger-scale societal manners conflict with one’s own personal manners.
Ed writes:
I think one truly has impeccable manners if one can easily adapt in any cultural context, even if some of the larger-scale societal manners conflict with one’s own personal manners.
Absolutely agreed. Thanks, Rob and Magikmama, for the stories.
FYI - Hugo, you might want to let whoever updates links at feministing know that they need to update yours.
I’m an east coast Jew. When I moved to Idaho, I left my house one morning and the neighbor said “Hello!” I was immediately suspicious. Where I came from, the only reason to address a stranger like that would be if you suspected him of coming into your neighborhood to sell drugs. I’d meet people who pumped my hand and gushed like a used car salesman, and I’d think, “Have I done something to offend you?”
Among Jews, when a person is too formal, it indicates to us that he is not showing the respect of speaking plainly. One is polite to one’s enemies, one’s competitors, ones ex-girlfriends. Politeness says “I will be civil with you, but you are not my friend.” Informality, with a touch of downright rudeness, “shut the damn door!” “Are going to take all day with that?” indicates that I regard you as being close. This is the way we treat family, after all.
Actually though, I get on fine with East Coast WASPS: they are formal, but they have an easy going friendliness and a dry sence of humor. But then I grew up among WASPS.
Southerners though…To this day I have terrible problems with southerners. I KNOW intellectually that it is simply cultural differences, but I can’t help feeling that they are laughing at me behind their obseqious veneer.
ON THE OTHER HAND….
Israelis….Israelis are like American Jews on steriods. They have NO manners. They defend their ways, the same way I just did…that familiarity is friendliness. But to me, they take it too far.
What works in one culture may not work in another!
As a person who lived in GA and SC, I can tell you: they are laughing at you, more than likely.
I read this post and the article because I’m interested in the race issues, but I also find the discussion of regional differences in manners very fascinating.
I grew up in poor all white area of southern Ohio, then moved to Michigan for undergrad, northern Ohio for Masters, Connecticut for PhD, and now NYC metro area for first job. The differences in regional manners is striking, and I may never get used to New York. I frequently find people’s behavior offensive, especially the tremendous lack of pleases and thank yous.
Joe’s earlier point also reminds me of some of the ethnic variations correlated with region a large percentage of my co-workers and students are Italian and a sizeable minority are Jewish, and I think there are some manners differences that I may not be understanding. I also worry that I am developing ethnic stereotypes from these encounters, and that really troubles me because I often have a hard time distinguishing between regional differences and ethnic differences. For example, a couple of my Jewish co-workers frequently bond over whining about horrible their lives are. Their lives are really not bad in my view, but it’s almost like a formal sort of greating between them. There are others who do the same thing, so I’m not trying to insinuate that it is a Jewish thing. But I can figure out this phenomenon at all–is it regional; is it ethnic; is it something else. Hardy working class/middle class midwestern people absolutely do not do this; it is really rude to do this. I have even had a few run ins with my boss over issues that I think may be regional or something of this nature. For example, he made a joke one time that I didn’t find funny. When I first got to the job, I lost three of my grandparents. I was talking about this much later, and he said, “what happened did they die in a hunting accident?” Then he started laughing at his joke, and smiled and said, no that’s not funny, but being the ass that he was being he didn’t understand my point.
I’ll write a more detailed response about the race issues over at my site because this is my subject area anyways, and I got side tracked.
For example, a couple of my Jewish co-workers frequently bond over whining about horrible their lives are. Their lives are really not bad in my view, but it’s almost like a formal sort of greating between them. There are others who do the same thing, so I’m not trying to insinuate that it is a Jewish thing.
That’s definitely a Jewish thing! There’s a widely held superstition in the Middle East and Eastern Europe that if “you praise something it breaks”. This goes back to the belief in the evil eye…that if somebody looks at you with envy it will harm you. To brag about one’s good fortune is to invite envy and thus disaster.
If you ask a Jew how he is doing, he’ll usually respond “not bad” or “can’t complain”. This is also really weird in the Pacific Northwest…many times I’d say “not bad” and people would look surprised and say “bad?”. Its as if theyve never heard anybody respond that way.
Most modern Jews of course don’t beleive this intellectually, but its deeply ingrained. When I read about the evil eye, I was like “OMG, I’ve never heard about this, but my whole life I’ve been acting as if it were true.”
I should be careful what I say, but this thread is explaining some things about the whole “They don’t say ‘hello’” issue at my university.
In which case, some people may be able to guess which midwestern university I went to! Oy vey!
This may be neither here nor there, but when I read the linked article I had to really rack my brains to think of which couple in Lost is mixed-race (and I’m a Lost devotee). I guess they did a good job of making skin colour irrelevant in that story line.
I suppose the minimizing is a reaction to earlier story lines which were all about the race angle, a thing that’s sort of like having your set of male characters and your female character who is defined by being “the girl.” And, sometimes it makes sense to downplay skin color in a particular story line. Such as, for example, Jurassic Park II, the one movie I saw criticized for doing that, but where I think it made sense: when huge dinosaurs are running around destroying LA, who’s going to bother to ask the white guy if his black daughter is adopted, etc.? But of course over time, the barriers are still there.
I once went on a road trip with three Jewish friends (Texas Jews actually..yes they exist!) and they spent the whole time kvetching about every little thing, every inconvenience, every imperfect moment. To my somewhat southern sensibilities (Texas isn’t the Deep South, after all) their behavior struck me as almost unutterably rude and joy-erasing. (The southern way is, after all, to say nothing if’n you ain’t got nuthin nice to say).
After awhile I did figure out that it was an habitual behavior, at least, they weren’t as unhappy as they SOUNDED. But these were people I was already friends with…I can’t imagine how I would have felt about their manners had they been strangers.