Posted by Rick Denney on July 05, 2000 at 08:30:50:
In Reply to: Re: Re: Re: Re: popularizing the tuba posted by Rick on July 04, 2000 at 23:47:32:
As a native of Texas, but having done engineering projects in Georgia, Florida, and Virginia (my current home), as well as about 35 other states, I can say with some certitude that they are all different. In fact, Northern Virginia is about as different from Southern Virginia as is Anahuac, Texas is from Dallas.
In Texas, I saw plenty of racial influences. In Houston, where I grew up, they were based on the rift between blacks and whites. In San Antonio, where I lived for six years, they were based on the rift between Hispanics and Anglos. Here in Northern Virginia, it's more between the landed gentry class and the tenant class. But in Baltimore, solidly Northern and proud of it, the racial boundaries are drawn as sharply as in Macon, Georgia, and the expression of those boundaries is far more belligerent.
Most people have a component to their psyche that makes them need someone to look down on, if for no other reason to be sure they are not at the bottom themselves. This is not one of the better aspects of the Human Malady, but it is nearly universal, crossing all boundaries of race and class. Sometimes this need turns into racism, sometimes into snobbishness, but only a very few overcome it entirely.
A fellow tubist in San Antonio was the band director for an inner-city high school. He was Anglo, but the school was predominantly Hispanic. The biggest problems he had were not because of the Hispanic cultural differences, but because of the attitude of defeat and low expectations that accompanied the lower economic circumstances of the students. He also taught for a while at a middle-class mostly Hispanic high school in another part of the city, and that school was another world altogether.
Cultural differences are real. Plenty of white people play jazz beautifully, but it would not exist but for the cultural differences in the African-American community. Plenty of anglos can play a latin beat like a native, but wouldn't have had examples to follow without fabulous Hispanic players leading the way. And wasn't Velvet Brown expressing differences in her cultural background when she included gospel spirituals on her CD?
We need to learn how to celebrate and explore the cultural differences without using them as an excuse for not striving for excellence. But, as long as people need to know there is someone beneath them on whatever hierarchy is important to them, it will remain an ideal never fully realized. The only solution is to take the chip off our shoulders, and defuse the situation by refusing to engage battle in the first place. This can only happen one person at a time.
Rick "The opinions expressed herein are not necessarily yours" Denney