“Ms. M you hella fake!” Madai, one of my students, keeps informing me. I frown in confusion and ask what she means. “You know,” she tells me, “you gotta be real with us.”
I don’t know. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I forget about it, actually, until I hear the same word from one of my colleagues. “We’re being fake,” he says. “We need to be real.” Be real? I still have no idea what that means.
It’s not until I’m driving Sammy, another student, up to Berkeley to meet Geoffrey Canada that someone explains it to me in a way I understand. We’re talking about the different ways we talk to people as we pass a beat up old car. It’s rusting out and has broken headlights, and were it not for duct tape, it would dissolve into pieces on the road.
“Say your friend was driving that car,” I tell Sammy. “What would you say to him?”
“Man, your car’s a piece of crap,” he responds matter-of-factly. At my look of surprise he continues, “Isn’t that what you would say?”
“I’d say it’s interesting. I grew up in the Midwest. That’s what we say when something’s godawful but we’re too polite to mention it. Why would you just up and tell him like that?”
“Because he’s my friend. If he goes out with that car, he’s gonna get humiliated. I better tell him now so he doesn’t get hurt later.”
This exchange sticks with me as he gets his book signed and poses for pictures. I’d encouraged him to think of a question to ask Mr. Canada, who founded the Harlem Children’s Zone and whose book describes the changes that happened during his childhood in Harlem as guns became more prevalent, but I am unprepared for the rawness of the question he comes up with. “How did you survive?” he asks. There’s no surprise or disbelief in his voice, as there might have been had I asked the question. Instead, he looks intent, as if the answer might hold the key to a puzzle he’s been struggling with. Later, I pause on my way home from school and really look at the corner where he and his friends sometimes hang out. The fence has bullet holes in it. Real ones. As in “when shit gets real.”
As I drive up the hill into the wealthier part of town where I live, it occurs to me how very sheltered I am. Most of the time, the worst thing that is likely to happen to me on a daily basis is that I feel bad. I might feel very bad, but the question of whether I would make it to age eighteen alive was never on my radar screen.
In this context, I realize how I failed some of Madai’s tests, like on the day there was a rumor of a potential fight between one of our students and a student from a neighboring school. All staff were on alert and many more staff members were outside at lunch than normal. Madai came up to me. “Are you all out here because of the fight?” she asked. Since being professional means not sharing all the details, I prevaricated. “Oh Ms. M,” she rolled her eyes in exasperation. Her peers are the ones who, when invited to a hack-a-thon, build apps to share information about dangers on the street in real time so everyone can avoid them on their way home from school. Staying safe means being in everybody’s business, knowing what’s about to go down, and not being caught by surprise. When you know you can be hurt, and you need information to protect yourself, someone being fake is dangerous. It means they’re willing to let you get hurt because avoiding conflict or protecting someone else’s feelings or “being professional” is more important to them than your safety and wellbeing. Madai knew exactly what was going on that day. She wanted to know if I cared enough to tell her.
Being real is not something my past experiences prepared me for. When I was young, I was taught instead to “be nice.” I certainly understand why. Right now, I’m typing this with one hand while nursing my own baby with the other, a baby who is attempting to pull what feels like all my hair out of my scalp. What am I supposed to tell him, that he needs to learn to delay gratification and subjugate his own wants and desires so as not to impinge on the freedom and bodily autonomy of others? “Stop that,” I say. “Be nice.”
Be nice: don’t make other children cry. Be nice: share the toys even when you don’t want to. Be nice: when Mommy says that hurts, stop it. Teaching a small child to be a decent human being who doesn’t hurt those around him is a monumental and frustrating task. Quickly, we condense it into a shorthand, a simple set of rules encapsulated in the admonition to “be nice.” Don’t make other people upset, don’t take toys without asking, try to make people happy, don’t hit people, don’t be selfish, don’t say hurtful things, etc. For a child, simply categorizing behaviors into nice versus mean is a heavy enough cognitive lift. The complications can be left until later.
Complications there are, though, because the core admonition of being nice, to never make other people upset, works only as long as no one tries to take advantage of anyone else. If someone acts without regard for their impact on others, it is impossible to nicely demand that they behave better. Take, for example, the 2015 remake of Cinderella. In this version, Cinderella takes her mother’s dying encouragement to be kind to heart and offers sacrifice after sacrifice to her stepfamily — her bedroom, her unpaid labor, her kind words, her niceness — even as they exile her to the attic, deny her her inheritance, restrict her movement, use her as an unpaid servant, and finally lock her away. There is a moment in the movie where Cinderella comes to join the family at the table, only to have her stepmother express surprise that she would even think to do such a thing. Her place, her stepmother explains calmly, is in the kitchen. In Cinderella’s frozen compliance, we see the trap that the rules of niceness set. She could demand her place at the table, but no matter how calmly and gently she does so, there is no way to correct this injustice without making her stepmother upset. Prioritizing niceness above all else means she is trapped.
I had my own experience of this many years before Sammy clued me in to the rules he lived by. I had kept one of my then twelve-year-old advisees late after school, and she had missed her ride. Feeling bad, I walked her home, a trip that she assured me she could do just fine on her own, but which took her down a few blocks of a street so historically notorious for drug dealing and prostitution that the city changed its name in an attempt to revise its image. Needless to say, I accompanied her.
We arrived safely enough at her door, but since I was now running late, I texted my husband to pick me up from the corner near her house instead of at school like normal. After all, he was already on his way, and I was now a twenty-minute hike from where we normally met. What could happen in less than five minutes?
Three minutes in, every hair on my neck is standing up. It’s not that anything bad has happened, it’s that I can feel how I, standing there in my white skin and teacher clothes with my clipboard, am unbelievably out of place. It’s hearing the people in the biker club behind me wondering aloud to each other what on earth I’m doing staking a claim to their corner. It’s being acutely aware that I don’t know the rules here. It’s trying not to glance at my watch every two seconds, willing my husband to get here faster.
“Hey baby.” A man walks up to me. “How about a kiss?” He stops a few feet from me, grinning.
I freeze. What am I even supposed to do in a situation like that? In the years to follow, I will glean any number of answers from conversations with my students. Run like hell, walk in groups, cuss him out, only go to blocks where you know someone who lives there, walk with purpose and don’t stop, learn to project menace so hard that people leave you the fuck alone, and finally… you were standing by yourself on the corner of East 14th Ms. M? What were you thinking?
What did I actually say? “No thank you, sir.”
I kid you not. That’s what I said. Because I was raised to be nice, and niceness gives me no tools for what the hell to do when propositioned on a street corner. I was fine, as it so happened. He laughed and walked away, and I tumbled — shaking and humiliated — into the passenger seat of the car when my husband pulled up a minute later. But what would I have done had things gone otherwise? The most vivid feeling I remember from that incident is the sense of reaching into my toolkit of how to interact with people and realizing that I had nothing remotely appropriate for dealing with this situation.
This is the problem with niceness. It works if the possibilities for what could happen to you aren’t that bad. It works if everyone plays by the same rules, and a mild demurral or expression of discomfort is all it takes to get someone to back off. Unfortunately, that’s not always the world we live in. We live in a world where all manners of oppression teach us that certain people experiencing harm is the way things should be, that speaking up about something that is racist or sexist or causing harm is meaner than whatever harm is being done in the first place. In this environment, niceness is not neutral. Niceness prevents challenges to injustice. As children, we learn niceness in a very specific context, one where there is an adult on the scene who has the power to intervene and whose job it is to ensure that all the children play by the same rules. Had Cinderella’s stepmother attempted her power play in kindergarten, for example, the teacher would have insisted that she share her toys and bring food for everyone. But in the adult world, no one is there to intervene when being nice is not reciprocated. Cinderella both has to take care of herself and is denied access to the tools that would allow her to do so.
There is no nice way to challenge injustice. There is no nice way to defend yourself, or even to run away. Confronting someone because they have messed up or hurt someone or behaved in a racist way or don’t deserve something they think they deserve will make them upset. No matter how compassionately the issue is brought up, discovering the underlying reality is what is upsetting. Being nice means leaving someone who is doing harm in comfortable ignorance. Comfortable to them, at least. The people who are being harmed will just have to bear it until some hypothetical future day when those who have the privilege of ignoring their impact on others somehow magically wake up and correct their behavior. But remember, you can’t do or say anything to hurry along this realization. That would not be nice.
I understand the goal behind niceness, but in the world we live in, it cannot be the highest value. In the real world, there are real stakes, whether they are staying safe or protecting your friends or fixing harms that are killing people. When the stakes matter, being nice and avoiding hard truths is no longer a form of care. Care means knowing what someone’s deeper interests are and helping them meet them. Care means caring about the people who are being hurt, not just the feelings of the person who would rather not know that they’re doing the hurting. Care means helping people do better in a world where accomplishing meaningful things is hard. Cinderella’s mother’s actual admonition was to have courage and be kind. Is niceness really kind when it prioritizes avoiding conflict over justice or when it prioritizes feelings over saving lives? Hardly. We teach niceness to children in an attempt to steer them toward the first approximation of caring about other people, but developing compassion is a lifelong journey with myriad wrong turns and new lessons. The rules of niceness get us started, but after a certain point, sticking to them does more harm than good. It’s time to let them go and take the next step.
Originally written May 2017
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