Tolerance Award

My middle school guidance counselor used to give out monthly character awards, and I always hated it. The meanest kid in school would get "caught" doing something not downright cruel, giving back something they stole, perhaps, because the teacher was looking, and then they would receive the Kindness Award.

In retrospect, I suppose it's good to reward troubled kids for what good they do, however dubious, to not always be only punishing them. Water what you want to grow.

But I didn't see it that way at the time; I was still young enough to think that awards were about finding and proclaiming true excellence, and so I was infuriated by what I deemed to be a monthly injustice.

Then to my great mortification, I won the Tolerance Award, "for having friends who were different from me." I was so embarrassed, it seemed like the dumbest trait on the list, who would only choose friends who were exactly like them? To be honest, before that award I had never really thought about why I liked who I liked, and why I didn't like who I didn't like.

Worse, it was true, I always sort of hated people who were just like me, desperate overachievers who wore their strengths on their sleeve, always waived their best foot around at you, lest you miss it and misjudge them to be ordinary.

I believed myself to be special, but I also believed, not seeing the contradiction, that every being on earth had some redeeming quality, a logical byproduct of my Evangelicalism. If everyone, no matter how far they strayed from the path of righteousness could be saved, there must be something in every person worth saving, something reflecting back the Image of God. I believed this wholeheartedly, and looked for that special significance in every person, and I started to suspect from mounting evidence that the people with the buried treasure had better treasures. Perhaps that's why they buried it, to protect it. Or perhaps keeping it in one large lump in the middle of their chests preserved it intact, instead of crushing it up into a fine powder to cover yourself in, loosing little pieces of it on every surface you traversed. Shiny people were rotten on the inside, you could only see their sparkle if you didn't dig.

At any rate, I developed a love for underdogs from an early age. I remember taking lots of leisurely bathroom breaks to just wander the halls, to get a glimpse at the boys cutting class, to see what they were up to, what extracurricular pseudo-event was worth skipping class for. I loved that there was an alternate universe happening outside the classroom door, just like the world going by outside the window, just like the countless worlds you could drop into and out of and carry around with you in the form of a book.

Often they were playing an invented game, in the process of being invented, with whatever materials were on hand, the negotiation of the rules soon becoming the true game. There was a boy who always liked to talk to the janitor, and sometimes help him out, and I liked to talk to them, although I couldn't help for long because I had to get back to class. I remember that boy asking me why I thought it was so important to get back. I hadn't really ever considered skipping class myself, and even then I pushed the thought out of my mind before it solidified fully into something worrisome, a genuine option.

But with that stupid Tolerance Award I had to look at my friends, to see them the way the adults presumably saw them, which was awful, less than dimensional, more of a rap sheet or a Wikipedia article about a lesser celebrity than as the full, dimensional, paradoxical people I knew them to be. It was true, I supposed, that I didn't care what ethnicity someone was, what social standing. When I visited friends’ houses, theirs were mostly bigger than mine, but I had a friend who lived in an apartment. But I didn’t classify her as poorer than me. What fascinated me wasn’t what she didn’t have, but what she did: her family had a shrine in their dining room, where her mom always placed a bit of the meal before we ate. It was beautiful, like shrines in pictures, but also small, humble, casual somehow, personal. I remember thinking it was frankly odd that we didn't have a designated religious space in our house at all, because we were very religious, and also, how infuriating it was that our religion couldn't be even remotely visual or exotic.

I also couldn't believe her parents let her watch horror movies, and one night we had a sleepover and her mom had a late shift and so it was just a few of us girls, and we sat in the apartment with all the lights off and watched No Left Turn and laughed so hard because it was so stupid, not even remotely believable, and also we jumped and screamed every time anyone else from the adjoining units pulled into the parking lot and closed their door.

I tell people now that I grew up in essentially a PBS special, that all sorts of different races and cultures were represented, even "celebrated." I remember at least once a year lining up in front of a new kid at recess, asking to have my name written down in their native language. Was this a celebration, or tokenism?

I remember in high school a kid I thought I was good friends with reading an angry poem at the talent show about being black and how no one understood him, and feeling betrayed, and thinking, I didn't understand how he could lie like that, and thinking, he only wants attention. It wasn't until years later that I realized guiltily what that must have been like to feel so completely required to assimilate, even and maybe especially privately, with "friends," to exist in a space that was only willing to accept you if you agreed to a whole list of contingencies, including one that you were not to disclose that such a contract was ever entered into, lest you wake the sleepwalking “natives” of that dominate culture, which would be dangerous for everyone, because they might be angry, and you were always outnumbered. That perhaps if someone is brave enough to demand attention on a stage in front of their peers, we could be “brave” enough to even just once consider actually giving him, really him, all of him, our full attention.

Perhaps that's what bothers me the most, still, years later; the sinking feeling that even after examining my friends and deciding that okay, I did have a variety of friends, I refused to do the hard work, examining myself. How deep were my friendships if they couldn’t show me all of themselves; if, when they did, I denied them?

No white girl at that school had any business winning a tolerance award, not with the constant hum of micro and surely even macro injustices every child of color must have endured silently to “protect” “our” “culture,” any more than a bully deserves a kindness award for stopping short of beating another kid to death.