Chris Jennings
In the musical South Pacific, there is a song called “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.”
It is a short song, about a minute and a hundred words long, but it is the heart of the show. Composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II thought carefully about it, argued about it, and defended it—long before and long after the show’s 1949 Broadway premiere.
The song is about racism. South Pacific is about racism in general, but only in this song does the show approach its subject the way a surgeon approaches a body. The song gives us no euphemisms or squeamishness, just an honest and precise look at what’s inside.
The song’s message is right there in its title: racism is not a fact of nature, it is something humans teach each other. Or as the lyrics put it: “it’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear,” so you “hate all the people your relatives hate.” [1]
Every time I read about a resurgence of violent racism in the United States or elsewhere, I am reminded of this song. Not because it has a catchy tune (it does not), but because every time, I hear people talk about these incidents as if the racism stems from some ancient, primordial well of hatred deep in the human past.
But racism is modern. The careful teachings of racism are modern. And every time it flares from passive prejudice into physical violence, it does so because people are still drumming those modern ideas into other people’s dear little ears.
The hatred is in and on us, not our long-gone ancestors. Oscar Hammerstein was adamant about this point in the days before the premiere of South Pacific. In response to a complaint that the song was too strident, Hammerstein wrote: “I am most anxious to make the point not only that prejudice exists and is a problem, but that its birth lies in teaching and not in the fallacious belief that there are basic biological and mental differences between races.” [2]
Optimists sometimes assume that anti-racist education can overcome the careful drummers. But events on the ground seem to mock those aspirations. Anti-Asian hatred, for example, has been extensively documented and critiqued by anti-racists since the 1800s. And a long line of writers, from Lee Chew to Sui Sin Far to Younghill Kang to Ronyoung Kim and beyond, have provided relatable, enlightening first-person accounts. But COVID-19 shattered the delusion that this education had changed hearts and minds.
The careful teaching of racism persists because the social contexts in which it emerges persist. Ambrose Bierce wrote about this as long ago as 1886, with precision and frankness matching Hammerstein’s. In a San Francisco magazine editorial, he complained that “the treatment of Chinese all along this side of the continent is barbarous.” [3]
Bierce did not blame the violence only on “Jake Hoodlum,” but also on the politicians, grand juries, district attorneys, and newspapers that inflamed, tolerated, and benefited from the violence. “In the narrow sense naturally commending itself to politicians and newspapers,” Bierce wrote, “it is doubtless expedient to let the fires of racial hatred burn brightly here on the Pacific shore.” [4]
There is a parable known as “The Second Arrow,” in which the Buddha asks a student whether it hurts to be hit by an arrow. The student, naturally, says yes. The Buddha then asks if it hurts more to get hit by a second arrow. The student thinks and again says yes.
The first arrow, says the Buddha, represents things beyond our control that cause us pain. The second arrow represents our own reaction to the pain. We are the ones who aim that second arrow at ourselves. Buddhists believe that we can learn to stop doing that.
Maybe there is also a third arrow. The language of racism’s careful teaching is a language of grievances, real or imagined. It latches onto fearsome events beyond our control—the smoldering ruins of modern war or the threat of an aggressive new virus that disrupts an otherwise comfortable modern life.
The third arrow is the one we aim at others, not ourselves. It is high-tech, it is modern. It inflicts brutal damage. Learning to fire this arrow takes a lot of practice—and a lot of careful drumming in dear little ears.
[1] R Rodgers & O Hammerstein “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” South Pacific (1949).
[2] Quoted in A Most “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught: The Politics of Race in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific,” Theatre Journal 52 (2000) 307.
[3] A Bierce, “Editorial” The Wasp (12 June 1886)
[4] Bierce, “Editorial”