The Way I Was Raised

Robert Esposito, Prose Reader

On the fourth night of Hanukkah, I slept over my friend’s house, and expected to partake in their ceremonies. I was excited to be part of their tradition for another year; it’s part of my personal rules to expose myself to other cultures as directly as possible. However, the night progressed beyond midnight and we realized that his parents had never called us down to light the menorah, to say the prayers. He brushed this off easily, going back to the video games, but it continued to pester me. How could they simply skip a tradition like that?

The next morning while eating breakfast, my friend’s father started talking about the future. “Your kids probably won’t even know what a store is,” he said. “Everything’s online now! In my day, you actually had to talk to people, but now you don’t even need to leave your house. I guess it’s just the way I was raised.”

Something about that gnawed at me for the rest of the day. I decided to write it down, and every time I looked at it, I could feel its caustic effects in my head. Just the way I was raised. How many times had I heard that? I didn’t truly realize how often I forced myself to ignore it until my family’s annual Christmas Eve dinner.

I have an absurdly monochromatic Italian and Roman Catholic upbringing, which results in the traditions of the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve, sweeping hand motions that usually ends in carpets stained with soda, and icebox cake. These seasonal traditions are great – funny at times, even, especially when Zizzi Anine starts reeling out curses in Italian after spilling her fourth drink. But there's a darker side to this traditionalism that is not often thought upon. Countless times during family parties do I hear slurs, racist statements, and queerphobia, all defended with the First Amendment; with the preceding phrase, “I’m not [racist/homophobic/prejudice], but…”; with “It’s just my opinion!” It has become part of my tradition to ignore this.

Instead of restricting my hearing to exclude anything prejudiced this year, I relinquished my filter and silence. Racist and queerphobic slurs assaulted me, and for the first time, I allowed myself to be truly offended by my family’s crudeness. “Talking politics” meant little more than complaining about whatever race or sexuality they didn’t like at that particular moment, and then claiming that it was just their opinion; that they were just raised to think that way; raised to say those slurs. “I’m too old to change,” my grandmother told me when I confronted her about it. “There’s no use teaching an old dog a new trick.”

Not being prejudiced is a trick in the way that breathing is an incredible feat, I wanted to tell her, but restrained myself. This isn’t a point of the way someone was raised, I realized quickly. I was raised to be a God-fearing Catholic and Italian, but here I am: gay, atheist, and learning Spanish.

This excuse is a perpetuation of prejudice, an excuse that I have heard far too often from not just elderly people, not just adults, but from people as young as twenty – from people in high school. Was it not just the other day in my Health class that someone claimed he didn’t support homosexual rights because his parents didn’t? Was it not just at my work tutoring elementary students that one child said she didn’t like the fact that she was told to say “happy holidays”, instead of “merry Christmas”, and the reason was because her mother shared the opinion?

The point of growing up is to grow out of inane mindsets, not to use your family as a scapegoat for your own inexcusable behavior. Even after puberty has run its course, as cliché as it sounds, learning should be a lifelong goal. The instant one claims that they are too old to learn, they should be given a weary and cautious eye. No, my friend’s father’s statement regarding face-to-face conversation wasn’t malicious, but is there not some hypocrisy in claiming to want to follow a certain way of life, while disregarding the traditions that one has followed since childhood in not lighting the next candle of the menorah, in not saying the daily prayers? It may sound trite, but this cherry picking of traditions, this claim that being raised a certain way cements one’s personality and traditions henceforth, is what leads to toxic behavior.

There are some traditions in families that need to be unlearned, and allowing prejudices to perpetuate because one was “just raised that way” is not justification for it. If these cancerous traditions continue, society will never shed its prejudices. The cycle needs to be broken, and so far, the best words I have seen used to explain this are from Ali bin Abi Talib: “Do not raise your children the way parents raised you; they were born for a different time.” Take the goodness that the people who raised you taught, and pass solely that along to others. Display the noxious slurs and ideologies as such – venomous, monstrous, and absurd.

I’m not an activist, but I implore you to stop the cycle here: shed your filters. It is your societal obligation to examine traditions in your family, and unlearn the passive prejudices ingrained in you; your duty to move forward from them – your duty to continue learning.

#robertesposito #misc