There’s a story I’ve been meaning to tell. It centres around just one sentence, spoken by a man at a dinner event, and it’s hard to explain the impact of those eight words. I’m going to try.
What he said was, I hope you told her to shut up.
We were at a dinner table, and I’d been talking to the woman next to me, who had asked me to tell her about the adult literacy tutoring I’d been doing.
I wanted to explain to her the barriers some people face to literacy. The trauma they have had in their lives, some of it relating to teaching or schooling, but lots of it just adding up to people who don’t feel safe, who believe they are stupid, who have built up walls to stop themselves from being hurt again, who don’t know how to have the openness you need to be able to learn.
I started to tell her the story of a session I’d had with a learner recently. It was the first time I’d met this learner, and after we spent some time getting to know each other, with her permission I asked her to try to read a simple text. I could tell she was anxious but she began to read, and I thought she was doing well. But then she hit a word she didn’t know, and she froze. She didn’t read any further and her whole body became tense. I sat with her for a bit, waiting to see if she would start again, and when she didn’t, I just said quietly, it’s OK, you’re safe here, no one is going to judge you. As soon as I said that, she began to cry, I mean really cry. And she cried – on and off – for ten minutes or so.
It was at this point that the man sitting beside the woman I was speaking to said, I hope you told her to shut up.
I didn’t even know he’d been listening and to this day I can’t fathom how he could have thought that was a useful thing to say.
It certainly made me shut up. There is no way I was sharing any more of the learner’s story in his presence.
So I’ve been wanting to tell this story for some time, because there was something about what he said that horrified me, but I’ve had trouble processing just what it was.
I didn’t know this man at all. But his words told me something about him, and perhaps others like him. I understood him to be telling me that other people’s trauma is annoying; it’s weakness; it’s boring. People with trauma, or disadvantage, are inconvenient. They should be quiet, they should be invisible.
They should not be pandered to; they should not be helped, there is no need for sympathy or empathy. I guess he and others like him are the bootstraps kind of people. The ones who think that if they experienced disadvantage, they would just get themselves out of it. And if other people can’t, then they are at fault – for their weakness, or lack of discipline, or stupidity.
I hope you told her to shut up.
For the record, I didn’t. I sat with her while she cried, told her it was OK, and waited until she was cried out. I asked her if she wanted to talk about what was going on for her, and we talked for a bit. When she was ready, I asked if she wanted to keep going with the reading, and although she didn’t really want to, she bravely did. I met her every week for a year, and within the year she was reading articles from the newspaper, and talking about what she was reading. Not my teaching, by the way. It turns out she knew how to read, but had no belief in herself, and so much trauma from past experiences with learning that she needed help to try, and fail, and still feel safe. She learned how to ask for help, and feel proud – not ashamed – of what she was capable of.
There were ups and downs in that journey, and a back story for her life that I learned over time, and that would help you understand why things were so hard for her. But those are part of her story, not mine.
Now that a little bit of time has passed, I feel bad for the man who said that. I feel sad for the things he can’t see or let himself understand. I’m sorry – for him and the people around him – that he hasn’t woken up to a wider understanding of the world.
I didn’t respond to him at the time, and maybe that’s a good thing. Sometimes silence speaks loudly, and I don’t know if the thoughts I had at the time would have been useful, if I’d said them out loud. But if there’s one thing I might have done, perhaps it would be to ask him if he had ever needed someone to extend him grace. I might have asked him if he has ever had a time when he felt afraid, or fearful or overwhelmed. Because when we have those feelings, the best thing others can do for us is to give us grace.
When we carry the privilege of literacy, we have so much grace to give. And it costs us nothing to give that – in fact, in my experience, the rewards are enormous. We are returned grace for grace, and more often than not, we receive more than we give.
Creating Good Change 