Pity (Party?)

Talk. It's so important. 

When we don't talk about a new piece of knowledge, we don't really take ownership of it. We don't really learn it. 

Today the vocab word was pity. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie talks about pity in the first segment of her TED Talk, "The Danger of a Single Story." She says: 

I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.

Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.

We looked at this section, and had students demonstrate physically how Adichie might look if she were standing next to Fide. How do we show that he is "poor"? How do we show that she feels pity? 

I. stood on a chair and offered a backpack of "food" to N., who played Fide, sitting on the floor. 

M. reached out pityingly to E., who played Fide bent over in hunger. 

"What do you think about this scene? What do you think about this relationship?" I asked them. 

A. said, "It's like they're doing the nice thing, but at the same time it's disrespectful." I asked him to say more. 

"Like, when people give the old clothes, it's usually not nice. It's just ripped pants." 

"Is that a thing?" I asked. "That we can do the 'nice' thing and be disrespectful simultaneously?" (fitting my fingers into a web to demonstrate simultaneously). Folks nodded and assented. 

E. demonstrated by getting up and "donating" a book to J. by tossing it casually (and, indeed, rudely) onto her desk. "The way you give something matters, you can give it in a disrespectful way." 

Sh. said, "People are sometimes nice on social media but it's just to show off, they don't really care about that person." 

We spent probably 25 minutes talking about this concept in the story -- which is only in the first two minutes of the TED talk. We wrote at the end of class solely about this relationship between Adichie and Fide. I felt a little self-conscious about spending so much time a small part of the text, but it seemed so key that we discuss what is problematic about pity. 

Today I wanted to return to the word and get a definition in the notebook. 

The vocab slide for "pity". Deliberately provocative.

As we considered these pictures of pity, the question came up: what's the difference between pity and sympathy?

S. pointed out that "When you feel sympathy, you identify with the person and what they feel. Pity is just you feel bad." 

Sh. added that "When you give something with pity, it's just the object. It's nothing. You don't really feel or think about the person." 

N. said that in the freeze frame from yesterday, Issa should have stepped down from the chair to give the food, not just offered it from his high high position. 

These comments were spot on. C. jumped up, as Eclaire did yesterday, to show that pity is based on a quick judgment of a person, not on real understanding of them and their life. "Someone will judge my ROTC uniform today, and think they know the whole story of me, but they don't."

This whole conversation took way longer than I had hoped. But if it had been the ten minute opener that I imagined, would folks have truly understood? I feel pretty confident that at least the people who shared have a solid grasp of the problems with pity. 

The mood in the class was jovial during this discussion. Many wanted to share and there was lots of energy. There were moments when everyone was talking and I would wait 20 seconds before calling folks back. I don't know what's being said during all those interludes, but I trust that some of it is solidifying the concept of pity in people's minds. They need to talk in order to weld onto their minds what they have heard. 

And those who are talking about something totally unrelated, they probably needed a quick break from silence anyway. There need to be some release valves for pent up energy after extended whole-class discussion. 

Talk -- it takes time, and it's worth it.