12: A Synergy of Awareness, Understanding, Empathy, and Action: Confronting Social Issues in the English Classroom and Beyond

I grew up in a household in which violence, racism, and, to a certain extent, anti-Semitism, were pervasive. My father, a huge and grossly overweight man with a hair-trigger and violent temper, was a police officer in East Los Angeles, California. A rough and tumble area, it was primarily comprised of stockyards, meat-packing houses, industrial plants, and impoverished residents, most of whom were blacks and Hispanics. In Los Angeles in the 1950s, at least from what I gleaned from my father’s conversations with my mother and other officers who visited our house, meting out “street justice” by cops was fairly common then, if not the norm. That included threatening, slapping and, if “need be,” beating suspects into submission with fists and blackjacks and then arresting them. While my mother, brother, and I were technically his “loved ones,” my father meted out the same sort of brutal treatment in the house as he did on the street. I suspect that the endless beatings—along with his profanity-laced ranting and raving, his smashing of furniture and dishes, and the pervasive terror induced by him—were more frequent at home than they were on the street. Due to sheer fear, no one in the house dared to attempt to quell his actions. And no one came to our assistance. Not our relatives, not the neighbors, not our teachers, and certainly not the local police.