The Absence of Racism

by Tom Kando

 As children, my sisters and I spent several years (1950-52) in a French boarding school. The place was called Valmondois, near the town of Auvers, about 80 kilometers north of Paris. This was the dark and grizzly place made famous by Van Gogh and his paintings of the potato people.

The boarding school was actually not unattractive. The setting was rural, located in a lush wooded region. The supervision and teaching were adequate.

The Institution housed about seventy kids. It was a relatively middle-class boarding school, not a penal institution or a place for wayward juveniles, but neither a fancy Swiss-like place for millionaires’ kids. It was an institution where hard-working Parisians parked their children for a few years, visiting them on weekends, as did our mother.

The children ranged in age from seven to fourteen. When my mother dropped us off, my sisters were nearly eight and I was nearly ten. Not that toughness wasn’t expected. Any group of young children has its pecking order, its bullies, its sadists, its victims, its conflicts. Cliques always exist, groups gang up on their weakest members under the demagoguery of brutal and cunning leaders. Lord of the Flies is a familiar scenario.

When new kids are dropped off by their parents, as my sisters and I were in the fall of 1950, they are les nouveaux, (the new ones, the rookies). Now begins the testing, the hazing, the sizing up.

While the Valmondois Institute was co-educational, boys and girls were kept separate much of the time. My sisters went inside the main building, and I followed a group of boys outside to the Institute’s large wooded park. Right away the boys began to throw a whole bunch of questions at me, “Where are you from? What do your parents do? Are those your sisters? Why did your folks dump you here? They don’t want you or what?”

The leader of the pack was Roland Thiam, a large boy from Senegal who was eleven years old but looked at least fourteen. Things went badly between him and me from the start. Roland told everyone that they were going to play a game of cops and robbers, one group against another. The rest of the boys obeyed. I had not yet learned to be afraid. The boys started the game. Some were cops and some were fugitives. Roland appointed himself sheriff of course, in charge of running down and apprehending people. I was told to be one of the fugitives. After a while Roland caught up with me, slammed me to the ground, and locked my head between his sweaty thighs, squeezing me like in a vise, shouting, “give up! Say uncle, or I’ll squeeze till you stop breathing!” 

I complied, extricated my head from the bully’s stinking crotch, catching my breath, and seeing to what extent Roland had ruined my clothes. Then I just walked away without a word.

Roland was a curse. Most of the kids hated him, but they all feared him. I, too, was afraid. However, my strong sense of justice made me less prone to buckle under than most others. This was a lasting character trait which would often get me in trouble later in life, but which also helped me overcome many crises in the face of unfavorable odds. I always figured that getting hurt is bad, but suffering injustice can be worse. Hence, I would often say things which others only dared to think. As an adult later on, my mouth often got me in trouble, but it also helped me maintain my self-respect, and the respect of many others.

As far as Roland was concerned, I was the only boy who ever dared tell him the truth. I paid the price for that. At the dinner table in the refectory, Roland would bait me, realizing that he still hadn’t gotten the best of me. He’d say things like, “The day you arrived, I said to myself, this guy has the face of an imbecile, haha.” and “What’s the matter with your mother? Doesn’t she know how to dress?” Some of the other boys around the table, the bad apples, enjoyed the torture, and laughed. But most were silent. I understood clearly how much the boys hated the bully.

One day during late Spring, I overheard a couple of teachers say to each other that Roland was about to leave the school permanently. That afternoon, as the kids were doing their homework in the study hall under the supervision of an aid, Roland and I among them, I announced loudly in front of everyone, “Roland is leaving. He isn’t coming back next year.”

Everyone was stunned, including Roland. At first, the bully wanted to deny it. He said, “Who told you that? You’re a liar!”

“I heard it from Monsieur Calvin. It’s true. And we are ALL glad that you are leaving, too! We have all been talking about you. They all told me how much they hate you!”

Roland looked around the room menacingly and asked, “That true? Anyone here is glad that I am leaving? Who is happy that I am leaving?”
There was the deadly silence of cowardice, but also the tacit acknowledgment that I spoke the truth. None of the boys denied that they were glad to see Roland leave. No one said things like “Not me, Roland, I’d like you to stay.” Some of the boys were even beginning to smile a little. Freedom was at hand.

The school year came to an end without any violence or retaliation by Roland, and the following year was a lot more pleasant. After Roland left, there was no succession. I was not interested in leading the pack. I just wanted to get along.

* * * * * * *

Now let me say something about race - back in a French boarding school in the 1950s, compared to 21st century America:

Back then, it never once occurred to me that Roland was an African. Nor did it occur, I bet, to any of my peers. You see, to us, skin color was about as important as hair color - zero. Take red-haired people. They are a numerical minority, and hair color could conceivably be the basis of a caste system similar to the one that exists based on skin color.

But to most people, hair color is pretty irrelevant as an identifier. And to us, 12-year old French boys, skin color was no different. It simply did not OCCUR to us to use that feature as a primary descriptor or identifier of a person.

When talking and even thinking about Roland, we might think of him as big and strong, as often mean and bullying, also sometimes funny and maybe even generous, but I don’t remember one single time when he was referred to, or we thought of him, as African or black. Any more than we would single out hair color or eye color, or whether someone is right-handed or left-handed, as a key descriptor of a person.

Maybe on a rare occasion we kids had a conversation about, say, life in Africa. Even then, the talk might be about elephants or giraffes or something else, but race? No. Because to us, race was a MEANINGLESS concept. It simply did not occur to us. It wasn’t even on the radar.

Now, in retrospect, of course I remember Roland’s race. And he was the only African at that institution. But in a French boarding school in the 1950s, even by age 11 and 12, we had not (yet) been contaminated by racism. This was the innocence of children. I remember it vividly. I wish it were still so.

© Tom Kando 2019;All Rights Reserved

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