In addition to being Martin Luther King Jr. Day, today marks the beginning of GLSEN’s annual No Name-Calling Week, when schools across the country will be having activities and events to encourage kindness and end name-calling and bullying. Did you know the event was started because of a book written by a gay dad?
No Name-Calling Week was founded by GLSEN and Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing in 2004, inspired by author and gay dad James Howe’s novel The Misfits
In this 2006 interview at Teaching Tolerance, Howe explains how he came to write the book:
The Misfits came up at a particular moment in my life and the life of my daughter. My daughter was in the 7th grade and had been going through a very difficult time socially since the 4th grade. For whatever reasons, she was perceived as being different. By 7th grade, she was having a hard time, being picked on, being called names, being excluded. It was the kind of thing I experienced in middle school and high school. I was tired of hearing people say, “Kids will be kids. That’s just part of socializing. It toughens them up.”
The other piece was that, two years earlier, I had come out of the closet. I was finally able to say, “I am gay. This is who I am. This is a part of myself. It’s not some shadowy, bad, dark shameful part of myself I have to cut off and hide any longer.”
I said to myself, “I need to write a different reality for kids who are growing up gay.”
He did—and followed The Misfits
This year’s No Name-Calling Week seems particularly needed in our current social climate. One need only look at President Trump’s Twitter feed to see that name-calling is part of his modus operandi. If our nation’s president is modeling that kind of behavior, the rest of us need to work even harder to teach our children otherwise.
And because we cannot ensure that all children will likewise stay away from bullying, we need to make sure that anti-bullying policies and laws are in place that specifically prohibit bullying and harassment of students based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Twenty-four states do not have any such laws. As Dr. King once said, “Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.”
While we’re pondering the wisdom of Dr. King, too, let us remember his observation, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” GLSEN’s call to “be an ally, not a bystander” resonates here as well. May we all take that to heart and step up to help others, no matter what part of a person’s identities the bullying or harassment may target.
