At a recent faculty meeting when we were beginning to discuss the ramifications of the new Massachusetts Anti-Bullying Law, everyone acknowledged that online bullying now presents a peculiar new threat to the safety of children and adults alike. As the discussion evolved and as we shared perspectives both from real-life and from the national media, it became clear that the dangers of bullying are restricted neither to the playground nor to the locker room. This seems to shed interesting light on the Fallacy of Childhood Invisibility: i.e., when no one is looking--or indeed when no one is perceived to be looking, the temptation to bully becomes both more likely and more problematic. As we know, children often imagine themselves to be invisible when they are engaged in online behavior.

Eventually someone made reference to the idea that digital natives have vastly different behaviors from digital immigrants, a terminology that owes its genesis to Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives, a 2008 publication by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser.  According to these authors, people born after 1980 may be considered Digital Natives, whereas the rest of us may be thought of as Digital Immigrants.  I find the distinction between these two parts of the population to be thought-provoking and valid, but I also wonder to what degree a child currently in elementary school actually holds digital competencies and attitudes in common with a teacher born in the 1980’s.  In this and in other arenas of public life, the arc of immigration seems fluid rather than fixed.

My supposition is that all of us face unfamiliar social patterns from time to time and that these moments may be regarded as fundamental to the building of an enlightened character.  Someone we know speaks with a different accent or prepares a favorite food with an entirely different set of spices.  Someone else feels offended because we fail to recognize a deeply rooted belief or a commonly held convention.  The discomfort that arises from these situations is not so different from the discomfort that immigrants must feel whenever they confront unfamiliar aspects of a new culture, and in many cases this can lead to bullying.  In an era when schools and citizens are struggling so hard to neutralize the harmful effects of bullying, I think back to a publication of 50 years ago: To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, 1960.

One can easily imagine the likelihood that a character like Boo Radley would be targeted for teasing/bullying today no less than he was in the setting of Depression Era Alabama.  After all, anyone whose behaviors are so thoroughly different is likely to be misunderstood, if not derided.  But of course it turns out that Boo Radley, the utterly reclusive boy who never leaves his house, is both a kindly and even a heroic figure.  In choosing to educate his family about the importance of “standing in other people’s shoes,”  Atticus Finch reveals something very extraordinary about the nexus of the Native and the Immigrant.  As much a native of his fictional town as his many bigoted neighbors, Atticus nonetheless invites his children to confront the inevitable discomfort of the immigrant.  His children cannot prevent the bullying that goes on around them but they are successful in neutralizing it.

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