Sitting on a stool in the school infirmary, shoes off, I'd roll the right leg of my sweatpants up to the knee; I'd take up the tights on that leg, too, courtesy of a slit I always cut in the sole. I'd look down into the metal vat of hot liquid wax and plunge my foot in past the ankle, soak for 20 minutes or so. I'd do this several times a week, hoping that this "one size fits most" treatment would do the trick. (Soaking in paraffin wax was recommended frequently, for a variety of complaints that we just shrugged and called overuse, maybe tendinitis, not caring much what it really was, only needing to keep it at bay.) If the treatments did what I hoped, then maybe I'd have less discomfort to dance through, because that was what we all did with our aches, pains, and injuries: we danced through them, Ace-bandaged and ignored them—at least long enough to perfect the choreography in that day's class or rehearsal. The wax was clear-looking in the vat, and although hot, it didn't burn the skin; it was silky soft because of the paraffin oil, but not at all greasy. I would sit with a book and not read. I would look out the window, look at the clock, pull my foot up every so often and look at the wax shell growing in thickness around it. The gooey paraffin buildup made my foot look large, bloated, and shapeless. It was cozy and trapped the heat next to my skin. The warmth seeped through my pores, penetrated and soothed my uncooperative ankle. Whenever I lifted my foot, the air began immediately to cool the wax, and it would turn very white—the foot looked bloated and pale, like what I imagined the foot of a fat corpse would look like. When it was time to stop soaking, I'd take a wooden stick and loosen the wax, watch it fall back into the vat in a single, solid, soft piece. Were I now to soak in paraffin, it might be a hand or a rough-skinned foot, but only at the urging of a beautician in a spa (assuming I ever went to a spa), and only in preparation for one of the manicures or pedicures that I never have. I do, though, from time to time, push a finger into the soft wax of a recently extinguished candle and remember my former dancing life—a life also extinguished—and I remember, too, the comfort and desperate hope of ritual therapies, the healing properties of paraffin.
The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...
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