Season 2, Episode 11 - Don’t Believe the Hype

Original Airdate - December 1st, 2002

Brief housekeeping. Sorry for the delay. I was sick yesterday. No post tomorrow either because the next episode is a two-parter. That’ll be in your inbox on Wednesday. Let’s get into today’s episode.

It’s Grade 9 International Day! The day when all of the freshmen are supposed to make displays and give presentations about their cultural heritage. Paige interrupts Hazel and Terri’s discussion of how Terri can honor her Scottish Heritage with a classic fashion police joke. But Hazel takes it too far when she declares Iraqi student Farizah of a fashion criminal for wearing hijab.

That’s right friends, this is an A story focused on a character that isn’t a series regular. Paige’s bestie Hazel Aden. Ironically, I think this is the only episode where Hazel is the A story main character, despite her promotion to regular for seasons 3-5.

Hazel has made zero progress on her own International Day presentation and seems ready to take the fail on the assignment. Paige offers to come help her with her project, scheming for an invite to Hazel’s home. Paige has never been there and it’s starting to feel weird.

Hazel explains that she finds the whole project kind of dumb. What does race and culture really matter anyway? Paige thinks she’s overthinking it. Just get some jerk chicken and call it a day. Hazel realizes that Paige thinks she’s Jamaican and goes along with it.

She stops at a Jamaican restaurant she frequents. The owner is a sweetheart and gladly gives her some chicken, as opposed to her usual goat curry, and a poster for her display. He does clearly tell us, if we didn’t already get it, that Hazel is not Jamaican.

International day is here! Spinner makes a gross pizza representing all of his different cultural backgrounds. Paige updates her Ukrainian garb with a modern 00s twist. And Hazel passes the jerk chicken off as her mom’s recipe. Simpson is impressed. It’s just as good as the jerk chicken from his favorite Jamaican restaurant.

Farizah is less impressed. At lunch, she confronts Hazel. Aden isn’t really a Jamaican last name, but Farizah recognizes it as Somali. Hazel denies the implication. After lunch, Grade 9 returns to their displays to find that someone has destroyed Farizah’s and labeled her a terrorist.

Classes are paused throughout the school as the administration investigates the hate crime. Teachers engage their students in conversations about race, and there’s a divide between those who find it important and those who think the whole thing is overblown. Hazel is called into Raditch’s office. Farizah told him about her comments and Raditch suspects Hazel. Luckily, she’s saved from punishment when the police catch the actual culprits, a pair of unnamed Grade 10 boys.

Raditch apologized to Farizah on behalf of the school and asks her to recreate her display in the foyer. Hazel offers her help and Farizah isn’t interested. Hazel comes clean. She is Somali and a Muslim. At her old school, she was beat up and bullied for her ethnicity and her faith, so she chose to hide at Degrassi. Farizah says that all Hazel has done is become the bully she was fleeing.

The next day, Hazel gives a presentation where she comes clean and admits to everyone her heritage. She explains why she wanted to hide and how she’s learned it’s important to remain visibly proud of your race in the face of those who want to oppress you. She makes a special callout to Farizah, highlighting her dedication in choosing to wear hijab at school.

Our essay today is not about racism, so a little commentary for you. This all lands in a solid C+ zone for me. I’m glad Hazel finds some pride, but people are still super ignorant and she is put in a position to educate them! I don’t love it! Kendra is one of the people who says race doesn’t matter and Jimmy says there’s no reason to discuss it because it won’t change. Plus, Hazel is Black. I refuse to believe she doesn’t experience anti-Black racism even when she’s hiding her faith. It’s very 2003, y’all.

Anyway, let’s talk about Home Economics. JT is really good at it. Liberty is not. When Sean and Toby make comments about how sewing is for girls, JT switches his pillow-sewing project with Liberty’s. Liberty is celebrated as an excellent seamstress and JT gets bad marks, but avoids criticism from the boys.

There’s just one problem, the follow up project is based on performance on the first project, so Liberty is given a task beyond her abilities. She blackmails JT. If he doesn’t sew the skirt for the project, she’ll tell everyone who really made the good pillow.

JT gives Liberty some sewing tips as he makes the skirt and explains that his mother is a seamstress, so he’s been doing this a long time. Liberty says he shouldn’t hide his talent for stupid gendered reasons, but JT doesn’t agree. They hit this note again in a really sweaty attempt to relate JT hiding his sewing skills to Hazel hiding that she’s Muslim.

It’s time to submit the projects, and JT’s skirt is perfect. Liberty can’t take the praise and comes clean. JT made the skirt, she made the shitty pillows. Toby and Sean instantly start teasing JT, both in class and at his locker. The girls approach, and JT expects more teasing, but they’re actually impressed. They want to pay him to make them skirts. Money and female attention? Looks like this all worked out for JT Yorke.

I don’t want to shock anyone, but I was a boy with a lot of “girl hobbies.” I loved to dance, I loved playing music, I loved played pretend. My favorite tv shows were about girls. Or fashion. Or cooking. I didn’t much care for sports.

And, unsurprisingly, this got me a lot of shit. It wasn’t just that the boys my age were weird to me, which they were. It was more that all of the adults around me seemed judgmental. Friends’ dads, especially, didn’t know what to make of this boy who proudly and boldly embraced his girl hobbies. But the problem was less my embrace of the feminine, and more my rejection of gendering fun at all.

I don’t think hobbies should be gendered, but they are. That is simply a fact of American life. It’s more than just the “boy” and “girl” aisles in the toy section. There are behaviors and activities that we assign based on gender.

The dividing lines between these activities are far murkier than they seem. Running around outside with no purpose is a boy activity. Running around outside playing pretend is a girl activity. Cute animals are for girls but bugs and snakes are for boys. Intense physical activities where you introduce contact like football are for boys. But if you introduce any amount of beauty, then it’s for for girls. The clarinet is for girls and the tenor saxophone is for boys. Soccer is for everyone.

These distinctions are as arbitrary as they are important in young American life. Even in communities where varied gender expressions are more accepted, we still see someone crossing these lines as divergent. Whether we judge them positively or negatively, there is still an eye of judgment towards a boy who dances or a girl who plays rough.

Alabama in the 00s was not a place that judged this deviance positively. A young girl could get away with being a tomboy, but was expected to become more feminine once they hit puberty. A young boy had no business doing girl stuff to begin with. That distinction highlights the patriarchal strangeness that underlines all of this.

I come from a place where the man was meant to be the center of the universe. Women had to learn to play second fiddle and caretaker. Their behavior should be obsessed with finding a keeping a mate. In fact, despite all of the girl hobbies, women weren’t meant to have hobbies that didn’t somehow serve the home.

But the patriarchy also required men to act as the center of the universe. A man must dramatically defend his manhood, because without it, how could we remain in charge. This required toughness, performative courage, stoicism. It did not involve grace and beauty, creativity, or a love for costumes.

Food is one of the most fascinating examples of this to me. Cooking is feminine. Being a chef is masculine. Being interested in food for sustenance, feeding your family, or entertaining is in the realm of the women. It is about service. Being a home cook is femme.

But cooking to make money or run a business is masculine. And the stereotypical images we have of chefs and cooks reflect this. Cooks are warm and bright, speaking softly. They let you lick the spoon. Chefs are intense and cold. They yell a lot. They are to be feared and respected.

I never played along with this gendered game. I did what made me happy. I looked for cool rats in fields and I pretended to be Sailor Moon and a Power Ranger and I moved my body beautifully and I made cheesecake and I hit things with sticks. I pursued only joy. This was my true aberrance. It wasn’t that I was trying to be a woman, they had a language for that. It’s that I was rejecting the gendered nature of childhood and adolescent fun.

It sounds egotistically, but as much as these adults judged me, I think they were also jealous of me. I was free in a way they were not. And no matter how much people tried to beat me into submission, and they did try, I would not stop doing things that made me feel alive. For all of the ups and downs of my childhood, that is the thing I’m most proud of.

I think it’s so sad to watch men, as it’s often men who do this by choice, keep themselves from doing something they enjoy or have interest in because it’s coded feminine. Play and fun are so important to feeling joy and fulfillment. How sad it is to make defending the gender binary more important that feeling happy.