Don't Call Me “Sir”

I acquired my distrust for honorifics like “sir” and “ma’am” early, from my father. He didn’t mean it that way. Rather, in fourth grade (so I would’ve been nine years old), I had a teacher who insisted that children use polite honorifics when speaking with adults. As a “go along to get along” kid, I complied. Then one day, at home, my father, who’d recently been commissioned a warrant officer, gave me a direction. I replied “yes, sir.”

“Did you catch that?” my mother asked. “He called you ‘sir.’ He’s trying to show you respect.”

“Oh,” my father said. “I just assumed it was because he knows I’m an officer now.”

His tone suggested he was half-joking, and knowing him as I do now, I suspect he was using jocularity to conceal the fact that he’d completely missed my attempt to show him respect. What struck me then, though, as a child, was that my father didn’t regard me as a son. He regarded me as a subordinate. I swallowed my desire for a sarcastic rejoinder, like the coward I was then, but I also learned an important lesson, and stopped using the word “sir.”

Recently a trusted friend, a schoolteacher specializing in middle-grade history, re-posted this brief harangue to social media: “Unpopular opinion: Children should respond with "yes, sir" or "yes, ma'am" and then do as they have been told.” He followed this comment, which he didn’t write, with his own words: “I’m less hung up on the “sir/ma’am” than I am on a pervasive attitude in the last couple of cohorts I’ve taught that overtly disregarding a teacher or responding to correction or redirection with sarcasm is an acceptable behavior.”

As a sometime teacher myself, I understand this frustration. Classroom learning requires a certain level of discipline, which begins by acknowledging that your teachers have paid their dues, earned their credentials, and want you to have the same opportunities they’ve had. (Toxic exceptions exist, I realize. Bear with me.) Adolescent resistance scores quick points with peers, certainly, but it poisons the long-term experience for everyone involved.

However, I can’t help seeing a straight line from a blanket demand that children should obey adult authority, and the problems Americans see unfolding right now. Whenever police, or other authority figures, shoot Black men for insignificant infractions, defenders of the status quo inevitably emerge from hibernation to insist that the dead men should’ve obeyed. Obedience, unmoored from other ethics, becomes the ultimate defense of authoritarian injustice.

Okay, I'd call him “sir”

As a longtime admirer of French anarchist and theologian Jacques Ellul, I explain myself thus: all authority derives from God. Anyone who claims authority over another person, thus claims to represent God, or if they don’t believe in God, at least they claim to represent the higher power. Even if power isn’t literally God-given, it’s nevertheless God-like. Therefore, all human authority is idolatrous and illegitimate, unless it’s yoked to humility and restraint.

But I also recognize this creates certain contradictions. Even the most doctrinaire anarchist will admit that sometimes it’s appropriate to acknowledge another person’s authority. Teachers couldn’t manage their classrooms without decision-making power. Complex multi-person activities, from simple barn-raisings to paving highways from coast to coast, require coordination, which means somebody necessarily has to take charge.

The question, therefore, isn’t whether authority exists; it’s whether (and when) authority is legitimate. I asked myself this several times in my teaching days. The state university system invested me with responsibility to teach youth how to write on a collegiate level, and authority to execute this responsibility. My students ostensibly acknowledged my authority by enrolling in my class. Does that mean whatever I do is legitimate?

Certainly not. My authority is circumscribed by time, space, and jurisdiction. If I assign students a paper on a given topic, that assignment is legitimate, because as a writing teacher, during a classroom semester, on campus, I have that authority. If I assign students math homework, that assignment is illegitimate, because it’s outside my jurisdiction. If I assign students to wash my car on Saturday, that’s also illegitimate, for hopefully obvious reasons.

My father’s expectation that I behave like his subordinate, that I salute him and follow his orders, continues to burn. It took years to understand why, though. As my father, he had certain authority over me, which corresponds with responsibilities to raise me well. His authority as an officer doesn’t correspond with his authority as my father. This fuzzy distinction causes my lingering dislike for the word “sir.”