metaphortunate | you know, the easy questions

Crossposts: http://metaphortunate.livejournal.com/52098.html

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you know, the easy questions

You may have seen that article going around about how it's totally useless to tell your white kids that "everyone is equal". (Spoiler: it has no effect on shaping your kids' beliefs on race because it is prompted and shaped by no actual beliefs on race.) Someone on Twitter - I can't remember who, sing out if it was you - said, well, what do POC want people to tell their white kids about race?

And I've been thinking about that for days on end.

Partly I don't have a good answer because my kid is only 2, and I know exactly as much about parenting as you need to know in order to have a 2 year old. I don't know anything about kids older than that. I'd love to hear from parents of older kids.

Partly my answer is very simple and not trivial for everyone and, for the reason mentioned above, appropriate for a 2 year old. Mention race. Like this:

(while reading picture book) "That little black girl is playing ball. That little white boy is running."
"The president is black. His daddy was from Africa."
"Our neighbors are Taiwanese. They are Asian. Asia is the continent across the Pacific. You are white. That means your family came from Europe [a long time ago/when your grandma was a little girl/two years ago]."
"Your best friend at daycare's daddy is black and her mama is white. Doesn't she have pretty curly hair?"
"Mama's friend S. is Indian. They're coming over this afternoon and you can play with R."

And it's not trivial because to do it right you have to actually have the neighbors and the kid at the daycare and the friend. That's the important bit. It's helpful not to act like being other than white is some kind of embarrassing faux pas that other people are doing but that polite people never mention! But as the article says, if you talk about how everyone is the same, but your kids see that you only ever spend time with white people….well. Kids aren't dumb.

But of course that's not the beginning and end of the story of race. God. Me personally, just off the top of my head: we're going to have to talk about the Civil War, and the Japanese internment camps, and Israel and Palestine, and hip-hop, and all that shit my one cousin says about Trayvon Martin, and why the people look different in the different neighborhoods in our city, and, eventually, why I call my kid white but myself not quite*.

And, after thinking and thinking and thinking about it, there's a lot I want white kids to hear about race. But the really hard parts aren't race-specific. Though of course it will be important to explicitly connect them to race, because otherwise people can develop some truly hilarious blind spots, it will be just as important to connect them to other inequalities. And these are the things I have no god damned idea how I'm going to try to teach:

1) People are frequently unbelievably horrible to each other, and profit by it, and suffer no bad consequences. But don't do it anyway.

2) Sometimes when you do the right thing you will get no reward of any kind for it, and in fact you'll pay for it, and sometimes you'll get shit on. But do it anyway.

And if you have advice on how I can make that sound convincing, I'd love to hear it.

------

*Mr. E is white, and if you've never met me, these days my expressed racial identity can probably best be expressed by the fact that my one co-worker has (unsolicited) told me (twice) that I look totally white. That about sums it up. The genetic mix of us has produced a kid who looks like he could be made out of mayo, basically. So this question is relevant to me.

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I have no insights to contribute to this post, but I found it fascinating! I can't wait to read the comments.

-J

I hadn't realized till your post that I make casual positive and neutral remarks about difference to my small daughter; I'd registered only the casual attempts to deconstruct negative situations. Huh.

(She thinks, at nearly three, that she's white...though she's a shade or two browner than I am.)

I don't have advice. :/ For the first one, I was taught not to do it with the remark, "Otherwise you won't be able to sleep well at night," and the mere implication was enough that when I did random small, crappy things, I did have trouble sleeping. But I don't know how early I first heard it--under age four, certainly.

#2 was presented to me in its lighter form as always working hard and doing one's best, which I think made a dent only because there wasn't much of a household reward tree. One did certain chores because they were one's chores, not to get paid an allowance or whatever; small allowance came later and not tied to specific actions. I have zero idea which additional factors have led me e.g. to make a fuss because speaking up on behalf of a junior employee's pay was the Right Thing on principle--more a sense of how to calculate risk and the scope of the consequent shit in my case, though having been in the junior employee's situation (it's a uni student) does pertain. Now I am more baffled than I was before trying to untangle stuff, but this kind of thing is worth thinking about/through; thanks for the impetus.

I really like that approach of mentioning and acknowledging race as a matter of fact thing.

This all seems incredibly smart to me.

Trudy at Gradient Lair had some words of advice on this topic, and a specific book rec: Dr Beverly Daniel Tatum's "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria". (I've read Dr Daniel Tatum's "Can We Talk About Race?" but not "Why Are..." so clearly I need to pick that up.)

God, I'd read that post and blanked on it. I need more sleep. Thanks for the reminder!

...I cannot actually remember whether I have also read the book, or not. I know I meant to, a couple years ago.

addendum: recently, my husband had to explain to our 4 year old about racism. He kept it fairly simple, but it was agonizing. I forget what brought it up, but it required explaining that some people think that the color of your skin makes you a better or worse kind of person, and especially these people think that if you have brown skin instead of light skin you are a better person, and that is a very wrong idea that hurts people.

I mostly remember the look of confused horror on my son's face. "But why? Why do they think that? Why do they hurt people?"

Oh god, I am not looking forward to explaining all the ways the world is fucked up. ;___;

Speaking as not-a-parent (well, not-a-parenting-parent anyway), it seems to me that the "no bad consequences" part and the "get shit on for doing right" part come way later than the "do right, don't do shit" part. Should be a Piaget stage, even if it isn't.

Yes, I think so. I just wish I felt like I had a better handle on the path to get there.

I think mentioning race -- especially whiteness -- is very useful. Have you seen the Unmarked State t-shirt I put together for

pokershaman?

Yes, and I love it. :D

I am really confused by that article, and by your response to it. It seems to me like it is saying "you tell your kids 'everyone is equal' but then you do X and Y and Z that belie it", and then encourages you to stop saying "everyone is equal", instead of encouraging you to stop doing X and Y and Z.

I don't see any contradiction between saying people are equal, and also teaching the reality that some people are treated differently, often very badly, and why it happens, and why it is wrong. This is how I was raised. My parents *didn't* associate only with white people, or freak out if I made a non-white friend, or quietly ignore the racist relative at Thanksgiving, or the other things that Harvey mentions.

I'm completely baffled by the idea that a proper approach to teaching kids about race involves training them that the color of someone's skin is one of the most important things about them as a person, one of the first things to notice about them and comment on, as you're describing. Any more than, say, the color of their hair would be.

I should probably be avoiding this minefield entirely, but you are one of the few people who both have a perspective on race wildly different than mine, and are capable of making insightful comments without ripping my clueless-white-boy head off. So I am interested in what you have to say.

Well, the first thing to accept is that race is already one of the first things you notice about a person. Okay, I'm not even going to talk about you personally. Let's leave you out of it entirely. Let's assume that you, personally, don't see race.

The amount of segregation in this country alone proves beyond a doubt that race is one of the first things that everyone else notices about a person. Oh, not that people all look at one another and spend a lot of time thinking "...argh. Thai, or Laotian?" but yes: we look at someone and we do categorize at least at a high level, such as black or non-black, Asian or non-Asian, maybe Latina or non-Latina, depending on where you live. Race is one of the most important things about you. Race affects where you live, how you talk, where you shop, who your friends are, how much money you have, what jobs you will do, who you'll date and/or marry, whether you will go to prison, what quality of health care you'll get, whether you will die young. It doesn't determine any of these things on its own; but it affects them.

When white people steadfastly participate in this system - which you do, we all do, since everyone does; it is too pervasive to opt out of - but refuse to give their kids any way to talk about it, it only reinforces the unexamined belief that this is not a system but just a natural aspect of the world. It makes it very hard to think about it constructively. I assure you that people of color are talking to their kids about it. They have to. If you want to know what happens to children of color whose parents don't talk to them about race, read what kids of color who have been adopted by white parents have to say on the subject. It's fucking heartbreaking. They're sent out into the world without any tools to cope with or even talk about the racism they encounter.

The reason to stop saying "everyone is equal" is not that it's a bad message; it's that if saying it is completely compatible with massively racist behavior, then it doesn't really send much of a message at all. Better not to spend your time saying things that don't mean much. Better to figure out what does have meaning and say, and do, that instead.

Also, when the Junebug and I read books, we do talk about the color of people's hair. And the color of their shirts. And the color of their bicycles. My kid is personally really interested in color. The color of people's skin is part of that, so we talk about it as well as all the other colors.

Thank you for being patient with me. So I'm seeing two assertions here:

1) Kids will notice race whether they're taught to or not
2) Someone's race is such an important part of who they are that it's important to notice

(1) doesn't match my experience, but I realize my experience may be weird. I grew up in a California town that was roughly 2/3 white non-latino, 1/3 Mexican or Mexican-American, scatterings of others. There was prejudice against the poor Spanish-speaking Mexicans, but it seemed to be based more on the other two attributes - poor, or Spanish-speaking - than the darker skin or Latin features. Even in retrospect I recall witnessing very few examples of overt racism towards middle-class Mexican-Americans.

Against this backdrop... I *really didn't* notice race. Generally the first time it'd register with me that someone was Latino was when I heard their last name. The people with Spanish-sounding last names were, if I'd sat down and thought about it, more likely to have black hair, and somewhat likely to have darker skin, than the people with non-Spanish-sounding last names. I didn't sit down and think about it. It didn't seem important.

As for more subtle stuff, like who's Jewish, who's Italian, etc... yeah, forget about it. I didn't even realize that Jews could be considered a race until my late teenage years, rather than just a religious or cultural group, and Mom's side of the family is all Austrian Jews who fled the Holocaust.

Occasionally race is really obvious, in your face, such as darker-skinned African-Americans, or the little old Japanese man who rented an apartment from my great-uncle. But... it's no more blatant than, say, bright red hair. It did not inspire me to categorize them along with other people with similar skin tone and facial features, any more than I would have categorized all people with red hair together.

I dunno, maybe if I'd grown up someplace like Chicago, or the South, dealing with race would have been a more inevitable and thus important part of my life? As it was, when someone lives in the same place as you, goes to the same schools, talks the same way, has the same money, shares the same friends, has the same college and job dreams... I am still having a hard time seeing how "look at the little Mexican boy" does anything more than openly invite a kid to treat him as something "other", which rarely leads to anything good.

The message I got on race was pretty much: Everyone is equal. Despite this, not everyone gets treated equally. Some people treat other people differently based on stupid things that don't matter, like race. This used to be a lot more common, but it still happens. Those people are being assholes, don't act like them.

I think, in the 1970s, that was considered an enlightened attitude. Now it is considered to be cluelessness generated by white privilege. It seems analogous to shifts in feminism, where second-wave feminists in the 1970s were chanting about how sex doesn't matter, while today's feminism seems to seek recognition of and (appreciation of? consideration for?) difference between the sexes, or at least between the experience of the sexes. Saying that sex doesn't matter now demonstrates that you Just Don't Get It, at least if you're male.

I have more understanding of the shift in feminism, because it seems a lot more inevitable for men and women to have different experiences, and be treated differently, than for people of different races to do so. Race is a social construct. Sex is a biological reality. We've already seen examples of prejudice against races disappearing, unless there are still some "No Irish" signs out there that I'm unaware of. I don't think we'll ever see the same with sexism.

Ehhh. I'm babbling. I guess it's just a matter of emphasis? "Different, but equal", vs "equal, even if different". I just have a hard time getting the echoes of "separate, but equal", and how THAT worked out, out of my head.

I only really buy this line of reasoning if you also object to a parent saying something like, "Hand your ticket to the nice man, honey," or "Look at the girls and boys playing; isn't that nice?" Pointing out people's apparent gender is commonplace and isn't any more 'training them that [someone's gender] is one of the most important things about them as a person" that matter-of-factly mentioning their ethnicity or skin color.

In practice, as a white parent, my approach was to avoid avoiding. That is, if there's a black kid and a white kid playing and I want to differentiate between them to my kid, I do have a societal-pressure kind of urge to describe them without mentioning race -- see that taller kid and shorter kid? See the one with the blue shirt? no, the one whose shirt is BRIGHT blue, not light blue -- and that's not necessarily bad, but "Hey, tell Jamie to come over here -- no, the black kid in the blue shirt. Yeah, Jamie." is a good way to stop acting like race is something unspeakable.

Normative whiteness insists that I stop noticing (or, of course, stop mentioning that I notice) when people aren't white, because they're transgressing the default, to which I say fuck that.

I think the sort of language you describe *does* train gender essentialism into kids to an unwelcome degree. I also think it's basically impossible to avoid it, in a language where pronouns are gendered, honorifics are gendered, and many nouns are gendered, and in a society where children are segregated by sex from a very young age. It's a fascinating question as to how kids should be introduced to gender if we *didn't* have such constraints, but as it is, it's kinda moot.

Treating race as taboo, or racial features as something unmentionable, is of course silly. This kid has red hair, that kid has brown skin. I'm just dubious about treating the brown skin as something worthy of special emphasis, whereas the red hair is not.

Man, don't be disingenuous, though. It's not really the color of the skin. You know that blind people can see race (and make snap judgments based on it), right?

I wish I could convince you that I am sincere and not just trying to be contrary...

I went and read the 26-page article which that link discusses. It does not seem to support the "it's not really skin color" argument. Both blind and sighted interviewees, white and non-white, described race as primarily a set of visual attributes. Among blind respondents, "voice and accent remained secondary measures used to give a sense of what is thought to be the primary characteristic of race: visual cues." (Annoyingly, the author seems to attribute smell as a racial indicator to learned racism, which does not match my limited experience in smelling other people.)

I mean there is facial structure and accent and speech mannerisms and all sorts of other things, but in most cases, these were way too subtle for me to pick up as a young child, in the ocean of unfamiliar differences between people that surrounded me, without being trained to do it.

I admit it is possible that I was an especially oblivious young child. Probable, even.

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you know, the easy questions

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