metaphortunate son (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
metaphortunate) wrote2013-08-20 04:07 pm
metaphortunate) wrote2013-08-20 04:07 pm
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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.
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.
no subject
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.