The students in my class were outraged. It wasn't fair that Black and white children weren't allowed to learn together, they said. Didn't they understand that all people were equal?
There was a single Black student in our class, a shy and quiet girl with braids named Vanessa. My students pointed their fingers at her, clamoring, "We would let Vanessa come to our school!"
I was brand-new to teaching and I was in way over my head, but I knew the librarian's lesson had gone terribly wrong. At 6 and 7 years old, my students had already internalized that they weren't equal at all: They were the ones with the power. They would wield their power benevolently, of course: They would "let" Vanessa come to "their" school. They were already comfortable in the assumption that they were and always would be the ones in charge.
I think about that lesson a lot, especially now that I am raising my own white male child (my husband would argue that he isn't white, because we're Jewish, and we have been persecuted, and a Nazi sympathizer would just as soon target us, but I would argue that what happened to George Floyd would never happen to us and so it isn't the same thing, and in fact this is an argument we have been having a lot lately).
If you are raising a white middle-class child in America, your child probably thinks racism is a very unfortunate, archaic facet of American history that we solved in the '60s by listening to the words of Martin Luther King Jr, sending Ruby Bridges to school and putting Rosa Parks at the front of the bus. Every January on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and every February during Black History Month your child gets to congratulate themselves for not being the kind of person who would make a tired Black lady sit at the back of the bus because obviously all men were created equal, and then they get to move on with their lives until they grow up to be liberal white adults who are so scared by the sight of a Black man emerging from the bushes in Central Park that they phone 911 during a pandemic and carefully describe the man as "African-American" several times.
I know this because I have bungled the job of discussing race with my own white child. And I know that because on Saturday night, when we watched America burn on CNN and carefully explained why the protesters were out and what happened to George Floyd, my child said, "If I had been there, I would have gotten between him and the police officer, and then the officer would get in a lot of trouble for shooting me because I'm white."
My child isn't a racist. But he's internalized the structure of racism. He understands instinctively that there's an innate power dynamic that grants more value to his life than a Black life. And he thinks that in order to be a hero all he has to do is put his own white body in front of a Black body.
In his fantasy, he generously bestows the gift of his protection on that Black body, because he isn't a racist, of course. He just knows that he is inherently powerful in his white body. He moves through the world free and unencumbered and unafraid. He challenges authority because he doesn't have to live in fear of what might be done to him if he doesn't.
Even in his fantasy, where he nobly challenges injustice, the structure of the power dynamic remains intact. It's so easy to teach our white children that we're all equal on the inside. It's so much harder to point out all the ways we're not equal on the outside, especially when we're not doing the real, visible work of dismantling that system: I may be raising my white child in the most diverse city in the world, but I'm also raising him in the most segregated school system in the country. I am complicit.
Eli has this fun book called "So You Want to be President?" It correctly points out that all of our presidents have been white men. I've told him how this means that when we learn about things that happened in history, we mostly learn about it from the perspective of white men, and so we need to pay attention to whose voices we get to hear and whose voices we don't.
But then the history of Black lives becomes one in which they have always been silent, in which they have always needed white voices to speak up for them. If I am a well-meaning white parent who has tried to teach my child that we need to stand up for marginalized communities, I also need to become a white parent who celebrates those communities not only because they allow us to feel like benefactors, but because their narrative is powerful in its own right.
Here's a summary that spoke to me from Nicole Byer, the esteemed host of "Nailed It," a show Eli and I thoroughly enjoy together:
No comments:
Post a Comment