What White People Say to their Kids about Race

    One of the things I think I have in common with a lot of other white people who grew up in liberal, mostly-white Northern cities is that my parents never said much of anything to me on the subject of race. This is, in no uncertain terms, the very definition of white privilege: as a member of an ethnic group that forms a supermajority in both your immediate area and the country as a whole, you are not asked to think about yourself as anything other than a human, and can fairly easily go about your life assuming that this is as true for all people as it is for you. I don’t think that my parents never talked to me about race because they were especially inconsiderate or thoughtless; it’s just that we lived in a place and a time that never really brought the issue to the foreground for us. On some level, of course, this is a condition of existence that white people sought, even if a lot of us would have been horrified to realize that this was what we were doing: white flight from cities like Chicago and Cleveland and New York, away from urban centers and out to suburbs, or to western cities like the one I grew up in, was couched in terms of “finding good schools” and “getting away from crime”, but in many respects it was really about cocooning ourselves away from the black folks who came north in the second Great Migration. This way, we could go on living our lives without having to bear witness to the true effects of white supremacy. In fact, kids of my age and social class more or less grew up thinking that white supremacy was an aberrative behavior sequestered safely in the actions of a few sick individuals who were now all thankfully long dead. It was rarely brought to our attention that white supremacy was alive and well and thriving in our systems, and when it was there was always some way to stave off responsibility.

    Part of the reason for this is the way we were taught about race in school, frankly. Nobody ever said to me in so many words, “Black people were oppressed in this country, but then there was the civil rights movement in the 60s and it’s all fine now,” but if I carefully examine the attitudes I walked out of high school with, I’d say that was the bulk of the message. We were showed some footage of people being hit with water from fire hoses, then a couple of speeches by Dr King, and then left to assume that black people were now happily riding at the front of the bus and tipping their caps to police officers and joining in on the American Dream. We never talked about redlining, or the how the GI bill didn’t work the same for black vets as white vets, or the way in which the draft vacuumed up black and brown teenagers in disproportionate numbers and shipped them off to fight and die in Vietnam; we were never challenged to contemplate the idea that perhaps history hadn’t ended with the passage of the Voting Rights Act; it certainly never crossed anybody’s mind that the panoply of American ethnicity comprised more than white and black, or that the goal of any person of color would be anything other than to become, more or less, an honorary white person, with whatever rights and perquisites that might entail.

    Let me tell you a little story, which might help illustrate how insidious this type of education could be. I remember getting into an argument with a friend’s girlfriend when I said something offhandedly about the Civil War having been fought over slavery. This would have been about 1997, when we were juniors in high school. Anyhow, she came over all condescending and said something like, “Do you really think that’s what it was about? It was about state’s rights.” I remember this so vividly because I had been taught a version of the same thing, and though I had intuited that it wasn’t an entirely accurate representation of what had happened, I mostly felt embarrassed: it felt like getting a question wrong on a test, which I didn’t like and rarely did. I wasn’t self-possessed enough to come back with the obvious retort, A state’s right to do what, exactly? I didn’t know enough to cite all the various ways in which the Confederate States made it clear that what they cared about most was maintaining slavery within their borders. I certainly wasn’t smart or brave enough to condemn an entire system that taught white children a lie about history in order that we might feel better about ourselves and our country. Instead, because of the ways that white supremacy had been inscribed on both of us from very early on, I ceded the point: she was probably right. You must understand that I hate to lose arguments; I hate it so much that part of the reason I remembered this incident for so long was because it felt like the only time in my whole life I had lost one. That’s how powerful received wisdom can be. Now, of course, I remember that moment for different reasons, and I’m glad that I do.* It’s important.

*Luckily for me, the way in which I think about it now also means that I retroactively won that argument! Never wrong, I tell you. Never been wrong.

    I don’t really expect or trust that American schools will ever come to tackle this subject terribly well,** meaning that one day it will be incumbent upon me to talk to my kids about race in America, in a way my parents never felt the need to. I’ll have to do this, not because my parents were bad parents, or even because I think they should have known well enough to have that kind of talk with me — if history never ends, and it doesn’t, then one of the things we need to acknowledge is that people keep learning from it as it keeps going. This is something that white people need to have learned from our experiment in running away from the issue of race in America: sequestering ourselves from it does not solve it. The reason I was taught that the racial history of America ended with Martin Luther King, I think, is that a lot of people profoundly wished it were true, and as the man said, the wish is father to the thought. If we could just convince ourselves that everything was okay now, then we could ignore the ways in which it wasn’t. Having been asked to acknowledge that people of color were human, we did so, and then many of us, fearing what such an acknowledgment might mean, tried instead largely to ignore them. We kept running the country largely by and for ourselves, and the system, through the negligence of many and the malevolence of some, continued to be a system of oppression. Albert Einstein once wrote, “The world is in greater peril from those who tolerate and encourage evil than from those who actually commit it.” This is how that happens.

**Though I do expect that they can stop teaching Lost Cause lies to kids; that’s a very low bar to jump over, even for public education.

    So, what would I say to my kids about race, what specifically? Hell, that’s a hard one. Luckily it’s something I have a lot of time to think about, given that said kids don’t even exist yet. It could even be that my kids won’t be white, in which case, some of this goes out the window. I think, first, I’d say that it’s important to be humble about it. Do not presume to know more than you do; do not make the kind of mistake that I, personally, have made many times, and think that because you’ve read a book by a black person, you are now an expert on blackness. Or being Latino, or Asian, or whatever. Second, be suspicious of happy endings, or anybody who tells you the story ended before you were born. Those people are lying to you, though they probably don’t even know it. Revolutions do not happen in this way; systems do not change overnight. When people are upset, take them at their word. Protests and riots don’t occur because people love violence (though some of them do); they happen because people can think of no other way to be heard.

    But one thing I keep coming back to, one thing that I must admit makes me uncomfortable to think about, is that white people are going to have to talk to their kids about whiteness. In the past — in the present — when white people talk about whiteness, it has usually been as a means to make explicit the system of white supremacy from which white people implicitly benefit. We all sense this system, and know it’s there; we wouldn’t be so uncomfortable talking about this if we didn’t. We wouldn’t be teaching our children a history that ends in 1965. We wouldn’t have concocted a system of shibboleths in which the n-word has more power than any other word on the planet, and racist is just about the worst thing you can be called. These are defense mechanisms, in my read, though they do at least indicate good intentions. (Also, keep in mind that I don’t think it’s a good idea for white folks to go around using the n-word willy nilly.) And I think this is the stuff white people need to talk to our kids about — not to make them feel bad, but so that they can approach the task of making the system better with honesty, and not repeat the mistakes and bad judgements that their parents and grandparents did. I mean, we all wish for the world to be a better place for our children, right? This is part of how we do that.

    The last thing I think it’ll be important to teach my kids (or the last for now, as I'm sure this list will go on mutating for a long time), one I have to remind myself of from time to time, is this: this is not a team sport. I have to remind myself of this these days when people talk about Donald Trump, and how he wins the support of white men disproportionately; this leads some people, understandably, to speaking disparagingly of white men, because Donald Trump is a fatuous gasbag, a dangerous charlatan, a liar and a villain with the mind of a criminal, and he has risen to prominence on the shoulders of a lot of people who share a lot of characteristics with me. I find myself getting defensive: Hey, I think, there are lots of different kinds of white men. Don’t put that shit on me. So I’ll have to help my kids remember: that’s a thought that almost any person who is a member of an ethnic or religious minority has had more times than you’ve remembered to put gas in your car. This is a lesson in empathy. Interrogate the ways you think about people who are different from you. Wonder why you believe what you believe. Remember that every time you feel defensive, you’re reacting to something that happens to you less than it happens to anybody else. Remember that this isn't a team sport, and every person you meet is an individual with an individuated experience.

    Anyhow, I’m not entirely certain what got me off on this jag. Originally this was going to be one of those things where I folded in a TV show and a cultural event, but it’s gotten so long now that I’m not sure there’s really a lot of space to talk about Black-ish or the death of Muhammad Ali or a police shooting in Central Oregon. What I’m really going to do now is force myself not to chicken out on posting this, I think.