Monday, March 26, 2012

Why It's Time To Talk to Our Kids About Race No Matter How Young They Are - My Response To Trayvon Martin

In general, my goal for these posts is to chronicle my life with Owen in a funny way, talking honestly about the rough patches of parenting but the murder of Trayvon Martin has made me think more seriously about what it means to raise a son. I have some friends who were recently joking about how the hard part about having sons was that you ended up losing them to a future daughter in law.  I'm pretty sure that I will be an awesome enough mother and mother in-law that this will not be the case but I guess there's always a danger.  I told them I was banking on my son being gay so I just get another son, though I guess their would always be mother to contend with. (Assuming he had one, he could have two dads too. . oops I digress.)

My husband's worry for our son is that he will be so sensitive that the world will be hard on him.  I'm not sure where this fear comes from, perhaps the fact that Owen kisses his stuffed animals on the mouth or blows kisses at people on the television if they are crying, or seems to stop people on the street who look lonely and wave until they smile.  I am not entirely convinced my husband's fear won't disappear entirely when the terrible twos arrives.

I do worry about raising a son in New York City.  From my experience boys can sometimes be the target of other boys just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Yes, girls fight too but it generally seems to be personal.  But in the light of both Trayvon's death among other recent incidents I have thinking about how grateful I feel to not have the added burden of having to worry about the effect the race of my child has on his likelihood of being the victim of a crime.  Yes, I still worry about cars and deadly animals and freak storms.  I will probably worry about SIDS until Owen is out of high school.  I worry about traffic accidents and poisoned Halloween candy even though we mostly walk in the city and have yet to go trick-or-treating and even when people thought old men were poisoning Halloween candy it wasn't really happening.  But in general the only time I worry about the color of Owen's skin is when we are outside and he rips he hat off and I have to worry about his super pale baldie head burning in even the modest March sun.  And while that IS a considerable worry as we come from a long line of skin cancer sufferers, to say that that is my "white woman's burden" is somewhat ridiculous.

What happened with Trayvon Martin is devastating but sadly not an isolated case. While our country has come a long way in regards to race, we still have a long way to go.  As white parents, especially those who identify as being forward thinking, who regularly expose their children to different cultures, who talk about politics and morals, it is easy to think that our kids either do not need to be taught about race or that talking about race does not need to be explicit.  But as books like "Nurture Shock" (Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman; Twelve, Hatchett Book Group, 2009) show, white parents are not talking about race, or at least not in a way that changes attitude or behaviors.  (Read the chapter "Why White Parents Don't Talk About Race.") White children still tend towards associating positive traits with people who look like them and negative traits with people who don't. This is a problem.  Sure, eventually this problem will be solved when white people don't exist anymore, and yes this day is coming even if it won't happen in our lifetime.  But that seems like a lazy, irresponsible solution.

The most powerful thing we can do as parents is to make sure that we don't create the George Zimmerman's of the world.  Or even if are to give him the  deepest benefit of doubt and take a step further back, that we don't create the world that gave space for his fear to feel so real.  This is our moral obligation.

I don't purport to be saying anything particularly new or daring.  I don't claim to be above or beyond racism in any way.  I am most decidedly not naive enough or egotistical enough to think that my talking about race will magically make it disappear for my son's generation. But I do think that sometimes as parents, especially white parents who consider themselves 'aware of race' that we do not address it directly enough.  We do not talk about it in a real meaningful way. In general, parents offer vague comments like, 'race doesn't matter' or 'anyone can succeed.' This does little to change children's perceptions. One study in the Journal of Marriage and Family 2007 shows that our of 17,000 families with kindergarten students 45% do not talk about race at all and if you look just at the white families that jumps to 75%  (Bronson & Merryman 2007).

75% is not acceptable.

So while you might not be able to change the mindset of a neighborhood watch person miles away or change the mentality of police who still racially profile, or individuals who do the same, what we can do is teach our children about race.  Use this incident and others to make a difference in some way.   Telling kids that skin color does not make a difference does not make a difference.  We need to be explicit and real.  Kids do respond.  And start talking now. Kids are never too young.

Now to be clear, I don't think I can have a completely meaningful conversation with Owen today.  As advanced as I think he is, he's still mastering words like "water" and "milkies" so I don't know if it makes sense yet, though my mom claims she gave me a very meaningful lecture about the birds and the bees when I was four.  She said she wanted to get it out of the way.  And while I think perhaps her approach was a little off (sorry Mom) I also think that maybe she is on to something.  If we start talking about it freely before kids can really understand, it will not be as hard later because we will be so used to it.

So when the story came on the news again last night, I told Owen what had happened and why I thought it was wrong.  And because I'm still hormonal (yes, I know it has been a year) I explained to him why I was crying and how I hope so much he would be safe always and how I felt so much sadness for Trayvon's mother. I'm not sure he got it but it does not matter.  He will some day.

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