I have thought about this post, letting the thoughts about it ramble around my brain a bit - hoping if the things that I want to say will be better if they marinate first, like a good steak or pot of stew. I don't know if that really works, but it is my process...
I couldn't be more white. I did an Ancestry DNA and the most southern part of my DNA is from....Michigan. I am highly Slavic, Scottish, Eastern European, French....I am blue eyed and fair haired...I grew up in an entirely white family, in a mostly white town, going to a church where it is rare to see a person of color and going to school in the middle of corn fields with another group of white kids. I don't know if most families handled the issue of race like mine did back then, but it followed the school of thought that we don't see race. Everyone is equal, everyone is made by God exactly the way he wanted them to be, and skin is just a characteristic like hair color. As a kid in school, black history was a week or so of information that never really sunk in. It was awful, but so far removed from what I knew that it was impossible to sink in. I 100% grew up believing race was not an issue anymore, that everyone felt like I did. I had no clue of the bigotry and the hatred and the bias that permeated our country - and still does.
As I grew up, my world expanded. I met and shared conversations and experiences with people of many backgrounds and ethnicities and color. I followed current events and traveled to other cities much more worldly than my humble beginnings. It shifted my lens that I saw race through - showed me that while actual plantation slavery is a thing of the past, many other awful things followed from then up to where we are now. Fear of someone different, fear of something unknown, prejudice that is taught through careless words or racist jokes....so many little things that are woven into our psyche. Some that we know of and some that we just assimilated somewhere along the way.
As a parent, I have never HAD to think about talking about race to my kids. My kids don't face any danger from not having had a race talk. I packaged my race talk in with my be-kind-to-others and God-makes-us-all-different talks, thinking that was enough. We talk a lot about inclusion, about never leaving anyone out. But before this May, I had never sat down and shared so much truth about race in America as I did yesterday. I thought about it for a while. How much is too much for a 6 and 7 year old to understand? As their mom, I want to shield them as long as I possibly can from losing their innocence and trust in people. But if I were a black mom, with black kids...this conversation wouldn't be optional, right? It would be necessary. And if these kids have to lose their innocence, how can I say I stand with them if I continue to hide the truth of this from my own children? I want my kid to be the one on a playground standing by a kid getting picked on - for race or funny clothes or crazy hair or whatever...so my kid has to be armed with the knowledge of why some kids have it harder than others. He has to know his own privilege and use that platform that he has to help stand up for those that are marginalized.
So I did what I always do when I need to undertake something. I bought books.
I researched online and sought recommendations and bought myself four kids books on diversity and inclusion and kids that live in different cultures. We skipped all our regular home school yesterday and got cozy on the couch and read through all of them. It took a long time. My kids had lots of questions. There were things I never realized they had never seen - like a Muslim woman in a hijab. They thought I was joking that cows were sacred in India. We read this really beautiful book called "The Color of Us" that had a young artist going out into her community to see all the different shades of brown in her neighbors. It was gorgeous. We learned what the word 'diversity' means. And then I told them that in America, a black man had been killed by a white man just because of the color of his skin. I explained that even though it was wrong, there are still people out there that believe they are better than others. My kids were utterly confused - my son summed it up best by saying, "if we know this already as kids how can there be adults that don't know?" We talked about how this prejudice makes it harder for kids of color - and how we need to be the best partners that we can be to make the world a place where everyone feels heard. It was a hard conversation, where my mind was just whirring to hopefully say the right words to all these questions.
I hope that I made the right choices and said the right things, but even if I made a mistake - I am sure that starting the conversation and widening their world view was the right way to begin. And if my kids start talking to you about race - whether you are black or white or any shade in between - I hope that you appreciate their curiosity and help me encourage them to ask questions and hear the answers and continue to make this a moment of real change. A change that I truly believe we all have a share in making in whatever way we can.
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