Dear Parents of White Children, This week a dear friend, the mother of a precious Black boy, related a horrible story of racism. The story isn’t mine to tell, but the boy was victimized blatantly because of the color of his skin. He’s very young, and he was traumatized. There are no excuses. The same day I learned of this story, I had an activity planned for my on-campus Comp I students. Our first essay of the year is an evaluation, and in order to introduce the concept, I had the students evaluate a children’s book. (The length makes it accessible for a short in-class activity.) We brainstormed some criteria for evaluating the genre -- illustrations, theme, accessibility, etc. -- and then each group was given a book and a few minutes to discuss strengths and weaknesses and come up with an overall impression. At the end of the lesson, we discussed how to turn that overall impression into a non-obvious, arguable thesis statement with implications. I grabbed a few books off of the family book shelf: A Mother for Choco, Shades of People, If a Bus Could Talk, Freedom Summer. These were books I loved to read to my children, and I was excited to share them with my students. Because I teach at a campus with a majority white student body, I’m always looking for ways to bring issues of diversity and inclusion into the conversation, even in my writing class. I chose these books intentionally. (If I hadn’t been the mother of transracially adopted family, my bookshelf may have looked differently. That’s a layer I need to pull back and sit with, too.) After I distributed the books, I wandered among my students, listening to their conversations. “This book is too mature for young children,” I heard one group analyze as they flipped through a book about Rosa Parks. It talks about lynching and the Klan. “Kids don’t need to know about that,” they concluded. “This one would require too much background knowledge for kids to understand,” another group quipped. “They would need to understand segregation before they could understand what Freedom Summer is about. And the pictures are too dark.” As I listened to them, I added a few comments of my own (“You may be the parents of white children someday. They need to know these stories.”), but mostly I thought about my friend’s son. What if the boy who bullied him because of his skin and hair had been introduced to issues of equality and justice at home? What if his parents had taught him, in an age appropriate manner, about our country’s sordid history with race? What if they had read to him books like If a Bus Could Talk and Freedom Summer to give a basic framework for history and used books like Shades of People and We Are Family to explore the beauty of diversity in individuals and in families? Would the situation with my friend’s son had been different then? I think so. And what about the other white bystanders? What if they had read these books with their families? What if they had been taught to stand up in the face of injustice and went to tell a safe adult? What if they spoke out against the bullying student and protected my friend’s son? Eventually my thoughts turned to my own sons who’ve been called names because of their skin color and experienced firsthand the sting of implicit bias and racial profiling. I remembered my younger son being told to “go back to Africa” by a student from another school when he was on a trip with his 6th grade class. The list of these instances isn’t short; I wish I could erase it. Of course, I can’t. “Mom,” my oldest son last week as we walked down the street together to his job at the state fair. “I’ve been thinking about what I will do when a white person says something racist to me. I know I will want to retaliate with violence or by saying something really mean or cussing them out, but you want me to come home alive. And I want that, too. So I’ll just walk away. I know the limits. I don’t know who might have a gun, who might be mad enough to really hurt me.” These are the thoughts that keep him awake at night, the decisions he is making for his life. I’m not naive enough to think a few children’s books will solve the country’s problem with race, but I also know that ignoring the problems and not addressing the roots won’t do a darn thing to make things better. So yes, the books might be difficult. The content might be painful, and the illustrations might be dark. But the conversations are necessary. For the sake of my kids, read them to yours. Love, Kim
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September 2020
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