So You Don't Want To Raise A Racist?

Lately, the news has been full of proof of a horrific truth: racism in modern America.  

I don’t want to rant on and on, but race is a big issue in my life and I plan to write a lot more about it in the future.  Today I focus on some of the things I credit for helping me grow up rejecting racism.  If you are a parent, unnerved by the world your child is being raised in, I invite you to take a few cues from my parents and my early childhood.  

Note that I wasn't taken to riots or protests as a child, and I wasn't lectured on race by my parents (though those may not be bad ideas).  Heck- my parents are Republicans!  But you don't have to be a protesting revolutionary to raise empathetic children.  Rather, as I will relate, there are some very simple things that parents can do to encourage open-mindedness without forcing any rhetoric down their kids' throats.

 

Full disclosure:  I’m as white as they come.  Blond hair, blue eyes, freckles.  “Northern European-American sounds so much more glamorous…but yeah, I’m just white…” I sheepishly reported to a state employee taking down my demographic information the other day. 

And my husband is black.   His family is “good old-fashioned plantation black” as one of my favorite co-workers in Maryland once described.  He is also ¼ Native American.

Our babies will be as mixed as you can imagine.  And we love that!  So that’s the angle I’m coming from.  It puts me in an interesting position to watch and listen as our two worlds interact.

The usual reaction from our loved ones about our relationship is “PLEASE have babies NOW!  We can’t wait to see them!”  But, as, oh, so many recent news events reveal, there is still so much racism in this world and, surprisingly, in this country—a country which fought so hard for freedom and liberty, and sacrificed so many lives nearly two centuries ago to eradicate slavery here.

I remember watching an old news video during law school about the race riots that happened when schools began to integrate in Boston around 1974.  It blew my mind.  I never even knew this had happened, let alone happened in such recent history!  I was amazed that it took all the way until law school before a teacher of mine would go there.   For shame!

ME:  They had RACE riots in the NORTH?!  In the 1970’s?!  Martin Luther King, Jr. was dead and buried well before 1974!  Also, the Supreme Court ruled interracial marriage Constitutional several years before this!  The March on Washington was a memory!  Birth of a Nation was an old, old movie at this point!  The North had won the Civil War more than 100 years prior and the XIV Amendment abolishing slavery was also over 100 years old!  

I listened with my jaw on my desk.  White people rioting because they don’t want young black students at their local schools?  Young, black students who were probably scared out of their minds at going to a new school already.  How cruel can you seriously be?  Protesting against children going to school…now that’s low.

I’m not sure exactly when the following interview was recorded, but it would have been within the last few years.  It was originally broadcast by WGBH and was picked up by NPR’s This American Life podcast in 2013.  You can listen to it free on a This American Life re-cap podcast, just search iTunes for: recap of TAL episodes 51-75 (2013).  #52 “This Year—recapping the best podcasts.”  The interview starts around 2 hours and 20 minutes into the recap episode.

It is an interview from a random husband and wife (Caroline and Danny) in Charlestown, Massachusetts, (Boston suburb) where some Boston busing race riots once occurred—

Wife:  What happened on the Oprah show was, she had on a white man who was married to a white woman—he disowned his children for being associated with black men and then in fact disowned his grandchildren because they were, they were black in them.   And I was saying, “That’s a disgrace!  That’s your blood, you don’t disown anyone.”  And Danny said…

Husband:  I don’t know…what did I say?

Wife:  You said that you thought he was right.

Husband:  I said, “I don’t know what I would do, but I understood his, his feelings.”  So, you wouldn’t mind your daughters marrying a black guy either?

Wife:  I didn’t say that, which we have discussed at length, that that is a fear of mine, that I would like to think I’m open-minded about race, more so than I’ve ever been.  But if it came down to my daughters choosing another race, I don’t think I’d be happy with that.

Husband:  I mean, I’m definitely, ahh… I wouldn’t say a racist, but I have definitely bitter feelings towards blacks.  I was raised that way, too.  I mean, my father’s an [--unintelligible, maybe “anti-panther”--]  I think it rubs off on ya.   Like I would never deliberately, I would never say anything to my girls, but they’ll learn.  They’ll learn what’s, what’s there’s and, ya know, what’s your own and things like that.   But that’s just growing up around the same type of people—they’ll look at anyone that’s not like them differently—I don’t have to tell them that.  It sounds ignorant, but I had no problem, I like the way I grew up and Caroline's outta the same mold and I don’t have a problem with that.  I’m not gonna push it on them at all, but I hope someday they marry and Irish Catholic boy and, ya know, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  Other people say that’s being racial; I think it’s natural to like your own kind of people.

…

Ya know, I think it’s a rare breed of person, you must have to grow up somewhere where you walk down the street and there’s a black kid, a Chinese kid, and white kid, and a Puerto Rican kid all playing together.  I just can’t even imagine that.  That’s just some kind of made up fairy tale, I think, where everyone gets along together.  Ya know, I can’t imagine it.

Whoa. 

So, back to me. 

If that^ is what white America looks like, how did a white middle class female from a very conservative and religious family like I did, come to be so not racist?  How did I miss that whole part about implicitly learning “what’s mine” while I was growing up?

For starters, that “fairy tale” this couple spoke of where everyone is together and gets along—that mythical place that this Massachusetts couple just “can’t imagine”…well, that was my childhood.  

Diversity in Early Childhood:

Just to illustrate the point, my hometown (not the county, not the region, but merely the CITY of  300,000) had entire congregations of my church (not ALL churches, just my church) that were specifically dedicated to the following languages/cultures: English, Korean, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Samoan.   And we’re not talking about the Catholic church or something else super common, that’s the itty bitty MORMON church! 

 

I remember being little and my mom teaching me the phrase "White Flight" and telling me how pathetic it is that some white people get so scared when minorities move into their neighborhood that they leave and want to cluster together. 

Decades later on an airplane to Israel for my summer studies, I sat by two of my peers, also from Orange County, California, but from more white/more affluent cities.  I told them I was from Garden Grove.  Their only response, besides laughter, was this mocking statement, "White people live there?"  Mom was right.  They are pathetic.

In 3^rd grade, my two very best friends were:

1) Raquel—Mexican-American and also descended from the Gabrielino tribe.  Her mom took us to the Native American Festival at the Orange County Fairgrounds and it was awesome!  Raquel seemed to know literally everything, constantly spouting facts about this and that.  And we would spy to get naughty kids’ names and room numbers, and tell the teacher on duty so they could get written up (I know, I know, snitches get stitches…). 

2) Angela—1^st generation Vietnamese-American.  She and her parents answered the phone in Vietnamese when I would call, so I knew about –that— much Vietnamese. Angela would share books with me, we had similar tastes in fiction and loved to talk about what we were reading.

Around 4^th grade most of the girls in my class, including myself, were obsessed with playing Gonggi (basically Korean JAX) so me, Raquel, Angela, the Korean girls, and a smattering of other girls played every chance we got.  I always won.  Seriously, I was excellent at Gonggi.  

The diversity I was surrounded with meant a wider field of companions, and even little boy crushes, to choose from.  Although I know my close peeps will try to be assigning my old flames to the following list, this is how my little crushes and boyfriends from 3^rd through 12^th grade looked: blond guy, Latino, blond, Latino, Korean, blond, Latino, mixed Asian/white, Eastern European immigrant, blond, Polynesian, and mixed white/Latino.  So about half of them looked like me.  The other half, really not.  I liked the BOY, not his hair color or skin color.  And what do I care which language his mom answers the phone in when I call?  My close girl friends’ families already had me speaking the mildest of conversational Vietnamese, Korean, and Spanish anyway!

Genuinely Embracing Culture (yours and others'!)

 My FAVORITE day of the entire school year throughout Elementary School was always "Multi-Cultural Day."  (In fact, I used to think that Neapolitan ice cream was called Multi-Cultural ice cream, lol.)  Usually my mom baked Irish Soda Bread for me to bring for the class, and I would get up in front of everyone and beam as I gushed about my Irish/English/Welsh/Danish ancestors.  No white shaming here.  White people have rich heritages, too,  and I was more than proud to share mine!  

 Later, I took International Dance in college and loved performing the dances that would have been native to my own ancestors.  It was very grounding and thought-provoking to contemplate my ancestors.  Still, my favorite was Polynesian dancing.  I became good enough that I even performed in a few Fijian dances for huge ticketed performances in a stadium that could seat over 20,000 people!  This was a big deal!  I’m not a Pacific islander…at all.  But I loved their culture and I was freely welcomed to celebrate it by my Hawaiian dance instructor, Kauwe, who taught me various forms of Polynesian dance.  Just as welcoming was her New Zealander husband who taught me to dance The Haka!

One more word on culture, living in Southern California, we are very influenced by Latin American cultures.  Half of my family speaks decent or fluent Spanish.  Some people who live relatively close to the Mexican border get all angsty about immigration and “those illegal Mexicans taking our jobs.”  My family?  We dress like luchadors and box on the trampoline, shouting playful insults in Spanish.  

A poor representation of Mexican-Americans?  Obviously.  But if that is not embracing something not native to your background, then I don't know what is. ;-)

Parental Attitudes:

When most people would have probably thought I was too young to "get it," I remember my family placing the musical West Side Story in front of me.  This is a musical written by Leonard Bernstein, patterned after Romeo and Juliet, about a Puerto Rican Maria and a white Tony who fall in love and are driven apart, (and driven to violence, sorrow, and death) not by their Houses, but by their racial and cultural groups.

When I first saw this movie, I was a mess!  I wish I could see my young little self sobbing on the couch about the injustice of it all!  I refused to watch the movie again for years because it had made me so emotional and I didn't want to have to cry that much again.  I was haunted by the words of the two young people yearning for a home together free from racism where they could share their love in peace, "There's a place for us, somewhere a place for us..."  The simple fact that my parents owned this movie, let alone told a child it was a great movie to watch, certainly says something.

Now, A few words about my dad.  He is an attorney and I have seen my dad brag about few women (besides my mom) the way he brags about the skills of his legal secretary.  We ALL know that she is the best legal secretary in Los Angeles County!  And she's black.  Her excellent work and work ethic were known to us long before we knew the color of her skin.  And so from his bragging, us kids implicitly knew that black women can and should and do succeed in the workplace.  And she was our living proof.

Along those lines, I never saw my dad more excited about a case than when his innocent African immigrant client was found Not Guilty of a trumped up rape charge!  How many dads tell their young girls about getting a black immigrant out of jail who is accused of rape, and are HAPPY about it??  My dad.  Why?  

(1) Because he was innocent, no matter where he's from or what he looks like.  

(2) Justice is far more important than race.  In fact, race is irrelevant to justice.

My dad didn't know it, but these were the lessons he was teaching me just by living his life and talking about it. 

Even when I was in college my parents were still influencing my views on race and race relations-- I don't think they were doing it on purpose (in fact, I don't think that they ever did it on purpose) they were just being their amazing selves.  One holiday break, I came home to my parents playing the movie Amazing Grace basically on repeat.  If you don't know this movie, it is about an inspired man in British Parliament making it his life's work to end the slave trade in England.  It is a superb film and I cry every time I watch it.  A testament to the power of looking out for our fellow human beings.

The Take Home #1= DIVERSITY. 

Do you want your kids to be those ignorant guys on the plane laughing at a stranger about her hometown, "White people live there?" or do you want your kid to be the one who speaks Spanish, has lived abroad, knows Polynesian dance, has friends of every color, and is NOT a racist jerk?  Growing up in all-white, upper-class neighborhood and schools does not necessarily doom you to racism...but I have seen very little evidence to the contrary.  

If it means putting your kid in an ethnic Dance Troupe (not your ethnicity), do it.  If it means going out of your way to set up play-dates with families you wouldn't immediately consider, do it.  If it means playing on community sports teams instead of fancy all-white club teams, do it.  In my experiences, exposure Early And Often to people who look different than you is fundamental.

Take Home #2= POSITIVE LEARNING/MEDIA INFLUENCES.

Not the news.  Definitely not the news.  All your kids will see there are artificial women who think they are pioneers in their field by being a female newscaster.  The only thing you’re pioneering are new Botox treatments.  Look at your face in the mirror and then look at your wrinkly male co-host and tell me I’m lying.  NOT the news.

Instead, try History!  The story of the struggle for equality is one that spans generations and continents.  Let children know about the sacrifices Abolitionist made, the risks that anti-Nazi agitators in Europe faced with bravery, the tragedy of September 11, 2001.  History is often sad, but it is real, and there is no better way to learn how to not make mistakes in the future, than by learning from the past.

Podcasts are exploding with great information presented in an accessible manner.  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a podcast presented in a way that kids can understand and is culturally sensitive.  

And books!  I recently bought a children's book about Thomas Jefferson that even mentions Sally Hemings!

  "But monumental figures can have monumental flaws, and Jefferson was no exception. Although he called slavery an 'abomination,' he owned about 150 slaves..."

   -Thomas Jefferson: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Everything

    Maira Kalman

Well-crafted films can be a great way to incorporate history, politics, and sensitive themes like race, which would otherwise probably be difficult to have a lengthy conversation with your child about without losing his or her attention.  Seek out the West Side Story and the Amazing Grace that suits your family.  And let them spur subsequent conversations.  I remember after watching Pocahontas, I asked my mom if Pocahontas and John Smith got married.  When she said no, I was so devastated that I silently cried in the back seat all the way home from the movie theater.  So learn your history and be prepared to supplement the media with the true stories and with the untold stories of past heroes.

Good luck, and don’t let me down—my kids will need friends who like them for who they are, not for how they look, where they live, or where their grandparents came from.

#EndRacism