In ARP Links yesterday, Elena Perez pointed us to her post on the California NOW Web site:
It struck me that, although her family is racially diverse, Millie doesn’t see it. Maybe that’s a function of many of us having lighter skins, or maybe that’s a function of the fact that we live out our ethnicities, but we don’t necessarily talk about it with her as an aspect of skin color and race. Now that I know she’s noticing skin color, we’ll be more explicit about the different races and ethnicities of our family members and friends. Hopefully that will help her gravitate towards the kids on the playground who are her age, or doing things that look like fun, and not just the ones who look like she does. Read more…
Yes! I think this notion is what was missing from the Best Life article. Talking to kids about race helps take away stigma and bias. Being silent, I think, allows prejudices to cement. Going to great length to avoid race gives a social construct undue weight.
Your thoughts?
I think talking about it is always the better way to go. I have 3 white daughters and the first time we really discussed race was when our white friends adopted a 2nd black child. One of my daughters (7 or 8 yrs. old at the time) said, “I bet E. will be happy that he’s not the only one in his family with brown skin anymore.” My knee-jerk reaction was to shut down the idea that my daughter had about it possibly being difficult for E. to be the only minority in the house, but from reading this site, I knew she was right. It opened up a lot of discussion about race and privilege and I think being able to talk about it has definitely taken away stigma. I mean, the kid could clearly see that it would be hard to be a child who looks so different from his parents. If I would’ve said, “Oh, I bet E. doesn’t care about that! He loves his family and he knows they love him,” and told her to never ever speak of it again, she would’ve gotten the message that it’s a bigger deal than she even realized and, I think, it would’ve created a stigma where there wasn’t one before.
I don’t know. I thought I did. When I was growing up we NEVER talked about race. I lived in a very white undiverse neighborhood and for 2 years (6 and 7 yo) I was bussed downtown where the school was split up with the neighborhood black kids on the top and bottom floor and us middle class white kids on the middle floor (they called it the oreo cookie school). But I always looked at people as people.
Now I have 2 biological sons who are part Latino and a Chinese daughter. We live in an area which is fairly diverse and the school is 50% minority. We talk about race all the time. However my 6 year old keeps calling people that look like him (he is white looking) as Americans and everyone else by their ethnic back ground or “others”.
I don’t know if he is just a different child, if I am doing something wrong but by not talking about race as a child I never saw it and by talking about it with my children they see it and are classifying people.
I mean, I know that I occasionally came home with racist sing-songy chants that I learned and my mom IMMEDIATELY told me it was wrong and why but there were no deep philisophical discussions about it either. It was never proactively discussed.
“Going to great length to avoid race gives a social construct undue weight.”
A minor point: This comment just reminds me how Social Constructivist “theory” on race has been reduced to simplistic and, to be blunt, politically problematic forms of understanding.
The argument goes something like this: since race is “socially constructed,” it is not real and thus should be treated as a fiction or myth.
This is nonsense.
All identities are socially constructed.
National identity (as American, for example), religious identity (as a Christian, for instance), or caste and class identity are socially constructed.
Indeed, feminists like Judith Butler in her work _Gender Trouble_ have suggested that even supposed “biologically based identities” like gender are *also* socially constructed.
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
http://www.amazon.com/Gender-Trouble-Feminism-Subversion-Identity/dp/0415924995
Does this mean that American national identity, or Christian identity, or gender identity are not real and thus should not be given undue weight?
How many social constructivists would be willing to come out and say this explicitly about Christian or American identity?