written by Anti-Racist Parent editor Tami Winfrey Harris
A friend of mine, mom to a tween girl, was fretting at her daughter’s burgeoning hormones. Her 12-year-old had recently, to her shock and dismay, expressed a desire to be “sexy.” As her daughter grows, my friend is becoming more and more aware of the sexualized images that abound. No matter how hard a parent tries, it seems kids get the message to grow up way too fast. My friend was certain that an age-appropriate talk about sexuality was in order. What did I think?
I, of course, told my friend such a talk should not happen. Talking about sex only creates problems and ideas where none exist. No sense borrowing trouble. My friend’s daughter is a good kid–smart, popular and kind. There’s no way she would absorb the message that women are only valued for their beauty and sexuality. I reminded my friend that, in her youth, she made good decisions about intimacy…mostly. And hey, my friend and her husband are educated professionals and live in a great neighborhood with top-flight schools. Even if she never has “the sex talk” with her daughter, good breeding will out against peer and societal pressure. Besides, my friend and her husband love their only child very deeply and that is all the innoculation against bad behavior a kid needs. I suggested to my friend that she and her husband try pretending not to see sexuality. Just don’t speak of it at all, all the better to teach their child that the subject is sensitive and should be avoided. When it’s time for her daughter to actually have sex, she’ll “get it” on her own.
Now, of course, you know I’m messing with ya’ll. No conversation like the above ever happened. The idea that parents needn’t address important issues like sexuality…that class or education or location or parental history or merely loving a child is enough to keep her safe from negative influences is patently absurd.
Most parents agree that child rearing involves proactive efforts to educate, instill strong values and prepare children for life’s challenges. We talk to our children about the things they should and should not do. We talk about sex–maybe not always well, but we generally talk about it. We talk about the importance of education, how it paves the way for future success. We talk about alcohol and drug use. We talk about faith or lack of faith. We talk about safety–teaching little ones to stop, drop and roll, and to avoid strangers. We don’t leave these important things to chance, because the stakes are too high.
If love alone won’t keep a toddler from touching a hot stove or stop a teen from engaging in unprotected sex, why, then, do so many of us think love is all you need to keep a child from absorbing prevalent biases against people of color or being damaged by them?
I hear versions of the above arguments all the time.
My partner and I never say anything bad about people of other races, so, where would my daughter pick up negative views about people of color?
<We live in a good community. Yeah, it’s all white, but race isn’t an issue. My interracially adopted child will have no problem fitting in. No need to make race a big deal.
My kid is a good kid; he could never be prejudiced.
My family doesn’t even see race!
In a society that preferences and normalizes whiteness and marginalizes and otherizes other races, racially unbiased beliefs don’t develop through osmosis. Acknowlegment of racial privilege doesn’t just happen. And children of color aren’t simply born with armor against prejudice and racism.
An anti-racist parent is a proactive parent, who includes race in the canon of important values that must be actively enforced in age-appropriate ways throughout a child’s life.
That is what we believe.
LOVE this!!! I hear these arguments so often, which is one reason why having ARP as a resource to send on to people means so much to me.
You nearly gave me a heartattack over here in Denmark, when I read the first part about not touching the subject
)))))
Seriously! I’m with Irene. As an adolescent medicine physician, I was like, has she lost it?!!
OK, now that I get it, I’m so with you. If you don’t talk about it, how is your kid going to learn about prejudice?
I was getting a little nervous at the beginning, but figured it out by the time I saw “good breeding will out”.
In very peripherally related news, I heard this morning that parents talk to their children about money & finance *less* than they talk about sex & sexuality. I’d say that’s another subject to add to the list [up there with education, safety, race, etc.]
Sorry for the derail.
Thanks for the example, though. That *does* make it abundantly clear.
I love this!!! I have also used the sex-talk analogy when I hear statements like the ones you have quote (all too often). It irks me to no end when people say that talking about racism just perpetuates racism. A code of silence around race just leaves children more susceptible.
But yeah, like Irene, when I first started reading I was like, “No way she did that!”
I read this and went “huh?”, and then: “Liana, is going to have a coronary…”
We should never doubt the awesomeness of Tami!
Come on, folks! Don’t you know me by now?
I had just been thinking of that analogy for a while. It seems odd that race is one of very few important things that most parents fail to discuss with their children AT ALL.
P.S. Sorry for the wonky formatting. I’ve tried to fix it multiple times. WordPress and I are enemies.
Haha, Tami, that was awesome. Like others, I kept reading, “What??” before I realized you were joking. I haven’t thought of the sex-talk analogy, but it’s a good one. It really illustrates the idea that racism, like hypersexuality, is just “in the air”—regardless of what one might do or say at home, though I suspect most white families are completely unaware of how they perpetuate privilege—and battling it requires conscious effort and conversation.
Thanks for the laugh and the tip.
Well, I think there’s a lot of things that various parents never talk about to their kids, resulting in missing life skills. As well as racism, you’ve got sexism, religious intolerance, pretty much any kind of prejudice. And of course all the life skills that kids aren’t learning, like how to eat a decent diet (was in NC last week after a year and a half out of the US and, my God, Americans are getting even fatter!), how to balance a budget, how to set and achieve realistic goals, etc.
If I think about the stuff I want to teach my daughter, I think teaching her about racism and how to be resistant to it includes two other indirect topics as well as racism directly:
- First, I want to teach her to think skeptically and question her (and others’ assumptions). This goes of course WAY beyond just racism, but would address the hidden assumptions behind it. Since she’s tri-national and a girl in a fairly sexist country, I think this’ll be pretty important.
- Second, I want to teach her not to give a damn about popular culture, its ideals or its expectations for her. That’s probably more my attitude as someone who’s always felt himself an outsider, but I think it can go a long way to breaking away from anxiety based on conformity.
I guess my thesis is that teaching your kid to be anti-racist will involve, as well as the talk about racism itself, instilling some other thoughts and values. And will have the additional benefit of combatting other kinds of prejudice.
Another fabulous one… and you really had me. I was so shocked at the first couple of paragraphs I didn’t even see the analogy coming!
Ahaha! You had me going for a minute there.
But actually, this is an excellent analogy. Thanks for putting it that way.
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Nice post, you had me going there for a sec …
So glad to see this info getting out there, thanks so much for what you are doing!
You might like Patty Wipfler’s Listening to Children series which has helped me with my young one’s over the years. Also, for me using listening partnerships with other parents helps dismantle my own misinformation and biases and to be more aware of my white privilege.
Your sites serve similar purpose for parents to vent and process race issues etc and begin clearer thinking and have more support as we go back to our kids from the keyboard. So thanks a million! xoxo cindy
Well put, Tami! I kept reading the article re: Love Isn’t Enough until the end. I had to see where it was going. It started w/ a different lens and I wasn’t sure what direction she was headed. However, it made sense. I struggle with the colored lens. I think the ‘priviledged’ should look through the ‘transitional’ lens; pretend not to be color blind but see life in different way. People avoid for fear and convinence. My 10 y.o. son attends a K-8 school that uses the word ‘emphasize’ Native American Indian culture. They had something positive in the beginning but a new principle was hired and overtime, staff changes. They couldn’t grip/continue to embrace, influence, and enrich the students with Native American Indian cultural teachings and true history. Part of this Native emphasis on their school dist website is to acknowledge (the inequities) and recruit Native families in a school environment that is welcoming (Note: Native American kids have a high, if not, the highest drop out rate amongst middle/high school age kids who are often considered an ‘invisible’ statistic and less than 1% ethnic group category.). I’ve been involved with the school’s ‘Native’ advisory group and it’s come to a point that I have stated: ‘Unless we: the principle, staff, teachers and parents can ‘walk the talk’ of honoring & teaching about the first people of this land it must be taken off the website.’ It wasn’t taken well. The battle is ongoing for indigenous people. Talk about racisim. The school administration can be patronizing perhaps sometimes ignorant trying to avoid the real issues. Same as adoption. Can’t avoid cultural differences and a parent(s) should not make adopted kids or kids of mixed racial backgrounds think they are just ‘white’ or white is right (make all children become ‘white’). White is not an ethnicity or a nationality. Nonetheless, white is a priviledge especially economically. It hurts me to see a person of color who marrys their partner who claims to be white and they have children. However, the spouse who isn’t white puts down other people of color or is seriously biased. It’s a battle that is totally exhausting at times or can be very sensitive to talk about. For Ms. Tedaldi, shame on her if its just a cultural/color issue. I didn’t watch the interview and can’t comment in detail but per other comments, sounds like a bad case of judgement and priviledge+power thing going on.
This post is on point. I completely agree with you.
My mother didn’t really talk to me about racism when I was young. She never told me how bigoted and evil some people can be. By the time I hit puberty, I learned the hard way.
I’m biracial/multiracial. My husband is a white American of Scots-Irish and some distant Crow Indian ancestry. My children with him will most likely be very “white” in appearance because of our blended backgrounds.
However, I will still teach them about different cultures. I will teach them about my Jamaican culture and I will show them positive aspects of other cultures as well. I don’t want them to be ashamed of who they are. I don’t want them to feel limited by anything.
My husband grew up very unaware of white privilege. He was raised in a white, Southern, conservative family. His parents raised him to not openly discuss race or racial issues. I believe that since meeting me, he’s become more open-minded about certain things.
I’ve explained to him that talking about race can be healthy because it forces people to open up and learn more about the world. I’ve taught him that most black women are very sensitive when it comes to their hair and how society’s destructive beauty ideals hurt women of color. I’ve told him about my personal experiences with discrimination and racism.
He went from understanding very little to understanding more than before. He used to say that he didn’t see color. I told him that was a ridiculous statement, because we ALL see color when observing somebody else. It is impossible to avoid seeing the color of another person’s skin.
There are physical differences between people. However, these differences should not determine the way we treat other human beings. I believe that this is what people who claim to not “see” color really mean.
His parents didn’t talk to him about race either. He told me about growing up in a nearly all-white town in North Florida in the 1980′s and playing basketball with a black coworker (he was about 16 then). But when it came to spending time at one another’s homes or hanging out otherwise, it just didn’t happen.