[Editor's note: Sorry for slow posting and moderation. I am sooooo sick. Sniffle...sniffle...]
written by Love Isn’t Enough contributor Julia; originally published at Nobody Asked You
Last week, my son’s daycare celebrated the Week of the Young Child with an assortment of special activities. The committee of teachers who planned the activities decided to organize around a theme, and chose a sort of cowboys-meets-wild-west theme. I thought it was an odd, slightly dated choice—I mean, do most young children living in the Midwest even know what cowboys are? (my son sure doesn’t)—but I didn’t see any harm in it as long as there wasn’t any cowboy-and-Indian nonsense.
I am happy to report that there was absolutely no cowboy-and-Indian nonsense. There was, however, an art project that I found very troubling. A week before the special celebration, a piece of paper appeared in my son’s cubby one afternoon; it was printed to look like a blank Wanted poster and was accompanied by a note: “Please decorate this however you would like.” These ambiguous instructions seemed somewhat disingenuous, though, as the blank white rectangle in the middle of the page looked like it was meant to be occupied by a drawing or photograph, assumedly of a “criminal” on the lam.
My response to this assignment was immediate and visceral: no way am I putting a picture of my child—my black, male child–on a wanted poster. My child is not a criminal, and it’s not cute or funny for me to imagine him as a criminal, when I know that plenty of criminal assumptions will be made about him as he grows up.
But what to do? I thought about how we could alter the assignment to make it work for us. Perhaps I could alter the text to read “Wanted more than anything in the world by his family” or something like that. A friend suggested substituting a peace sign for the photograph. Another friend with a dark sense of humor suggested using a photograph of the governor of Virginia. I briefly contemplated a photo of our family dog, whom we could legitimately and comically accuse of biting off the button eyes of most of my son’s stuffed animals.
In the end, somewhat paralyzed by discomfort and doubt (and too exhausted as usual by normal life to want to use any additional energy on this), I did nothing. And, judging by the number of completed Wanted posters that lined the hallway (not even approaching the number of children at the daycare), we were not alone. There were, however, quite a number of families who participated quite enthusiastically. One drew a villainous mustache on a photo of his son. Others added cowboy hats. I was interested to see that families of color participated as well, although two black families had put photos of the entire family on the photo rather than singling out the child. One black mother, though, seemed to have no discomfort, writing “she is on the loose!” next to a photo of her daughter.
I know I have some basis for my discomfort. My American Indian colleague, whose daughter attends the same daycare, also did not participate, and when we chatted about it, her reasons were similar to mine. And I noticed that one parent of a white child who did complete the poster was careful to write “Wanted: For Extreme Cuteness” above a photo of her daughter. Yet, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that I overreacted, made something of nothing, projected all sorts of adult fears onto an innocent assignment. I would be grateful, readers, to hear what you think.
I guess I don’t see anything that odd about the assignment, but there isn’t a single child in this part of the country who does not know what a cowboy is and doesn’t see modern day ranchers and cowboys walking down the streets or at the state or county fair. The state fair has an Old West booth where kids and adults can dress up in Western gear (cowboys of the Jesse James variety, too) and pose in wanted posters or other similar fake vintage settings. It’s a very popular booth. American Indians where I grew up ranch and like country music and they seem to use the Wild West booths at the fair when I’ve walked by and seen the examples in the photo booth. Kids enjoy trying out the old time jail at some of the prairie village museums here and having their pictures taken behind bars. It’s all a novelty and no one assumes they’re going to grow up to be criminals. They’re kids playacting what it was like to live in the Old West. I see it as part of the country’s heritage.
If you didn’t want to put your kid’s picture in a wanted poster, I’m sure there are ways that you could have altered the assignment as some of the other parents did and still had it look cute and not be commented on.
Well, I’m sure the assignment itself was innocent, but of course your reaction to it isn’t any less valid. I’d almost focus on your reaction to your reaction – it seems like you spent a fair bit of time worrying about whether or not it was a valid response. I think when you come up on something that for whatever reason strikes a nerve like that, just say “Nope. Not gonna do it” and move on (if you can).
FWIW, I don’t know if my immediate reaction would have been to expect that it should be a picture of my kid, vs. maybe something the kid thinks should be ‘wanted’.
@Andrea
“Kids enjoy trying out the old time jail at some of the prairie village museums here and having their pictures taken behind bars. It’s all a novelty and no one assumes they’re going to grow up to be criminals.”
First, I would have much less of a problem with this assignment if my son had the maturity and cognitive development to understand the assignment and make a decision about participating. I don’t feel good about doing this TO him.
Second, no one EVER assumes that white kids are going to grow up to be criminals, so this kind of play is very safe for white children. People DO make assumptions about how children of color will turn out, so to me, this sort of “play” has a much less innocent connotation.
“American Indians where I grew up ranch and like country music and they seem to use the Wild West booths at the fair when I’ve walked by and seen the examples in the photo booth.”
This sort of smacks of “people of color do it too, so it’s okay”–an argument I don’t think holds much water. As I said above, people who understand what they are doing who choose to participate get to choose to participate. But I’m certainly not going to make any assumptions about all American Indians from some photos [and there's such a thing as internalized racism, which may or may not be relevant here]. As I noted in my post, my American Indian colleague was uncomfortable with this assignment, too: for her, it was an uncomfortable evocation of the whole cowboys-and-Indians thing.
Then, there’s the problematic nature of the whole Wild West thing, that is really such a white, romanticized view of history.
I have to agree with dersk. I think the assignment, and the teachers’ intentions were most likely innocent, but that does not make your reaction any less valid.
You actually brought up a good point: when you said that your child is not a criminal, and it is not cute or funny to picture him that way. You know what? It’s really not.
How & why did it become “okay” to make being a criminal “cute”?
I don’t think you overreacted at all. Maybe mention to the teacher that the assignment is only innocuous when viewed through a lens of privilege. Specifically, we’re talking about the privilege of the social perception that children’s photos displayed on wanted posters are something cute and quirky rather than a grim foreshadowing of the child’s future prospects. This privilege is something that isn’t shared by populations whose members end up overrepresented in this nation’s prison complex, as you pointed out. Could you imagine a classroom assignment in a black majority school where the kids were asked to put their pictures up on wanted posters? Never. No way.
I wouldn’t put my son’s picture on a wanted poster either. (His preschool had driver’s licenses made with the kids’ photos. That was cute.)
Two people mentioned that it was probably ‘innocent’. Of course the teacher didn’t mean any harm. But that’s not the point. The point is that it is harmful.
It’s innocent that at my son’s school the emergency form asks for the mother’s and father’s names. But that doesn’t make two-mom families feel welcomed. It’s something we need to get changed. (I am not suggesting that you need to do anything more about this incident you’ve been dealing with.)
I remember having that feeling of “Am I over-reacting?” in the past. I don’t think I was. Mother’s Day is coming up, and my son’s school will do something, and I’ll feel torn about it. They do less for Father’s Day, but that’s the one that’s harder here, as I’m a single adoptive parent, and my son has no father in his life. I’m fine with that, but Father’s Day celebrations at school make him feel deprived.
(Sorry to wander off-topic…)
Um… I’m an early childhood educator (more than 25 years in the field) and an adoptive parent of children of color, and I am speechless. Are you kidding me?! I think your reaction was completely appropriate, and the “theme” was completely *inappropriate* on *so* many levels. What on Earth would the “learning objectives” for such an activity be??
@Andrea – Maybe kids who “enjoy trying out the old time jail” are lucky enough to not spend their weekends visiting a parent in prison. And how dare you “know for sure” what every single child knows? Some kids know about cowboys, some kids know about jazz musicians, some kids know about hip hop or farm equipment, some kids know about ballet or gang shootings. The world you live in is not the world everyone lives in.
@Sue VanHattum – Yes, you and your family deserve to be included, not excluded. Sometimes it is in the small details of the language on Admission Forms (Parent/Guardian 1 and Parent/Guardian 2 works well) and sometimes it is thinking more carefully about our traditions and celebrations. Why not a Parents Day or a Family Day?
In order to help each child feel known, loved, and respected, we as adults must step outside of what is comfortable, familiar, and easy. We must slow down and think about the impact of our words and our actions. We must remain open to the questions and concerns that we should be raising with one another as we work together to help our children grow healthy and strong in a culture that is often so unhealthy and destructive.
Respectfully, Andrea in Vermont
Yes. You overreacted. It was nothing more than an innocent and fun project that would not have harmed your child’s psyche. Also, I find it odd that children would not know what a cowboy was or that a black child, particularly, would be unaware of the great number of African-American working cowboys in the 19th and 20th centuries or about black rodeos, e.g., the Bill Pickett Invitational.
@Sue and Karen: I’m thinking “yeeeeah, but….” in reaction to your posts. But that’s only because the assignment was broadly “Make a wanted poster” not “Make a wanted poster of your kid”.
So, to me, the explicit “Do what you want” with the poster makes it okay (of course, so’s Julia’s reaction to it).
I probably would have done a derivative of the assignment, make it positive like you mentioned (i.e. The most wanted for being so smart or Wanted for being a GREAT kid). Nice article definitely put things in perspective.
@Julia: I don’t think you overreacted. I would have reacted the same way. No thank you. I don’t like the whole “western” meme anyway, for the reasons you mentioned above. I think it is an over-romanticized part of American history. Plus, it’s not my history and its not my son’s history sooo…it’d have to be pretty compelling to get me involved and a wanted poster is not going to do it.
@Julia: I do want your opinion on something re: overreaction in daycare. My son told me that the daycare teachers call one of his friends “Blondie” (she is the only girl with blond hair in the class). This rubs me the wrong way, but I haven’t said anything about it. I don’t like children being nicknamed by physical appearance. What’s next? Is my son going to be curly? Brownie? I just don’t like it. I also think that it could result in the feeling that blond = special. An idea that I am all too sure that he will get later on. What about the other little brown and black haired girls in the class? How does this make them feel? Am I being too sensitive? I have not said anything yet but I am wary.
@ Sue, I agree with the parent forms. They should say “parent/guardian.” I can imagine that Father’s Day would be tough for a child without a father in his life. That may be something that is tough for your child throughout his life –I have friends that struggle with it as adults. Maybe you could talk to your son’s teacher about this and have him/her be sure to be more inclusive of all family types on that day. Are you a two mommy family? If so, I think on Mother’s Day you should both be present—what is better than one mommy if not two? And your son, as an adopted child, might even feel that he has three mommies (not sure if you are engaged with birthmom that way). That’s great and I hope your school uplifts all families–not just the ones that fit that “traditional” mold.
This assignment would give me pause. I think parents have to be careful about the messages we and others send to our children. I don’t think you overreacted. I think your story shows that you are real person who is constantly thinking about and evaluating what’s best for your child. It doesn’t appear there was any harm in not completing the assignment and other parents clearly thought about it, didn’t participate or made some changes. Here’s the way I see it. I do what’s in the best interest of my child. Sometimes I get it right; sometimes I get it wrong. As long as I learn, it’s all good.
Thanks for all of the responses.
@Montclair Mommy,
Ew. I don’t like the “blondie” thing either, and I don’t think you’re overreacting. For me, it feels sort of patronizing, in the same way that it does when a saleswoman calls me “honey.” You know? And that sort of patronizing stuff is much more likely to happen to girls/women than to boys/men. But I can also understand your interpretation–that it’s putting extra emphasis on this girl’s blondeness (and thus, throwing into relief all the children who are not blonde.) Is the daycare director someone who would be approachable about something like this?
@Terence,
Fair enough. I wasn’t really concerned about my son’s psyche, though. He’s two, and could care less. The assignment wouldn’t have meant anything to him (which is another reason I’m not crazy about it–why not do something a kid could relate to?). It’s not so much about his feelings but about how this assignment may shape (entirely unconsciously) how people see him, and that it reifies a larger narrative about black people and criminality.
As for the cowboy thing, I don’t know why my son WOULD know about cowboys. He’s two. What he knows about the world comes from the stories he reads, the tv programs he watches, the places he goes, what we talk about with him, etc.. It happens that cowboys are absent from all of the ways he learns about the world–not at all by design, but just because that’s the way it is. To me, cowboys seem like they were a common fixture of childhood (or, white childhood at least) in my parents’ generation. But maybe this differs my region.
The history of African-American cowboys is one that I know little about, and only recently learned about. I’m looking forward to learning more. Some other parents I discussed this issue with also brought that up and mentioned these resources:
http://www.tamu.edu/upress/BOOKS/2005/massey.htm
http://www.blackamericanwestmuseum.com/
http://theautry.org/whats-here/overview
@Karen,
It’s interesting that you write this: “Could you imagine a classroom assignment in a black majority school where the kids were asked to put their pictures up on wanted posters? Never. No way.” The daycare is majority white, and I had assumed that this assignment was the product of a committee of mostly white parents. I just learned that the committee who chose this project was made up of 6 teachers–5 of them black. I don’t know if their thinking would have been different with a majority-black student body, but it seems like it might be harder to predict than you or I would think.
Andrea in Vermont, I said children in this area do know what a cowboy is. In a rural area where they see people in cowboy hats and cowboy boots walking down the street, at the state fair and where “Cowboy Poets” give presentations all over the state in local school presentations, it would be hard for them NOT to know. That may not be the case in the original poster’s area but cowboys and the west are part of the country’s history and heritage and I’d think any kid’s education was lacking if they didn’t learn about it. Hands on activities like the prairie museum, which also has an old time newspaper office, dentist, post office, butter churn, etc. are one way of teaching about it. There were black cowboys and American Indian cowboys too and there are pictures of them in some of the museums I’m talking about. As far as this particular activity, I still don’t think it was all that harmful. There was some room for creativity there — “Wanted for Extreme Cuteness” or “Wanted for Being the Best Kid in the World” — would have worked too.
Well, the whole Wild West myth is just that – a myth. The whole gunfighter thing is a complete invention.
@Montclair: Blondie? Really? Weird. You could always get everyone to start calling the teacher Dagwood….
over the years I have seen many collections of angels in every shape you can imagine. and in every kind of setting and for many various occasions. and every one is in agreement that “Angels Are Cute”….Right? well one angle slew 185,000 in one night, I can not see the cuteness in a being that is capable of such an act even thought he was being obedient to God’s orders. A black child on a “Wanted”poster? is not cute either, considering that too many black faces are on “Wanted” posters. Each of us as parents have to make decisions based on what we believe to be best for our children and you did just that. You and the other mother who believed as you did, I solute the both of you for not going along with the majority. The majority is not always right, Jesus is a good example of that. I am proud of the both of you for standing firm on what you believe to be best for your children. Thank goodness every one is not a herd animal as- Sigmund Fraud; Just going along because every one else is doing it does not make it right. Congratulations to the both of you for being, strong parents and strong individuals. Keep up the good work!
dersk wrote:
You tell that to Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday. and billy the kid>
Well, the whole Wild West myth is just that – a myth. The whole gunfighter thing is a complete invention.
@Montclair: Blondie? Really? Weird. You could always get everyone to start calling the teacher Dagwood….
The Wild West stories were probably somewhat exaggerated, but no, they’re not a myth. But it depends on what you mean by “myth” too. There were real cowboys who lived in real cattle towns and there were towns where the law was scarce and gunfights were had. There were black and white and Hispanic and Indian cowboys and cowgirls and women in bawdy houses. There were people who lived in sod houses or homes dug out of hills while they staked a claim to a farm. Two-year-olds are obviously too young to learn most of that but older kids should know it as part of the history of the country, including some of the more colorful stories like Jesse James or the Pony Express or the gunfight at the OK Corral.
@Montclair Mommy
I don’t think the Blondie nickname is appropriate; I don’t think it’s appropriate at all for teachers to bestow nicknames on children in their class. All of those forms you have to fill out nowadays asked what the child’s preferred name is, and THAT is the ONLY name they should use. My son is only called by his given name (just two syllables – why would he need a nickname?) and I’ve taught him to correct anyone who tries to call him by anything else. He’s even corrected his teachers.