Hellobee

My son was born the same day Michael Brown was killed. The irony of giving birth to a white male who will likely never have to wonder if his color is a reason he is being treated unfairly, or, yes, even killed, is not lost on me.

My heart is heavy. I believe many other parents feel the same way. For me, recent events and in the last few years have left me in disbelief, pain, angered, confused, and with a deep belief that I have to do something. I’m speaking from my context – my whiteness.

It took me a long time to process that I, inherently, have privilege and power. That I, personally, am a product of racism and engage in racist acts every day. To be completely transparent, this was a hard pill for me to swallow. I began understanding this, very theoretically, when I left my small, predominately white, Christian hometown in Idaho. I moved to our nation’s capital to earn a degree – and I learned a great deal more about the world and myself in the process. When I began working with a small organization aimed at empowering young leaders in DC – mainly, young people of color – my eyes were opened to the luxuries I had taken for granted growing up. My home state doesn’t have the best record of achievement in education, but I walked out of school solid in my knowledge that my teachers had been equipped to give me their best – my school was funded, resourced, and there were an abundance of people who had been teaching for many years in the same school and district. In college, I began to see the same was not always true for the young people I engaged with and many others in my country.

My career began in the classroom as a teacher in Baltimore City and much of my personal awakening began there. I learned from my students, from the veteran teachers who knew hundreds of times more than me, and from dozens of critical conversations with people around me about how my white skin impacted so much of my life and experiences.

I am still learning. Last Christmas, I read Between the World and Me and Ta-nehisi Coates and after immersing myself in his words, written directly to his young son, I recognized that I need to challenge myself to grow, change, again. I have to progress further because now, now I am a mother. I am learning the lesson of humility all over again because I don’t know exactly how to turn this realization into action.

I don’t know all the ways I can be more thoughtfully and more actively anti-racist, and bring this into my identity as a mother, especially a white mother of a white male. But I do know that I have to do something. I want to take action in my sphere of influence to build a more just world where people of color are not unequal citizens in the eyes of society – implicitly or explicitly. And my first place of influence is at home, as a mother, with my nearly-two-year-old son.

I want my son to learn, reflect, and challenge himself sooner than I did. I want him to engage in and analyze the world he lives in at a younger age, in hopes that he will make decisions to amplify the voices of people who don’t have his privilege. I want this because I think that will help our country and our world to be a more just place.

I am currently in the phase of processing how. How do I, a white woman who has never experienced prejudice, judgment or dehumanization because of my skin color conceptualize living on the other side of racist privilege? How do I then turn those reflections into words and actions that will ensure my son is more aware of his personal biases at a younger age and more actively anti-racist in his life than I have been?

I acknowledge my own privilege, power, and racist thoughts and aggressions, at the micro and macro level, so that I can be a more living example to my son. We all have biases – and for me, a white woman, I believe that it is nearly impossible to separate my privilege from race and racism itself. It’s a challenging mindset to adopt, but it has been necessary for me and my personal growth. For me, acknowledging this has meant that I am more keenly aware of how I engage with friends, colleagues, and the world. Part of my personal growth in this area has been acknowledging that I will never fully understand what it means to be a person of color. I simply can’t. But I can listen, engage, and deepen my ability to empathize with things I’ll never know. I hope that my son will see and hear these reflections and, by modeling, I am building his capacity to do it too.

I ask questions. I ask questions of my friends – white and nonwhite. I do my best to listen (this is, for me, more about shutting up the responses, justifications, ‘buts!’ in my head that come from a lifetime of thinking I’m a ‘good person.’) and change, even infinitesimally, as often as I can. I don’t always ask the right questions. I am learning. I hope my son will see me asking questions and turn first to inquisitiveness, rather than assumption and judgment.

I read and reflect. This is a succinct article from Huffington Post about raising anti-racist children, and here is a more detailed PDF with several reflections and considerations. I read things that make me nod my head in agreement and things that make me squirm because they challenge the inherently racist and privileged way I view the world. I have found several books to read with Will to engage his mind at a young age, courtesy of this fantastic blog/resource.

I seek to build the vocabulary to have the conversations with my son that will be lead him to an actively anti-racist path that I hope and believe will mean greater and different things for our country when he is an adult. This is maybe the hardest of all because it means talking about it in a world that still doesn’t feel ripe for these kinds of conversations (As an example, I have edited this post so many times before it landed here, in attempts to strike the right tone while conveying my truth and sentiments.) I feel slightly better when I realize it is not just my whiteness that makes it hard to talk to my son about race and privilege. This great This American Life episode features W. Kamau Bell wrestling with the same challenge.

The absolute best sample conversation I have seen came from this article by Courtney Martin, sent to me by a dear friend. Courtney’s words, which can be used to discuss racism and white privilege with white children, includes:

Make it a part of your daily consciousness even when it seems tiring and burdensome (this is not a choice for people of color, nor is it for you). Commit to interrogating the privileges that you inherit and constantly look for creative ways to subvert hierarchies, redistribute power, connect the unconnected.

It’s not the end all be all, but it’s a beginning, at the very least, for me.

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I initially wrote this post a few months ago, and in that time, Mrs. Polish published a post that I want to acknowledge, and send some appreciation her way. I mentioned in my comment to her post that I have been closely examining my privilege, especially since having a son, and I appreciate her, and others here, that have made this space a safe one for sharing truth and challenging our personal frames of reference for the world, especially in the context of parenting, which we all learn how to do as we do it and comes without a universal guide book!