Recently, much has been written about how we talk to our children about race and racism. In discussing this on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Host Michel Martin asks Professor Jennifer Harvey, author of Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America, “How do you do this? Do you wait for the child to come to you? Do you show it to the child (video of George Floyd’s death) and say, this is something I need to talk about with you?”
Obviously, any answer to this question depends on the age of the child, the relationship between the child and the parent, and a slew of other factors. As someone who has spent a lifetime studying, researching, and teaching about racism, I can tell you this. Clearly, it’s one of the most difficult things to talk about among people of all ages.
Take my two daughters, Suzy and Katie. They’ve been raised in a home in which discussions about diversity and race were the norm, not the exception. As a white sociology professor at a Historically Black Community College, I bought my “work” home each day. Around the dinner table or before bedtime, we discussed people’s differences and similarities almost as much as Maryland basketball and the weather.
For instance, I remember watching the Rodney King verdict live on tv in our family room. My older daughter (Katie, age 11 at the time) was with me as we tried to process the verdict while we watched and repeatedly saw what the nation saw only months earlier; a defenseless Rodney King being pummeled by cops as he lay on the ground. Right then and there, we talked about it.
On another occasion, I remember teaching a class at Baltimore City Community College (BCCC) in 1995. Suddenly my students started cheering the moment word got out that OJ Simpson was found innocent. Within seconds, we could hear students throughout our main campus yelling and voicing their approval as well. Later, I found out that Katie, who attended a predominantly white high school (South Carroll H.S.) outside of Baltimore, experienced a radically different reaction. When students at her school heard the verdict, she said “you could hear a pin drop.” When we got home later that day, we talked about the different reactions.
I remember taking Katie to hear Attallah Shabazz (Malcolm X’s eldest daughter) and later Professor Cornel West (soon after his book Race Matters came out) speak at BCCC. After each lecture, there was so much to talk about, and we did.
When my daughters were in middle school, my wife and I sat down with each of them, first Katie then Suzy, and we watched the entire nine-hour tv miniseries, Roots. This historical portrait of slavery in the U.S. is based on Alex Haley’s novel Roots. Both my daughters were somewhat reluctant to watch but we didn’t give them a whole lot of choice. As we saw Roots over the course of a few weeks, we talked about it and tried to answer their questions, but it wasn’t easy to watch or discuss.
And even as adults, we watch movies like Selma and Marshall, and Just Mercy, sometimes together and sometimes apart. By now our routine is just that, routine. We open up, share, ask questions, and invariably they share what they learn with their families.
Parents, there’s no one right way to discuss race and its impact on our everyday lives. Our strategy has worked pretty well for us over the years. For example, I never waited for my children to approach me. Rather we talked, and talked and talked. First about diversity, then race, then racism. There was no big formal sit-down session, no planned talk so-to-speak. It just happened routinely, in large part because we actively listened and tried to encourage these conversations. Now my oldest is doing the same with her children. And I suspect my youngest will too once her baby is old enough.
Links to more from Dr. Bucher:
Buy A MOMMY, A DADDY, TWO SISTERS AND A JIMMY: AUTISM AND THE DIFFERENCE IT MAKES at Amazon.com
Dr. Bucher’s Facebook page on Autism
Dr. Bucher’s Facebook page on Diversity Consciousness