Parent Upset That Son’s School Dwells on Racism

[conuly]

DEAR HARRIETTE: Seemingly out of the blue, they are reading lots of books about race at my son’s school. Seriously, they have read three books back-to-back about racial injustice. While I think it is important for the kids to learn about these topics, it is making us uncomfortable. Not everything is about race, but you would never know from this class. I don’t have the knowledge or time to debate these issues with my son every day.

I’m not trying to be rude or insensitive. My husband and I work hard to make sure that our son is thoughtful and not racist, but we also don’t want him to feel super self-conscious about being white. He shouldn’t have to apologize for being himself. I don’t know how to support him as times change. I do teach him to treat everyone with respect, but does that mean I have to allow him to be exposed to so much conversation about the atrocities of racism? -- Too Much Race Talk

DEAR TOO MUCH RACE TALK: I need to respectfully disagree with you on this. Hopefully your son is in the perfect place to engage in a conversation that is necessary for healing in our country. The good news, in my book, is that schools are walking toward the challenge rather than avoiding it. Perhaps our youth will be able to wrestle issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in respectful, creative ways. Consider that this is the way you can think about the curriculum he is engaging, rather than as a burden.

I think you should read the books, too, so that you can have informed conversations with him about what he is learning. Your job as a parent is to guide your child and to help him process whatever information comes before him. The more you equip yourself with the conversations of the day coupled with your own experience, the better you will be able to help him navigate this extremely challenging reality -- that racial injustice is still staring us in the face, and we have to do something about it.

For support, visit courageousconversation.com. This organization is devoted to helping educational institutions -- from administrators to students to parents -- learn how to talk respectfully and honestly about the realities of race, equity, inclusion and diversity in meaningful ways.

https://www.uexpress.com/sense-and-sensitivity/2020/1/30/0/parent-upset-that-sons-school-dwells#disqus-comments

Comments

[conuly]

I mostly only posted this in case anybody here has a particular desire to go read the comments over at uexpress. They're delightfully toxic and awful! I utterly regret having so much as glanced at them! I have no idea what I was thinking!

Also, I really wish LW had deigned to give us a booklist. How can I properly assess their gripe if I don't know what books triggered it?

[minoanmiss]

Enh, while I too would have loved a booklist for curiosity's sake, I think I can fairly assess their gripe without it. "Not everything is about race" is usually a dogwhistle for "pretty much nothing is about race/what people call racism is usually just interpersonal issues/POC 'play the race card' too much" etc etc. The bit about their son potentially becoming 'ashamed of being White' made my eyes roll so hard I may have sprained something.

Dear LW's son: Good luck becoming more open minded thank your parents, kiddo! I'm pretty sure someone in your future will be very glad you've put in the work and you'll be very glad they choose to trust you.

[conuly]

The bit about their son potentially becoming 'ashamed of being White' made my eyes roll so hard I may have sprained something.

Thankfully, eyes recover fast.

I'd still like a booklist, if only for my own edification.

[watersword]

How is "three books in a row" about a topic a lot?

[cereta]

When I still taught Intro to Fiction on a regular basis, every time, every time I used more than one novel by a woman or even a third of the short stories were about POC/by POC writers, or I had more than two works with LGBTQ+ characters, I would get at least one comment on my evaluations to the effect of "forced diversity" or "political agenda." So I'm not at ALL surprised.

[conuly]

Women are more or less half the freaking population!

[lavendertook]

Same. Even when teaching a women in lit class to undergrads. That was about a decade ago, but it hasn't changed very much from what I've heard.

[conuly]

Yo, don't ask me. This LW probably thinks one was too much.

[melannen]

Well, while I don't disagree about this particular letter or the answer, if you think about reading books in school (especially for younger kids) it does come out to kind of a lot.

When I was in sixth grade, we did three Holocaust narratives + a social studies unit on the Holocaust in a row, and for the record, that was too many. It worked out to about 4-5 months of an hour a day reading and talking about WWII atrocities, and while that's absolutely an important thing to teach and learn about, after about two months of it the 11-year-olds were pretty much deadened to it and either making jokes or tuning it out (including our fairly high proportion of Jewish students) because it was just too much (it might have been okay if we'd had deeply inspiring teachers who were experts and knew how to keep us engaged, but we didn't, we had well-meaning but ordinary ones.) We would have done much better with one atrocity book a semester for several years than five months straight.

If LW's son is that age or younger and the class really has been discussing "atrocities" for three months straight - like, idk, a novel on lynching and a novel on Emmett Till and a novel on surviving the middle passage - it might be on the verge of too much all in a row.

I suspect they are actually reading books that do things like talk about segregation or maybe hint that racism isn't over or maybe just have only black characters centered, though. And that maybe they are reading them as storytime picture books (there have been some really good picture books about racial issues lately) rather than spending weeks as the main reading book. Or the kid is closer to high school age, if he's ready to argue with his parents over it, and at 16-17 things are a little different.

[sporky_rat]

Yup! Four months of WWII and related atrocities was three months too much in elementary school.
(That's almost half the school year.

[melannen]

I might be slightly exaggerating, but given that it generally took over three weeks to do a novel, and it certainly *felt* like half a school year when I was 11, I don't think by much. (Sixth grade is middle school here, though, so that was fine, right...?)

[cereta]

Wow. It took like ten whole comments to get to, "But the Irish!"

[conuly]

Mmhm.

[resonant]

What do you want to bet she says “about racial injustice” but really means “has one (1) significant character who is not white and makes a glancing mention of how that affects her life”?

[cereta]

Dear LW,

You want your son to be thoughtful and "not racist," but lack the time and knowledge to engage with him on those topics. Surely it's a good thing that the school is picking up your slack, no?

No Love,
Dr. Lucy

[conuly]

It's not their job to teach them THAT stuff!

[welcomingsong]

"Engage"? The LW doesn't have time or knowledge to "debate"(!) these topics. I wonder which side of the debate the LW is on. *side eyes LW*

[cereta]

Yeah, that was an interesting word choice.

[shirou]

THIS. Teaching kids about race and injustice in a way they can understand is HARD, and I would welcome help from schools.

[evilsusan]

"we also don’t want him to feel super self-conscious about being white."

Why not? Everyone else has to go around super self-conscious about their race. Why defend white privilege?

I have a friend who is black. In a tearful, vulnerable moment, she told me how hard it is to listen to white people complain so much about their minor concerns while she legitimately has reason to fear, every single day, that her husband or son might not come home, killed for what other people think their skin color and hair texture mean.

"Not everything is about race" is a great goal, but we're not there yet.

[xenacryst]

Ignoring institutional racism is a great way to perpetuate institutional racism.

[ioplokon]

Honestly, I think it is actually way better for the son to experience and start processing 'white guilt' while still in school than leaving it for adulthood (where it is just as overwhelming and a lot of adults shut down entirely around it). Like, when else should people do that?

I also think the parents need to have more education on different concepts of responsibility? You can be responsible for fixing a problem even if you aren't directly, individually guilty of causing it. I don't think anyone wants the son to 'apoligize for being white' but he should feel he has a share in the responsibility to build a world free of racism.

[tielan]

Oh LW, honey.

I shouldn't have to apologise for being myself, but after the umpteenth "But...you're Australian?" I now pre-explain myself because I just know that some person who doesn't have to be white but is always quite clueless just HAS to ask "but...how can you be Australian when you're Chinese?"

All things considered, your son being white is a really lucky thing for him (and for you, because white mothers with visually black children have a lot more stress to deal with over the way their black kids are treated) and it's an excellent thing that he's learning the other side of the story.

You sound quite a lot like my friends who didn't understand why I thought The Joy Luck Club was such an amazing movie; they were nice people, but they were White People - and possibly even Nice White People. But I didn't have the vocabulary to explain why a depiction of someone like me in a life that was very much like mine was exciting then; I do now. So grow a pair of ovaries and suck up your whiteness, princess. You don't want to feel uncomfortable about being white? I'd like to not feel uncomfortable about being non-white in a White People Culture. And of the two of us, you'll get what you want, and I never truly will. So my sympathy is not great for you.

[lemonsharks]

If it was three books in a row about mediocre white boys succeeding through the ~power of believing in themselves~ you can bet LW wouldn't be complaining.

[conuly]

You can say that again.

[purlewe]

but knowing that kids get on a particular wavelength, reading 3 books in a row doesn't seem that ridiculous. I remember when I read every book I could find about superstitions in a row. I think I read 4 or 5? Then I moved on to folk stories.. I read like 10 different countries folk story books. I was definitely in elementary school when this happened, so younger than 5th grade.

I also feel like this equates to when women talk in meetings. If they talked like 20-25% of the time men felt like they talked more than 50% of the meeting. Which shows perception v. actual amount of time. If LW feels like books about racism are taking up more than their fair share of time they haven't realized that actual people of color deal with their internal thoughts/other people's external actions to them WAY more than white people do.

If this is just about reading books like ones written by Jason Reynolds (like say his Track series, which is 4 books and deal with 4 different perspectives of being a kid of color in a sports team) I can totally see a teacher assigning all 4 books. You get the story from 4 perspectives. Which I think is an AMAZING thing that Reynolds did. And reminds me I need to finally pick up the 4th book.