When I was first pregnant five years ago, I really, really hoped for a boy. The thought of having a girl terrified me: navigating sexual abuse, eating disorders, body image issues, the glass ceiling — I knew firsthand that girlhood was fraught with these landmines and it all scared the hell out of me. I was extremely relieved when I found out I was going to have a boy. I’m not naïve to think that those issues don’t affect boys (I know they very much do), but the overwhelm of it all just didn’t hit me the same way.
Phew, I thought. A boy will be so much easier.
Less than two months after my son was born, Philando Castile and Alton Sterling were killed by police. Two more black men killed at the hands of white police officers. It was a narrative not new to me: I had been a public defender for years. I knew the corruption that occurred in police forces, the police brutality that commonly occurred outside the view of cameras, the lies that police told on the stand with zero accountability by judge or jury or prosecutor. I had followed the news in Ferguson, the Black Lives Matter movement, the constant hashtags on social media that announced one more black or brown person killed by police. The rigged system of white supremacy was something I was intimately familiar with, but it hit me in a different way now that I was a mother.
A mother of a boy.
A white boy.
A white boy who would some day be a white man with all of the power and privilege that affords him in this world.
I think most parents want and hope that the children they raise will be good, kind people who do good, kind things for people. But for me, that’s not enough. Of course, I hope my son is good and kind. But my feelings of responsibility go much deeper than that. I don’t want to raise the next Dylann Roof. I don’t want to raise the next Brett Kavanaugh. I don’t want to raise the next Derek Chauvin.
I want my son to be good and kind, and I also want him to think critically about the history he’s taught in school. I want him to challenge the narrative that Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the good ones and Malcolm X was one of the scary ones. I want him to shut up and step aside for a woman who’s smarter than him to take the floor. I want him to call his friends in when they use the word “gay” pejoratively or make fun of the kid with autism in their class. I want him to shut down jokes about rape in the locker room and I want him to be willing to use the power and privilege of his skin color and maleness to protect those who have neither.
I want him to be not just an ally, but an accomplice to those who are the most vulnerable to oppression and violence.
But listen, it’s hard. Throughout my life, my whiteness has allowed me to step in and out of talks about racism, prejudice, and oppression as I choose. While I often chose to step in, it was still a choice. I can think of many, many situations where I chose to step out — because I was scared, or didn’t think I had time, or just didn’t know what to say. And I know there are countless situations I didn’t even notice through the lens of my privilege.
But raising a white boy to become the kind of white man who would make me proud? That’s a high fucking responsibility and it’s one that means I can’t choose to step out anymore. White supremacy and the patriarchy are relentless — my actions and intentions must be even louder, stronger, and more consistent in order to keep them at bay.
One of the complicating factors of this work in raising anti-racist white kids is that there is no guidebook. There are no experiences I can draw upon. There’s no script I can follow. There’s general advice and guidance but when you’re trying to come up with the actual words to explain racism and police brutality to a 4-year-old — well, it’s scary.
It’s scary and it’s awkward and a lot of the time it makes no sense. There are plenty of times where I say something and immediately regret the way I phrased it or the focus I took.
But when it feels really hard, when it feels too awkward or uncomfortable, I think about all of my black and brown friends who don’t have the luxury to step out of this conversation. Their kids don’t get the privilege of avoiding the topic. They are forced at very young ages to reckon with police violence and white supremacy. And while I don’t feel the need to traumatize my kids in the name of equity, I owe it to them and to my community to try my best to explain the world they live in and lay the foundation for their future anti-racist work.
So I try to be relentless. My son brings home a Skippyjon Jones book from daycare? I sit down and explain why mommy doesn’t like that book because it makes fun of how people from Mexico talk, and that’s not kind. We put on a lion documentary from the 1960s that starts out with the narrator discussing how uncivilized Africa used to be? We stop the movie to explain that I didn’t like what that man said because it was a lie and Africa was home to many strong civilizations with rich cultures, languages, and traditions.
Do I sometimes make fun things, like watching movies, boring? Yeah, I do. Do I ever want to just pretend like I can ignore this bullshit and coast through life by posting a few Black Lives Matter articles on Facebook and calling it a day? Occasionally. But it’s not about me. It’s not about my comfort. It’s not about my kids’ ability to be mindlessly entertained without my social justice commentary interrupting them.
This is about centuries of treating black lives as expendable. This is about people dying. This is about people in power using black skin to justify fear and murder. This is a life and death situation and even though my kids aren’t the ones at risk of dying, I sure as hell don’t want to raise people who are willing to exploit some power and privilege for comfort at the expense of the systemic, state-sanctioned murder of other boys and girls in their neighborhood.
This work can be tiring, inconvenient, awkward, and humbling — I get it wrong a lot of the time. But I try again. And again. Unfortunately, there are an endless amount of opportunities for me to discuss social justice, racism, protest, and intersectional feminism with my kids. If I mess up today, I will reflect and do better tomorrow. Throughout my life, I have directly and indirectly benefitted from white supremacy and I owe it to the next generation to do my part to try to stop it. Every white parent does. Let’s get to work.
