Do I do my daughter a disservice to raise her outside of blackness?
Generationally, aren’t we meant to transcend our conditions rather than stay mired in them?
Every morning when my daughter wakes, she gets up, stands quietly at the side of her cot and watches me intently, slumbering mere metres away, patiently willing me awake. Sometimes, her first stirrings actually wake me before she’s fully finished her sleep cycle and I’m already secretly watching her with a half-asleep, non-committal eye. On these occasions, I am often compelled to get out of bed earlier than I’d planned because my heart melts as I see her watching and waiting – no longer crying for attention and letting daddy rest if he needs to. Growth. 🌱
This whole quarantine period has really been a revelation in our developing ‘daddy daughter’ relationship. Whilst it has been very difficult to accept that exceptionalist ineptitude has cost us far more of our lives than it could and should ever have, watching my girl go from 15 to 18 months with such character, adventure, poise and, mostly, joy has opened up a dimension of myself that I could not even have imagined before parenthood.
What I had, however, imagined before parenthood (at great length) was the social/economic/political terrain that I would be introducing children into, regardless of who their eventual mother would be. And I didn’t really have to imagine that hard – I continuously looked at the world around me, took note of my own status in this society, the status of those I aspired to, the status of those who concerned me and the general statuses that populate our zeitgeist.
Aside from the abject pain, hatred, division and violence woven deeply into the fabric of our societies, what I observed, exhaustively, was a pattern of human behaviours, not limited to any particular group, sex, geography or any other social metric, but a mindset that can, apparently, be reached from any number of entrances – what these access points all have in common? It takes real grit to reach them.
In common business parlance, it is termed ‘growth mindset’ and embodies an approach to life that does not accept hard and fast rules which limit your potential. That acceptance of things ‘as is’ (or at least to your perception) is what is called ‘a fixed mindset’ and I can only characterise it as self-perpetuating inhibition. People often say things to me like ‘you are so lucky to be so confident’ or ‘only you could make a vegan parody go viral’ and whilst I appreciate the sentiment, what I hear are people resigned to accepting their lives, as is, and that people who make something different of their circumstances were ‘fated to’ in any regard. Fixed mindset people are not necessarily lazy people, if anything, the opposite. Dependent at which level a mind gets ‘fixed’ in can still play a massive role in, say, economic or influential outcomes and I would contend that 90% of the world’s population operate from a fixed mindset, mostly through social conditioning. Governments and institutions are in the business of mandating fixed mindsets because uncontrollable growth (mindsets or otherwise) will only lead to insurrection, uprisings and, ultimately, revolution which all threaten the status quo.
Concepts like black and white, rich and poor, third world and developed world, ugly and beautiful, left wing and right wing, master and servant, husband and wife etc are all fixtures of a fixed mindset. They are the social constructs that governments and institutions perpetuate to maintain order through herd immunity. When enough people believe in these concepts as sold, it doesn’t matter when some outlier shows you different, no matter how much it might make sense. You are now immune and largely impervious to anything but the construct and, no matter how much I try and convince you otherwise, your default picture of reality is defined by fixed constructs.
Back to my daughter.
At 18 months old, all of this conversation about social constructs is beyond her, as intelligent as she is already proving to be. All she wants to do is watch Akili and Me, dip her fingers into things and smile at strangers.
However, what I can do is my best to curate a world for her which doesn’t involve unlearning institutional propaganda. A world where she sees black and white, but also sees them for what they are – imposter identities that maintain an infinite and unwinnable game for its unwitting players on both sides. A world where she sees rich and poor, but understands that worth nor value are tied to these constructs either. A world where she sees mummy and daddy, but does not limit her own self expression to anything that we have done individually.
And so whilst I raise my daughter to be knowledgeable of both blackness and whiteness, I also raise her to not invest in a binary that is a poisoned chalice. I will do everything in my power to show her the parameters of the game so she needn’t ever get caught in it unaware or unprepared. And so I will also remind her that blackness is a resistance and resilience she has no choice but to strengthen because the war is not fought with fair rules of engagement by the enemy. She may want to live her truest, most authentic expression but this world’s fixed mindsets will bring trauma to the door the moment she lays down her armour.
It took my mother the better part of her life to make the breakthrough that has ended up freeing me with my best years still ahead. It is now both my honour and duty, to impart the same wisdom on my own child without the burden of lengthy unlearning and reverse engineering. She needn’t ever be demoralised by the actions of others, nor be exposed to content that ultimately erodes her strength of character.
I advocate for a growth mindset even in the building blocks of learning and language and have been mindful to teach my daughter about the world of animals not animal agriculture, cultures and cuisines not countries and customs, human spirit not certain people.
To answer my own opening questions, I think the greatest service I can do my daughter is to invite her to stand on my shoulders in much the way my mother has stood tall for me. From her shoulders, I saw the fatal cracks in the racial illusion she had managed to make after years of perseverance, fighting this system tooth and nail. With her guidance, I was able to shatter the biggest growth inhibitor amongst the people still pejoratively identified as black. My life changed forever once I fully extricated myself from blackness as an identity and instead moulded it to become my fortitude. Be under no illusion though – this journey took me 15 hard years.
If your child’s knowledge and wisdom do not surpass your own, you have not fulfilled your duty as a steward of the life force. If you do not allow your spirit to act as a conduit of generational growth then you are not a help, you are a hinderance. More parents need to get out of the way of their own ancestral paths. Stymying growth by maintaining generational curses born of fixed mindsets is the unaddressed killer in so many communities.
I beseech you to take a look at yourself and ask:
‘Am I getting in the way of my own progress? Am I living vicariously through my child(ren)? Am I maintaining a fixed mindset?’
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, the journey continues with the same honesty used to answer these first few questions affirmatively.
Right, I’ve got things to do before bed if I’m not going to be too tired for the morning routine. 😘
