Race Conscious Parenting

My takeaways from Jennifer Harvey’s Raising White Kids

I just finished reading Raising White Kids by Jennifer Harvey and wanted to capture my key insights and action items. Most of these are directly from the book and some are slight reframes as I have been sitting with this material. I am sharing here so I can provide this to friends in an anti-racism reading group, but I suppose if others find it helpful that’s fine too. But I don’t claim this to be an exhaustive summary and I highly recommend reading the full book — it provides so many practical examples.

My Headlines

Color-blindness has been proven to be harmful and ineffective in reducing racism among children and the adults they grow up to be.

Race conscious parenting represents the most recent information we have about forming anti-racist children.

As a white parent, antiracism work with my children creates the opportunity for an interruption of and liberation from the inherited generational harm of sustained psychological dissonance.

“We have inherited intergenerational legacies of silence, of looking away, of pretending not to notice and of numbness to the pain of our racial legacies. The long-term effects of repressing the truth means we are people who don’t even know how too begin to feel what we feel.”

“White supremacy malformed my humanity, constrains my life, compromises my spirit. When I recognize this I begin to see the fight against racism as also a life-giving struggle for my own liberation.”

Race Conscious Parenting Strategies:

1) In very young children (birth to 5), focus on making race visible and normal

“Our parental work is to knit together a notion of race as visible and normal, an awareness of racial injustice, and a working presumption that people can and do take actions against racism.”

• Chatter with children about difference, particularly skin tone, hair texture, and other identifiers of race (“Do you mean that person with a blue coat on, who has light skin?” “Do you mean that person carrying a backpack with brown hair and brown skin?”)
• Have diverse toys and books
• Point out and name light skin too. “There’s a strong socializing tendency for whiteness to go as an unnamed racial category, so we must counter this formation as well”

“When we are reading with them, we should point out and have them point out and talk about characters who look different from one another, including observations about features that tend to signify race”

2) Around age 6, transition from skin tone to race

• When children begin referencing skin tone as category, they are understanding racial groups and we can begin practicing naming race. For the author, this happened around age 6. (“Yes, he has dark skin. He’s African American. Some people with dark skin are African American” “You mean that person with a blue coat on, who has light skin — who looks like she might be white?” “You mean that person carrying a backpack, who looks like she might be Latina”)
• Use “MIGHT.” Be clear that people know best how they identify and it’s ok to ask

“We want to raise white kids who definitely see race, but who simultaneously don’t make assumptions about people because of their race”

3) Don’t generalize about groups (stereotype); try to correct children (and adults) who generalize

Using labels to make generalizations about groups of people can backfire, even if the generalizations are positive. “Girls can be anything they want” “Muslims eat different foods” communicate that we can tell what someone is like by knowing her gender, ethnicity or religion. When young children hear generalizations they conclude “groups make stable and important differences between individual people.” In other words they start to assume that race can tell you something determinative about a person.

Children learn more from specifics than generalities. For example, in response to a little girl saying “Only boys can be doctors. Girls have to be nurses”
• Not good: “Of course girls can be doctors! Girls can do anything!”
• Good: “Why do you think that is the case?” or “Yes, your doctor is a man. But did you notice that doctor who was a woman in the office last time we were there? Let’s look for her next time.”

4) Establish a healthy white identity

• Embrace the paradox. “The goal is to raise white children who are neither overdetermined nor underdetermined by being white”
• We need to teach white children that they are white
• In a racialized society in which they hold white privilege, they must develop awareness that what they see, feel, experience, and how they are perceived by others is influenced by race
• They are not responsible for having been born into this inheritance of white supremacy
• They have agency. They can actively stand up for justice. They can build skills for challenging racism in increasingly effective ways.

Words to try on:

A child says “I’m so glad we’re white”
“I’m so glad you’re you! And yes, you and I are white. But what makes you so glad we’re white?”… ”The same things that make you feel glad you’re white are actually ways of being treated that I want for everyone: Black people, Native Americans, and Latinx people. So that fact that I sometimes get treated better because I’m white makes me kind of sad. I’m glad you are you, but I want everyone to be treated well, not just white people”

“I’m white and I’m also an antiracist-committed person active in taking a stand against racism and injustice when I see it.”

(Focus on systems not individual)
“The world we live in is often unfair to people of color simply because they are people of color. Persisting racial inequalities are unjust and morally wrong. Racial prejudice and discrimination are part of the larger society and not just something that individual people do.”

We can always make different choices than our ancestors did. It’s our job to actively make different choices and work for justice and fairness, especially if we are white.

• Invite children into your own active participation in resistance and justice work. Children need to have an outlet for productive action, if they express that desire.
• Invite children to participate in protests and rallies — these events help children break silence and explore their beliefs.

5) Name racism

• On the foundation built above, the author began naming racism with her children around age 7
• “We need to anticipate that we will regularly experience a lack of closure. Repeatedly inviting our children into dialogue and responding to them where they are while nourishing their growth is a long-term practice.”

A 7 year old girl comes home from soccer practice and says a boy cut in front of her in line and said boys should get to go first
“That boy wasn’t just being mean. There’s actually a word for that. He was being sexist. Sexism against girls and women is a big problem; it can happen at school, in families, in all the places we live and work. Sexism is what’s happening when people say things that suggest boys are better than girls, do things to treat girls as if they aren’t valuable, or make rules that make things unfair for girls while boys get treated better.”

The song 10 Little Indians comes on, you turn it off, and the kid asks why she can’t listen to it
“Well, I can’t exactly explain it all. But the people who that song is about — Native American people — don’t like that song. They’ve said it’s disrespectful to them. And since they’ve said that, and since we care about respect and kindness, I think we shouldn’t sing it.”

6) Teach history. Complicate and disrupt lessons received at school and in the community

• Direct and honest teaching about the pervasive reality of racial injustice in the United States, focusing on the past and present
• Emphasize the agency of people of color in response to injustice. Offer white kids endless accounts and relentless emphasis on the resistance and agency being lived out by people of color
• Expose children to fiction and nonfiction stories by and about people of color that have nothing to do with racial injustice (e.g. Snowy Day)
• Share models of white people past and present who demonstrate agency against racism. (E.g. John Brown)
• Expose children to stories about youth their own age

7) Respond to racialized moments as you encounter them

Questions when you directly experience a radicalized moment:
• Take a deep breath
• Did the incident or encounter happen while we were alone with our kids, or it something they reported later?
• Slow down and try to break it down for ourselves. Get clear on what we understand about why and how something is racial or racist. Think about what we most want to bring to the dialogue from your values as we gently engage our child in an open way.
• What is the child saying about their self-understanding or showing that they understand in a given situation?
• What parts of their self understanding do we want to affirm and what do we need to support the child in rethinking?
• What is the child saying or showing in their behavior about their understanding of other people in what they said or in what happened? What do we want to affirm? What do we want to engage in rethinking?
• Did the incident or encounter occur when others were present?
• If yes, what is the impact on others or on the relationships present? Sometimes we don’t know for sure.
• What does the parent want to do/say/make manifest in respect to these people? What needs to be said to that person as well to align with the parent’s own commitments to justice? What does the parent need to model for the child in terms of acknowledging other present in a given exchange?
• What response is most likely to further the conversation, be open-ended, and not assert too much anxiety onto the exchange while also being explicit and direct?
• Does the exchange or experience lend itself to engaging the child in a conversation about advocacy and action in response?

We can also help children learn from indirect experiences through “agency visioning”:
• How would you have handled “x” if you had been there?
• If you were the person of color in this situation, how do you think you would have wanted a white friend to handle it?
• What do you wish you had said?
• Is there a way you and I could think together about how you might go back and deal with this/find that out/say you disagree?
• Why does that feel hard?
• Would you want to handle an experience like that differently next time?

8) Spend time in spaces that de-center whiteness

• Seek out spaces in which our children can experience being a demographic minority. Experiences in which white children are de-centered have a formative impact.
• Of course, always determine if such participation is welcome. Participate with humility and openness
• Diversify exposure to voices, perspectives, and productions of BIPOC: media, art, literature, news, scholarship

9) Normalize discomfort and pain

We instinctively want to protect our children from experiencing pain, but sheltering children from the reality of injustice is counterproductive and ultimately harms them

It’s deeply necessary we let our children’s hearts get broken a bit if they are going to remain able to recognize the humanity of their fellow humans whose lives are at stake in the system we live in. It’s necessary if they are going to grow any rooted sense oof themselves as part of a larger, multiracial community of people to whom they are committed.

Create space for our kids too move into their own deeply embodied relationships with injustice, as risky as that may feel. We need to create space for them to literally feel injustice and feel, touch, and ache from its real costs.