What a single white mother might want to say to her bi-racial child about racism in America.
Can anyone tell me?
My daughter is a beautiful human being. She is bright and funny and full of joy. She is gregarious and fearless, willing to make a friend out of any stranger. She is all smiles and I love it that way.
She is the bi-racial child of a single White mother. Her father is not a part of the picture for her, so her views on life are coming from me and the people I choose to surround her with.
A caveat: her godparents are African American, and in the course of any given day, while I do business and socialize, she is exposed to people from around the world, as my virtual network is built with people from Europe, Africa, and America. I work with women and men, white, black, purple, and chartreuse, young and old, and my daughter seems to love “talking” to all of them through video calling (I say “talking” only because she’s still young enough to babble and get away with it.) Her daycare, also, is full of kids from all sorts of backgrounds.
My concern: what conversations will I have with her about race and racism?
Here’s a clip from the television show Black-ish, about the kinds of conversations Black parents might have with their kids.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvykfyGTnbQ
There are plenty of ideas for White parents to talk to their kids. Just this morning, I read this blog post from On Being.
As news of the police murders of both Alton Sterling and Philando Castile hit headlines this week, adults have rightly…www.onbeing.org
Still, I wonder…
What will I, a White mother, tell my child, a Person of Color? A Black woman, a Queen, whose life matters to me so, so, so much. More than my own. (So, those of you who falsely believe that Black Lives Matter is about valuing Black life MORE than White life, this might be the one and ONLY circumstance under which that could be “true.” Otherwise, give me a break.)
The conversations will be so much more complex than I can imagine they will be. Every day that I think about it, I realize some other element of these questions about race, identity, and racism. For example:
I have privilege, while my daughter does not.
We’re living in the same household, going to the same social gatherings, meeting the same people, hoping the same dreams for her success in life, but I have this privilege that she does not. How will I meaningfully address that aspect of our conversations?
What will I tell her about aspiring and hope? What will I tell her she can accomplish? The instinct running from my every pore, like any mother, is to tell her the world is at her feet, but I have this privilege that she does not.
Should that stop her? Over my dead body will it stop her.
I’ve been having some hard talks with friends and friends of friends over the past few days, and let me clarify this right here and now: acknowledging white privilege and working to get past it is no “popular, hot-button” thing for me. It’s not something I engage in because it’s “cool” or because I was baited into it. I’m doing this because
It’s my daughter’s life, because IT MATTERS.
My life is social justice. It always has been. And now it’s about this particular aspect of social justice: my daughter, and your daughters and sons, will one day have the privilege I have, that you should have today, right now. This will be my legacy, to my own child and to yours: we will all be privileged to be alive and well and full of promise. Your child’s life, and your life, matters to me equally as much as my child’s life, and my life.
What will I say to make that real for my daughter? What will I do every day, without fail, to make that real for her? I don’t have those answers to hand at this very moment, but I’ve got the fire of a thousand suns in my gut. It’s never going to stop…
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Hillary Strobel is a content single mother, fierce learner and teacher, ardent lover of life, and ass-kickin’ President and CEO of a Benefit Corporation, The Flyways, Inc., a Social Impact Story Publishing House. Story projects are interactive and highly creative, and 25% of company profits are donated to various social justice causes, from business incubators serving vulnerable women to agencies working to reduce recidivism rates.
On the side, Hillary also runs a consultancy for businesses and organizations seeking to meaningfully build their social impact programs from the ground up. The three pillars that support this mission are: designing outcomes and developing goals, measuring impact and creating a universal metric, and quantifying results to the public.
After a long and varied career in just about every kind of Liberal Arts field imaginable, and in every type of job position — volunteer, employee, entrepreneur, non-profit worker, and freelancer — she has decided to put her money where her mouth is and marry her two deepest passions: storytelling and social justice. The results have surpassed her wildest expectations.
