Raising Anti-Racist Humans
“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.”
-Maya Angelou
A lot has been written (thank you to the writers and thought-leaders for their generous work - links at the bottom of this page) about talking to kids about race, racism, and raising anti-racist humans. I try to summarize frequent suggestions that appear to get to the root of the issue and highlight opportunities and provide tactical ‘leaves’ to try out for yourself and your family. Perhaps this isn’t perfect, but let’s start the conversation.
Your Role in Raising and Anti-Racist Kid
Understand how we learned about race
As kids, we learned about race before we even heard about it from adults. Our environment molds their viewpoints. Newborns show no affinity for race, but children as young as three months show a preference for their caretaker’s racial group(s). By nine months, babies categorize faces by color. By kindergarten, kids begin to show many of the same implicit racial attitudes that adults in our culture hold; learning to associate some groups with higher status or more positive value. No, kids aren’t color blind. So, it is a question of what our kids learn to associate with race. Learning happens by pattern matching from past experiences. Lessons are uploaded into the teeny database in the brain with any new information. No, there ain’t literal files and databases in the brain, that's a metaphor.
Learning is a function of frequency, the intensity of the internal state, and counterexamples. Kids are keenly aware of their caretakers’ reactions to novel experiences, taking in facial features, breathing, vocal tone, etc. These data points inform their internal state and inform learning.
Let’s take two simplified examples of your child’s first interaction with a Black person:
Playing blocks while you watch the news about drug violence in your city.
Meeting your college roommate who is over for dinner.
Both situations likely have an elevated emotional state, one negative in tone and one positive. If your child has frequent interactions with your college roommate, by the time he overhears the news, he can start to associate drug violence with other things beyond race, because he has many other counter examples to draw from.
Build your empathy muscle
In an anti-racist training I took, the facilitator suggested rather than the golden rule, the ‘silver rule’: do unto others what they would like to be done. Duh. We’re all different people who want different things. I would consider it a compliment when someone calls me eloquent, a black woman may experience this as loaded and racist comment.
A short story: There are two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fishes swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the F is water?” When we don’t see the water, it’s a sign we’re benefitting from being part of the dominant culture. But we’re not fish, so we can learn to see what the f*ck is water and understand how it is affecting us and the people around us as well as notice when those around us don’t understand our question about the water. Another metaphor: seeing the water means building your empathy muscle.
Ways to build empathy: You can start getting curious about other people’s internal states – your kids’ can be a wonderful place to start. Or you can start with someone who hasn’t had the vaccine. Instead of “he’s stupid for not getting a vaccine,” try “I wonder why he’s not getting a vaccine?” Or you can practice perspective-taking. “I wonder what it’s like to be Aaron Rodgers’ publicist.” Shutters.
Gain self-awareness about your biases
It’s important to understand the biases you bring to the table. Without a pattern disruption, you’re gonna hand them down to your kids. Uncovering your beliefs and ideas that are contributing to racism can be really hard to do. You’re a fish without awareness of the water. Our strongest biases can be the ones we cling to the hardest. They’re also the ones most difficult to see. After all, we usually call them ‘unconscious biases’–it’s right there in the name, biases we’re unconsc...err, aren’t aware of.
How to uncover your biases? Take this test by Harvard’s Project Implicit. You can intentionally slow down your decision-making process. For example, if you were hiring, you could make a +/- list for candidates, you could acknowledge the diversity of your candidate pool (or lack thereof). You could try substituting the race, ethnicity, and gender of candidates while keeping the qualifications. How does that feel? Seek out folks with different experiences can be useful for calling out biases. Enlist a friend to call you out.
Also, build your empathy muscle. No, there ain’t no literal empathy muscle; that's another metaphor. Naming your biases is a super helpful second step; it can make it easier to acknowledge when they show up and can help interrupt our default reactions. For example, I can name the part of me that wants to hire and work with my friends (let’s call this part Michael Scott) and then when I post a job, I can be like, “hey there tiger (aka person that likes to work with my friends aka Michael Scott), what if we also look beyond our network and potentially make some new friends?”
Develop your growth-mindset
Perfectionism is often cited as a nemesis to anti-racism progress. Fear of being called a racist or being labeled dumb can cause paralysis - no action. Paralysis protects the status quo. That quo ain’t helping. We have to believe that failures don’t have to be catastrophic, but rather a learning experience that through deliberate practice, we can get better.
Get comfortable being uncomfortable
A large part of white supremacy and status quo maintenance is because people are uncomfortable with change, acknowledging the pain other people are in, uncertainty, and accepting responsibility.
There are a million phrases like “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.” Eggs are your ego. Mmmm, Eggos.
Understand America’s racist history
“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”
-C. Wright Mills
We could not be where we are today without the journey that got us here. The New York Times’ 1619 Project is an excellent place to start learning about that journey. It took me a while to understand that you can scroll down on this website and click on various articles (yes, those are clickable links) or you could just read the book. But did you know that race as a category was ‘invented’ after racist policies were developed?
Acknowledge systematic, structural, institutional racism and learn about ways that systems change
Systematic, structural, and institutional racism are public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms that work to perpetuate inequality. Structural racism might not be something that groups of people or institutions consciously practice—although most of these were deliberately built—but rather a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist.
Systematic racism presents itself in schools & childhood, food & hunger, sleep, criminal justice, housing, work, and wealth. There is a list of 64 statistics that point to the variety systematic racism in America, but here are just a few examples:
Childhood: Black children are 220% more likely to be exposed to lead before being born—which impairs executive function. They’re less likely to receive prenatal care and are twice as likely to die in infancy. From National Library of Medicine and US Department of Health and Human Services.
Schools: Black children are 2.5 times as likely to be suspended for school infractions, which interrupts learning and perpetuates negative stereotypes. Predominantly Black schools receive less funding. From US Department of Education.
Food and Hunger: Black Americans are twice as likely to be food insecure and travel further to find grocery stores with fresh food, which negatively impacts school and job performance and health. From National Library of Medicine.
Sleep: Black Americans are more likely to work late-night shifts and live in noisier communities. Disrupted sleep impairs executive function (are you tired of me talking about sleep yet?), emotional functioning, immunity and health. From National Library of Medicine.
Criminal Justice: Black Americans receive harsher punishments for identical crimes, including being arrested for marijuana usage at 3.6x the rate (despite equal use). They’re 1.75X more likely to have charges filed with mandatory minimums. Black drivers are 20% more likely to be pulled over than white drivers. From University of Michigan Law Center, ACLU, Stanford University.
Housing: Black Americans represent 40% of the homeless population (despite being 13% of the general population). Black veterans are 33% of the homeless veteran population (despite being 12.3% of the general veteran population). Housing lenders disproportionately steer Black Americans to subprime housing loans with the same qualification. Only 43% of Black households own their home vs. 72% of white householders. From National Alliance to End Homlessness, Suffolk University Law Review, and PEW Research Center.
Work and Wealth: Lower home-ownership rates lead to lower wealth levels. Black Americans with white names receive 50% more callbacks for job applications. From PEW Research Center and National Bureau of Economic Research.
Health: Black Americans are more likely to have cancer, asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, depression and when they do have an illness, they receive significantly worse care. From CDC and Substance Abuse and Mental Services Administration.
Technology: data science that is trained on existing data for such things as hiring, facial recognition, bail and probation are systematically biased. From Rage Inside the Machine.
Systems are complicated, and so changing a system is also <probably> complicated and any change can feel destabilizing rather than progressive. So, know that. Think about having a baby - extremely disruptive to life as you knew it - you grasp wildly for things to bring you back into homeostasis (naps in the middle of the day anyone? eating a bag of chips like it’s a meal?) And then over time, the adjustments were less wild and you settled into a new homeostasis that no longer felt like you’d been pushed underwater by a tidal wave.
Okay. How to make change happen? Just do as Gandhi said, “be the change you want to see in the world.” Simple. Bring the wanted change into your consciousness. Doing so will illuminate ways you can impact change. Enough of greeting card advice. Power is also needed for change.
So voting, duh. There are the national offices, but you can have much more impact with smaller and local elections like district attorneys, city council, and school boards. These are also officials you are more likely to get an audience with, even if it is just an email. Beyond voting, you can look at the power structures in your own life. Who are the people that you can influence that hold power? Maybe it’s your boss, your partner, your kid’s principal. Can you influence them to be informed? Can you influence them to adopt anti-racist behavior and support anti-racist policies? Can we make it socially expensive to not be anti-racist?
Move from empathy to compassion
Building empathy, acknowledging the vast injustices and mountains of pain that exist...it can sometimes feel overwhelming and prevent us from thoroughly looking at the whole picture. It calls into question firmly held beliefs like ‘I’m a good person’ or ‘I deserve what I have.’ But, if you can move from empathy (I feel your pain) to compassion (I’ll do whatever I can to alleviate your pain), you re-route the neural pathway in your brain from pain-centered to reward-centered.
Then you can move to action.
It might be that ‘whatever I can do’ is running for office and evoking legislative change. It might be fighting for donations to public schools to be pooled within a school district. It might be forwarding this email to someone else that needs to see it. However big or small, I’m going to bet that your action will feel good. Two small and easy actions: subscribe to the Anti-Racist Daily and follow The Conscious Kid on Instagram.
Articles and resources that informed this newsletter:
https://www.ibramxkendi.com/how-to-be-an-antiracist
https://www.sealpress.com/titles/ijeoma-oluo/so-you-want-to-talk-about-race/9781580056779/
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/869071246/how-white-parents-can-talk-to-their-kids-about-race
https://www.pbs.org/parents/thrive/teaching-your-child-about-black-history-month
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/ahmaud-arbery/611539/
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/podcasts/nice-white-parents-serial.html
http://laylafsaad.com/meandwhitesupremacy
https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f2d18b0e0234
https://www.rageinsidethemachine.com/
https://www.tatianamac.com/posts/save-the-tears/
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BRlF2_zhNe86SGgHa6-VlBO-QgirITwCTugSfKie5Fs/edit
