From RIISE: “Five Myths of Talking About Race With Your Child”

Here’s something I’ve been struggling: I work in an ISD that is about 74% Latino. White kids know they’re white. The few black and Asian kids know they’re black or Asian (when you’re either the only black or Asian kid or the only black or Asian kid of your gender in your class in a school with no black or Asian adults, you don’t get to pretend you’re not). Native kids know they’re Native. But more often than I like, some of younger Latino kids shock me. Many of them don’t know they are Latino. Some even get upset if an adult has to address their race because all they hear is how “Mexicans” and other Latinos are bad. Or they think only their darker-skinned Latino classmates are “Latino” (oh yeah, we got colorism out the you-know-what and it’s always such a joy to have to address it in the classroom). I had one class of 3rd graders where Latino students were talking about how cool it’d be to have slaves like early white Americans — yeah — and I had the hardest time getting them to understand that the system of slavery that we had in the US would not have benefited them (and doing so without crossing some line that would have sent angry parents storming to the principal) and that any system based on racism was inherently wrong.

While there are a lot of touchy politics here about race–like how Latinos see themselves in relation to other people of color and to white people–what bothers me most is that these kids 1) definitely see race but 2) see it as something that only effects other people, and not them. And when you jump up a few grades to the older kids who, in addition to going through puberty, have had the realization that 1) they’re not raceless afterall but in fact 2) are of a race that is systemically discriminated against in this country, they become very hostile toward the whole issue of race because now being Latino just means to them is that all this racism crap in our society is now aimed at them too.

I’ve seen too many kids like this who go from ignorance to self-loathing, simply because once they realize their identity has that racial dimension they cannot see their race as anything but a disadvanage. There has to be a better way. I think parents do need to talk to their kids about race if only so they can associate it with more than racism and who ‘wins’ and who ‘loses’ in our society, but with family, community, culture and heritage. As far as I can see, kids who become self-loathing about their own racial identity are not to all prepare to face the challenges ahead of them. What we need is for these kids to grow up prepared to face systemic racism and to be able to address it and challenge it. And that mean giving them something solid and positive they can root their identity in, something that tells them that, yes, they are Latino–or black, Asian, or Native–and while racism will effect them, racism does not define them.

And one last thing, about telling kids you don’t have all the answers: I think this is very important. When racial issues come in my classes, like they did very recently when I did a special project with our 2nd graders for MLK’s birthday, I let the kids ask all the questions they wanted and told them very hoenstly that things aren’t yet as MLK had hoped they would be, that there is still a lot of work to be done and that there are some things we are still learning about what it means to live in a multiracial world. I think that kind of honesty from adults encourages them to think more on their own–I found it certianly encouraged my students to ask more thoughtful questions. And I think kids need that, to begin to prepare themselves for the kind of questions they will have to ask as adults about these very same issues.