Dear White Mothers,
I sat down to write an open letter to Mike Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden. I wanted to tell her, as a fellow mother of sons, how sorry I was for her loss. I wanted to say that her son’s murder was a heinous crime and that I, as a white mother, stood against the racism that kills black men and with her.
Then I thought about how empty the sympathy of a privileged white woman might feel as she’s grieving the execution of her baby boy. My sympathy isn’t going to bring him back and it isn’t going to stop the police from killing the next black man. What good is my sympathy?
I know that the way I raise my white sons is different than the way a black mother raises her black sons. Black boys need to learn to be cautious, fearful, and avoid certain situations where being black will get you killed. The burden to be squeaky clean is overwhelming. Don’t ever do anything that the media can label you a thug for because then they’ll say you deserved your fate. Black mothers have to raise their black boys knowing that jail is disportionately in their future along with murder by government peacekeepers. And even with all that it still doesn’t matter. You can’t parent your way out of the catch-22 of having a black boy.
In a conversation with a friend this morning when I mentioned how horribly different it is for black mothers. She said,
“It is certainly a different life, a life that people choose to ignore. We are told we have to be better but it clearly doesn’t matter. It is overwhelming and sad. I am grateful in a way to have girls. When I find out people are pregnant with boys, I am instantly saddened because their future is so compromised and uncertain.”
Is your heart breaking? It should be. Did you ever feel mournful when you found out you were having a boy? Or, relieved to find out your baby was a girl? It is shameful that in 2014 a mother would need to feel this way. Shameful!
It is easy to feel helpless and drown in my sorrow at the state of the world right now. But that helps no one. I can feel powerless or I can claim my power and DO something. So that’s what I’m going to do but I can’t do it alone. I need my fellow white mothers.
The Dalai Lama said that the world will be saved by the Western Woman. I think he reminds us that we have great power. I submit that as white mothers our power for change is absolutely crucial.
What good can we do? We can’t go to Ferguson, Mo to help or protest! We have babies to nurse and kids to shuttle to school. I’m here to tell you that we have the most important job available in the current conditions of the world because we are literally shaping the next generation of humans.
Let me repeat: there is no one in a more powerful position than you to stop racism. No. One. Not the police or the policy makers or even the president. YOU have a power they can’t wield. Let me suggest how you can use it to save the world.
1. Recognize your conditining.
Remember Pavlov’s dog? He was conditioned through repetition to salivate when a bell rang. We are conditioned to be afraid when we see a black man. There is no sense in denying it or claiming you “aren’t racist”. This is the type of racism that we all carry and denying it just gives it power.
I admit I have this racism in me. I grew up in an all white country town in the Midwest. My knowledge of black people came from the Cosby show and the news. The news, as the twitter hashtag #iftheyshotmedown shows has been using biased images and biased coverage for years to condition us to fear black men.
Recognize it, admit it, and talk about it. By pretending we don’t feel this way in order to avoid sounding racist we perpetuate it. There is no shame in admitting we have been conditioned in this way but there is great shame in not doing anything about it.
2. Avoid this conditioning with your kids.
Conditioning works because it is subconscious. For most of us (hopefully) no one sat us down and said “black men are scary, walk the other way when you see them.” No, we had this slowly build up due to biased media coverage in our formative years. Stop the cycle. Avoid biased media like you would GMOs.
You might think kids are zoned out when you watch the news but, like the little sponges they are, your kids are absorbing the micro-messages in the news. They see that news of crime is predominately black men. They hear words like thug, looting, gangs, etc. paired with images of black men.
TURN IT OFF. Turn it off with a quickness as if they were spewing the “n” word and spouting kkk credos. To your child’s developing mind they are just as dangerous. More so, because the messages are covert.
3. Talk about racism openly with your kids.
It isn’t enough to try to control the access to racist conditioning. You can not erase today’s racism but you can make sure tomorrow is less racist by teaching your kids about bias.
Don’t wait till they’re teens. Important discussions work through scaffolding - lots of mini-discussions adding up to a broader understanding. Tell your five year old about Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin. Don’t tell me “they are too young” do you think black mothers have that privilege?
I told my five year old daughter that the police killed a boy who was surrendering. I told her this type of thing happens WAY more often to black people (“like president Obama?” She asked) because of a history of racism. We’ve talked about racism before so she already knew that racism was treating someone different because of their skin color. We’ve talked about slavery and the civil rights movement. All of this builds up (scaffolds) to what will one day be a young lady with a sophisticated sense of racial justice.
If this is the first time you’ve discussed it don’t freak out about filling in all the blanks in one sitting. Just start talking about it and continue talking about it from now until forever. Start today.
Show them pictures from the #iftheyshotmedown hashtag. Show the “bad” one and ask what this person looks like. Then show the “good” one and ask what that person is like. Then tell them it is the same person. Talk about how the news uses one picture to create drama. Talk about how we should never make assumptions on one (or two) pictures or one or two stories on the news. If you have already been talking about slut-shaming and rape culture (you have been , right?) then you can draw parallels to how we judge people on dress and style and how that is unfair.
4. Talk to your kids about their privilege. Sure, you could focus on all the ways your life sucks and is an uphill battle. Or you could realize that, in respect to race, you were born with a winning lottery ticket.
Talk to your kids about how unfair stats like this are;
Less likely to be incarcerated: “While people of color only make up 30% of the total population, they are 60% of the U.S. prison population.”
Less likely to be hired: ” Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan found in field experiment in Boston and Chicago that people with “white-sounding” names are 50% more likely to receive a call back than people with “black-sounding” names, despite equal résumé quality between the two racial groups. White Americans are more likely than black Americans to have their business loan applications approved, even when other factors such as credit records are comparable.”
Less likely to get quality housing: “Whites are offered more choices; 60%–90% of housing units shown to whites are not brought to the attention of blacks. 72.1% of whites own their own home opposed to 48.1% for African Americans 46% of whites had help from their family in making down payments on homes compared to 12% for African Americans Whites are half as likely to be turned down for a mortgage or home improvement loan Whites pay on average an 8.12% interest rate on their mortgage, lower than the 8.44% African Americans pay on average The median home equity for whites is $58,000 compared to $40,000 for African Americans”
Less likely to get a quality education: “Minority students are less likely to be placed in honors classes, even when justified by test scores… Minority students are more likely than white students to be suspended or expelled from school, even though rates of serious school rule violations do not differ significantly by race.”
And it goes on. Read here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_privilege for more info and links to the research quoted.
My point is our kids need to know this. One of the reasons that we as adults get so defensive is that we are hearing about it for the first time after years of conditioning otherwise. You needn’t worry about white guilt in your kids if the truth is all they ever know. Tell them -“you are lucky to be white in these specific ways. That is terribly unfair to people of color. This is how we change it (or how do you think we can change it?)”
Many white people are raised to believe that talking about race is impolite and as a result we aren’t very good at it. I’m a social justice advocate and I’m often scared to speak out about racism because I’m white. This is the worst thing we could do. Our place of racial privilege demands that we get better at talking about racism and privilege.
Don’t be afraid to reach out for help. Check out what others are doing to teach about racial inequality.
“Find a book the children can read that depicts racism. “The Bus Ride” by William Miller, John Ward, Rosa Parks; “Wings” by Christopher Myers or “The Legend of Freedom Hill” by Linda Jacobs Altman are books discussing variations of racial inequalities or differences.”
This page has two activities you can do with kids to talk about racism: http://www.ehow.com/list_7654208_activities-teach-children-racial-inequa...
Remember: mothers like Mike Brown’s don’t have the option to float through life and not talk about racism. Neither should you.
The bottom line is we have overt prejudice - think Cliven Bundy spewing hate in the desert - but the much more insidious problem of internalized bias conditioned into us from birth. This is the fertile soil in which we grow a culture that guns down black men for doing nothing other than being black. As I’ve said before, the actions good people take fertilize the soil for bad people to practice extremism. If you are allowing the “fear of black men” propaganda in your children’s lives you are fertilizing the soil that killed Mike Brown.
But we are powerful. We hold the very key to racial harmony in our arms each day. Our kids aren’t born knowing hate but they are born being white. We have a responsibility to teach them the responsibility that comes with their skin color. We have a responsibility to Mike Brown’s mom and others like her that feel dread when they learn their child is a black boy.
The responsibility isn’t to be mourned. It is a privilege. Power always is. Let’s harness our power and use it to change the racial conditioning in our families. It starts with me and you. Let’s roll.
With love, Paige
