A few years ago, some academics did a study of racial attitudes in small children. They wanted to find out whether generic assurances that everyone’s the same on the inside — the standard white liberal catechism of racial good feeling — actually make a difference in whether kids turn into bigots.
Telling your kid that everyone’s the same, that nobody’s better than anyone else, that everybody’s friends with everybody, accomplishes nothing. You can say that kind of stuff all day and all night — and believe me, white liberal parents do — but if that’s all you do, when a researcher sits your kid down and asks your kid whether black people are as nice or as smart or as pretty or as good as white people, they’re going to get answers that are going to make you cringe.
Because there’s bigotry floating around in the air in our society. Not anywhere near as much as there used to be, but a lot. And your kid is going to pick that up. And if that’s all your kid picks up, it’s going to stick.
So if you’re a white parent who wants your kid to not turn into a casually creepy bigot at the age of six, you need to talk about race. You need to tell your kid about racism. You need to be the first to explain racism to your kid, before that bigotry floating around in the air has a chance to land on them.
You need to say that some horrible people think that black people aren’t as nice, as smart, as pretty, as good as white people. You need to say that those people are horrible, and that they’re wrong. You need to say that people like those people — white people like those people — used to be in charge in a lot of places, but that nice, smart, good people (some, but not all, of them pretty) fought against them in the courts and on the streets and changed the rules so that the horrible people wouldn’t always win.
You need to tell them about Dr. King and Rosa Parks and Ella Baker, and you need to tell them about Bill Moore and Viola Liuzzo and Chaney and Schwerner and Goodman. You need to tell them about Frederick Douglass and John Brown and Sojurner Truth and Denmark Vesey.
On our way to Niagara Falls a few summers ago, I took my kids to Harriet Tubman’s house in Auburn NY to learn about the Underground Railroad, and to Frederick Douglass’s grave. Two years later I took them to John Brown’s homestead.
I don’t want my kids to be bigots.
I don’t want my kids to be bigots, and that’s not all. I want my kids to be fighting against the bigots. And I don’t just want them fighting, I want them winning. And so I started arming them for that fight before they were out of preschool. Because that’s what you need to do.
Those of you reading this who are parents, talk to your kids. Those of you who are going to be parents, start thinking now about how you’re going to talk to your kids, when they get here. Those of you who are siblings, talk to your brothers and sisters. Those of you who are children, talk to your parents. Talk to your friends. Talk to your teachers. Talk to your professors.
Talk. Talk. Tell them what you know. Tell them what you believe. Tell them what you’ve learned.
Don’t let them walk around not knowing.
studentactivism.net 
21 comments
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June 18, 2015 at 8:59 am
jupitaur
“You need to say that some horrible people think that black people aren’t as nice, as smart, as pretty, as good as white people.”
That’s going to give them a big ol’ dose of cognitive dissonance when they discover their sweet old grandma says this kind of thing. Plus I think they get enough already about how if they do something bad, they’re a bad kid.
June 18, 2015 at 12:10 pm
Resources For White Parents On Talking To Kids About White Supremacy and Racism | Fiending for Hope
[…] How To Teach Your White Kids To Fight Racism […]
June 18, 2015 at 2:45 pm
Emciel
Speaking from experience, when you tell a kid that everyone’s equally smart/hardworking/whatever, and that treating people differently based on race is a bad, bad thing that no decent person should do, then when that kid is confronted with a world where people of different races are in vastly unequal positions they assume that’s by choice. Because if everyone has the capacity to be whatever they want to be, and racism is only something bad people do (of which you hope there aren’t very many in the world), then any inequalities have to be because people are just happier that way. And that’s an incredibly toxic thing to believe.
June 18, 2015 at 5:02 pm
Angus Johnston
Jupitaur, I think there’s a benefit in painting historical figures and abstract racists with a broad-ish brush, particularly in the early years, but yes, I agree that it’s important to have the good-people-can-do-bad-things analysis operating, and not just around this.
June 18, 2015 at 5:11 pm
Angus Johnston
Emciel, I don’t get it.
1. Saying “everyone’s equally/smart/hardworking/whatever” isn’t the same as saying that smartness, work ethic, whatever are racially-linked traits.
2. Treating people differently based on race IS a bad, bad thing that no decent person should do.
3. People of different races are in vastly unequal positions in no small part because of centuries of crushing racism and its aftereffects.
June 19, 2015 at 10:23 am
Emciel
Oh yikes, it seems like my comment came across exactly wrong.
I was just trying to provide an anecdotal observation to support your point.
My own experience* was that my (otherwise quite savvy) parents defaulted to “everyone is the same inside” and “treating people unequally is very, very bad” when raising their children. And yes, those are both true statements (assuming we’re excluding things like affirmative action from the second), but alone they provide no framework for actually understanding the world. So as a child who was trying to make sense of the inequality I saw, I had very little guidance. And in a world where people are equally capable and racism is a thing prepetuated only by very bad (and therefore, in my mind, rare) people, the only explanation I could find as a child was that people must be for some reason choosing to live in more dangerous neighbourhoods or work worse jobs or none at all, and so on.
So yes, absolutely, talk to your kids about race. Not just because otherwise they’ll pick up bigotry from the world around them, but because otherwise the world makes no sense, and kids come up with some seriously messed-up ways to explain things when they’re denied the tools with which to understand them correctly.
I hope that clears up my comment!
*growing up as a white kid in Chicago in the late 80s/early 90s.
June 19, 2015 at 10:47 am
valaria
Title should say “how to teach your kid to fight racism. “
June 19, 2015 at 3:59 pm
Angus Johnston
Emciel: Whew! (And I’m glad I scrapped and rewrote the snottier version of my response. I had a hunch that I was missing something.)
June 19, 2015 at 9:20 pm
suevanhattum
Thank you for your post.
“You need to tell them about Dr. King and Rosa Parks and Ella Baker, and you need to tell them about Bill Moore and Viola Liuzzo and Chaney and Schwerner and Goodman. You need to tell them about Frederick Douglass and John Brown and Sojurner Truth and Denmark Vesey.”
I have read a lot, and I don’t know what all of these people did. I especially don’t know how to talk to young kids about it all. I have found lots of great kids’ books that talk about slavery and the civil rights movement. (And I’ve seen a few that don’t address these things well.) I think this list could be the start of some wonderful resources for parents. The African American kids’ books I’ve liked are listed here: http://andalltherestofsue.blogspot.com/2010/03/african-american-picture-books-for.html
Do you have a similar list you can share with us?
June 20, 2015 at 4:46 am
sylvia surprise
I think the best way to fight racism is have black friends and encourage your children to have black friends.
June 21, 2015 at 11:57 pm
Stacy
I was blessed to raise my daughter with black friends around regularly, especially a bff coworker of mine she knew as auntie Stephanie. I remember her walking through Stephanie’s kitchen while cooking was being done for a party, coffee-colored hands reaching to tousle her softy flaxen hair as everyone was talking and cooking. Stephanie had a print of Norman Rockwell’s painting of the little black girl going into a white school amid police and angry, tomato- throwing crowds. We talked about the painting. What I’m getting to is, she absorbed for herself how lovely and loving and smart and every other thing Stephanie and Naomi and Angela and Uncle PH and everybody was. The idea of racism makes her heartsick, and of anyone hurting Stephanie — horrified, angry.
June 22, 2015 at 1:16 pm
Joanna
I really have a hard time with the “bad people”/”good people” thing. Evil exists, and any of us can end up doing its bidding if we are not careful. Powerful civil rights activists also committed adultery, and brilliant scientists have held stubbornly to stereotypes and dogmatic assumptions and abused their lab assistants. Ethnocentrism is a distortion of the need to be in a group, to care for your specific group with most of your energy…and then telling yourself you are doing that because your group is better than the other people. Stereotypes are “stuck” prototypes–our minds naturally come up with a “first picture” of what something is “like,” but then we use more information to shape that picture to reality. Assuming the prototype is TRUE is as silly as assuming that, when getting a key copied at the Home Depot, the “Honda” key template will start your car before the guy makes the modifications to it. Anyway, the point is, bad stuff happens when normal stuff mutates and isn’t corrected. It can happen to any of us.
June 23, 2015 at 3:41 am
GABBY
Sylvia having black friends is not a sure fire solution either. Dylan roof had a black roomate. it didn’t stop the white supremacy from taking root. Black children internalize huge amounts of white supremacy and self hate at an early age also. It manifests in ways that you couldn’t even imagine. I should know I was a black girl raised around majority whites in the 80’s. Our society tells us we are ugly so we believe it as kids. Our hair and features are not good enough and we believe it. The lack of inclusion makes us feel unworthy. We are taught we were slaves and thats it. Thats our only contribution to history besides MLK and Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman. Its a huge task to grow out of it and that is a learning process. Anti racism must come from the parents and not left up to the childrens interactions with each other.
June 23, 2015 at 8:22 am
Angus Johnston
Joanna, I agree that calling people bad or good is an oversimplification, and that it’s important to let kids know that doing bad things doesn’t make you a bad person.
But at the same time, the concept of heroes and villains is everywhere in our society, particularly in children’s books, movies, television, and games. If you’re raising your kids to be critical of that idea generally, that’s awesome — really. I think that’s important.
But to the extent that kids live in a world of stories, and that those stories derive a lot of their power from the struggle of good against evil, my own feeling is that it’s not a bad thing to plug our understanding of history into that, particularly in the early years.
I took my kids to Amsterdam last summer, when they were eleven and seven. We visited the Anne Frank house and the Dutch national museum of the Resistance. In the latter, there was a large kids’ exhibit tracing the experiences that four children had in the war — a Jewish girl, a boy whose father was in the Resistance, a girl whose father was a pro-fascist mayor during the occupation, and a boy from an apolitical family. Those stories did a great job of showing the complexity of the circumstances these children found themselves in.
But there wasn’t a lot of that kind of complexity to be seen at the Anne Frank house, and I’m not sure there should have been. The Nazis who forced the Franks to hide, the Nazis who took them to the camps, the neighbors who turned them in — those were, for our purposes that day, bad people, period.
Yes, good people can do bad things, and yes, it’s important to understand why. And yes, it’s important to understand why evil — evil actions and evil people — can gain support and power from people who aren’t cartoon villains. But I think we can say all that as part of an ongoing discussion in which we also say that white supremacists are the bad guys and people who fight them are the good guys.
June 23, 2015 at 8:25 am
Angus Johnston
And I agree with Gabby that just encouraging your kids to have a diverse friend group isn’t enough. Beyond everything that she said, it’s also important to help kids understand that racism is structural, not just interpersonal — fighting racism is about altering the way society operates, not just about how we interact with other people one-on-one.
June 23, 2015 at 8:54 am
Oops, Forgot a Title Links | Gerry Canavan
[…] * How to Teach Your White Kids to Fight Racism. […]
June 23, 2015 at 10:12 am
Joanna
Thanks for your comments Angus. I think it’s important to realize that goodness and badness involve a series of decisions that build on each other. When my children were little and a classmate was pushing or using foul language, I would explain to my children that he/she was “still learning” the right way to behave. Racist and other -ist behavior got a stronger reaction from me, but more along the lines of that behavior being wrong, not the person being bad. Your comments about heroes and villains made me smile, because when my daughter was around 3-4 years old we were playing “Narnia” with an empty cabinet as the wardrobe. She was Lucy and I was the White Witch, who I referred to as the Bad Lady. I was playing her up in all her evilness, and my daughter proceeded to tell me that Aslan loved me and wanted to take care of me, and that there was a book back in her world that could tell me all about that. I, as the adult, thought Jadis was beyond redemption, but my little girl saw hope. Pretty cool.
June 23, 2015 at 12:14 pm
lisa
I have taught my children that all people ARE different. We are are different, but like a good recipe, many ingredients make the meal delicious. I take offense that this author feels the need to say “white people like those” instead of just “people like those”. what he wants me and you to tell our children is that ONLY white people are racist and that’s a LIE. There are racists in ALL races, not just white people. Everyone has the right to be treated equally and fairly. We have the right to live where we want and go to school where we want. We all have to right to join the same clubs and organizations. No one should be denied any right that another has. Do not teach your children that it is just white people that are racist, because that’s not true. Teach them that we should respect each other for the human beings that we are, we are all different and beautiful for what we can bring to humanity.
June 28, 2015 at 9:47 pm
What I’m Reading – June 28, 2015 – ASK Musings
[…] kid is going to pick that up. And if that’s all your kid picks up, it’s going to stick.” How to Teach Your White Kids to Fight Racism (via […]
June 28, 2015 at 10:03 pm
Angus Johnston
Here you go, Lisa:
https://studentactivism.net/2013/12/25/how-we-define-racism-and-why/
July 10, 2015 at 9:01 am
The best thing white people can do for black people in America? See race, even (especially) your own - Quartz
[…] Dolezal’s and her family’s experiences could’ve been drastically different if an effective ally taught them another […]