Superman Can't Fix This

I was washing dishes last week when I heard Beckett ask a question from the kitchen counter... “Is everyone in our family a white person?” 

“Yes, they are,” I said.

“Phew,” he sighed. 

I closed my eyes and thought: “Oh, no. Ask questions before you react.”

“Why did you sigh like that, buddy?”

“Because I don’t want anyone in our family to be treated unfairly.”

We live thirty-six miles from Elizabeth City, NC, a town recently in the headlines for the shooting of Andrew Brown, Jr. Nathan chose to join other clergy in Elizabeth City in a prayerful procession of peace in response to the shooting, so we discussed as a family why he chose to participate. I always struggle with talking to Beckett’s young, categorical mind about racial injustice, and I fumble every single time. We keep having these conversations anyways, because they are just that important to get right.

When Beckett was very little we would say the job of superheroes, like Superman, is to stop villians from causing harm. As he got older, the job of the police was to help people in danger. But, there’s a good guy vs. bad guy dichotomy that falls apart quickly the more aware you become. He’s old enough to know that explanation is shaky at best, because he knows now that there are some childhood heroes that don't use their power to protect and defend everyone. We told him that many people in our country still assume black people are criminals and expendable, but in our house we believe that black lives matter. 

Last week, we read Something Happened In Our Town by Marianne Celano, Marietta Collins, and Ann Hazard. It’s a story about the way two families, one white, one black, experience and discuss a racially-motivated police shooting in their town. The families reflect on racial injustice and the historical roles of their families. The parents discuss with their children the ways to break these patterns of hate and injustice. 

We told Beckett that while it’s true that the world is much a fairer and safer place for our family, we have a responsibility to show courageous compassion to those that don’t get treated with that same humanity. Superman can’t fix this, but we can teach our kids that, in time, they can.

#somethinghappenedinourtown

Not My Story To Tell

I was on a run this week listening to the podcast Armchair Expert with guest Jamil Zaki. 

Zaki is a professor of psychology at Stanford, Director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Laboratory, and author of The War For Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World. I was rounding mile three when I had to stop in my tracks to rewind. 

Zaki said:

Another tool in the empathy toolkit is storytelling. Whether it’s immersion in novels, or plays, acting is a really powerful sort of performance-enhancing drug for empathy it turns out. [...] You embody other lives, you enter other minds in various ways. So any engagement in a narrative art can be a really powerful road to empathy for ourselves and for others. And there’s these fascinating studies where [...] it’s like a clinical trial, except where instead of a drug you prescribe someone a novel or you prescribe them a film. It turns out there’s these little boosts in empathy especially when we engage with art whose protagonists are different from ourselves. So if a White-American reads a novel where a protagonist is Muslim-American, there Islamaphobia will decrease a little bit.  

This was fresh on my mind when we read the picture book Sulwe a few days later, written by Lupita Nyong'o and illustrated by Vashti Harrison. Sulwe is a beautiful young black girl, distressed about her dark skin. Her family has lighter shades of brown skin, but Sulwe’s is “the color of midnight.” After a loving, but ineffective, talk with her mother, Sulwe is visited in her dream by a star that tells her the story of two sisters, Day and Night, and their own revelations about the power of appreciating, loving and embracing the skin you’re in. 

I stewed over this incredible book for a while, trying to contrive some plight-of-the-redhead experience to share that relates to Sulwe’s story. 

But, I stopped, because Sulwe’s is not my story to tell. 

If I have learned nothing else from the past year, it’s that my job is to listen to and absorb the black experience I’m being told. And...to offer the same opportunity to my kids. 

They need to know sometimes the story isn’t ours. Sometimes, we just have to stop and listen.

#sulwe

#empathy

#jamilzaki

I'm Going To Do Better

“‘Do they know they’re in the wrong place?’ I whispered. ‘Some rules have to be broken.’ Mama whispered back.”

I’ve never been in a situation where I had to break the rules to exercise my right for life, freedom or justice.

We read Freedom On The Menu this week by Carole Boston Weatherford, a picture book about the Greensboro Four at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, the movement kicking off the sit-ins. Beckett was thoroughly confused. He understood that the black people were treated very unfairly, and he didn’t want that to happen. He didn’t understand the protesting, despite the fact that this kid has been to quite a few protests since November 2016. His life, his freedom and his future success has never been on the line. Blissfully unaware, my little white boy, because the world has never been working against him.

Because of that, the protest is where his cognitive dissonance began, because the good guys in the story were breaking the rules.

The protestors were disrupting the peace.

The protestors were even being put in jail.

That’s when I began to see on such a base level the critical nature of the Civil Rights Movement and, now, the Black Lives Matter movement.

Protesting is loud, protesting is angry, protesting demands something break. There’s a disruption to the order of things that has to happen, and I see that real change won’t happen quietly or without literally and figuratively shattering reality as we know it. Although I know that I will never truly understand, I admire so deeply the incredible courage of these movements. I so admire the people that unite with bravery to disrupt the peace in order to be heard, to ignite change. This is not a distant past to which us white people can shake our heads and proclaim we would be on the right side of history. These horrors are right now. They are today.

I am going to do my part to respond with love in a braver and more courageous way. I am going to do better. As parents, we’re going to raise our boys to do better.

#carolebostonweatherford #childrensliterature #blacklivesmatter

Black Lives Matter

There are only five books on my boy’s bookshelves with black people.

And that matters, because black lives matter.

My boys aren’t actively cheering for black characters to win their story.

As woke as I want to believe that I am, I’ve listened enough to know that my scope as a white woman has been so limited, and I’m perpetuating that limit with my boys. This includes only posting about books by authors with dead white people that wrote about anthropomorphic animals or other white people. That’s part of the problem.

The reason I’ve been posting about them is because those were the books I was raised on, the books I was taught in school, the books I saw myself in. They evoke warmth and nostalgia and memories of reading by flashlight hours after I was told I had to be asleep. So what would happen if people of color were incorporated into my boy’s archive of nostalgic, magical characters? They will likely cultivate empathy, connection, admiration and love for their black neighbor.

Sure, reading books about the Civil Rights Movement once a year shows some incredible heroes. As a white liberal, of course I’m going to read about Rosa Parks in sheer awe. But if I want to start showing my privileged white boys that #blacklivesmatter, I’m going to have to start reading them more books with everyday black heroes being the protagonists, not just history book heroes. Their foundation of race can look different than mine.

Every black life matters, and my boys are young enough that a small change like this can be form the way they view the world. And, God willing, they will use their privilege to fight the systemic racism that is murdering our black men in the name of contrived safety for those that, let’s call it what it is, view themselves as more worthy of life.

Maybe reading them Kadir Nelson and Jacqueline Woodson and Kwame Alexander and Carole Boston Weatherford will contribute to them knowing that black lives do matter.

#blacklivesmatter #representationmatters #childrensliterature #jacquelinewoodson