Raising antiracist children starts by teaching about equality
My daughter knows that Black people aren’t really black. They are actually varying shades of brown. She also knows that people aren’t actually white either.
In her innocence, she refers to a box of Crayons to make her point, holding up a black one and white one.
“See,” she says. “We’re brown. No one is black or white.”
My son thinks people are pink and purple, and black is the color of hair, eyes and the interior of our car.
These are conversations we have at dinner. In my attempts to explain the concept of race to a 6-year-old and a 4-yearold, I’m reminded that race makes no sense at all. It is really a made-up construct based on a hierarchy of power and privilege that impacts everything, from how we live to how we see ourselves in the mirror.
I hope to teach my children to see the beauty of all people in all shades, as well as see the power in their hair, which grows to the sun, and the richness of their cocoa skin. I want them to know they can be anything they want to be.
The idea is that they are antiracist, a concept I learned only recently through Ibram X. Kendi’s many bestselling books, including “How to Be an Antiracist,” “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You” and “Antiracist Baby,” which was the focus of a bizarre attack by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz during Katanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings earlier this year. The attention, ironically, prompted book sales to soar.
Kendi is a leading scholar on antiracism and the founding director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. In 2020, he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world and was awarded the 2021 MacArthur Genius Grant. He has a new book, “Goodnight Racism,” a spin on
Margaret Wise Brown’s classic children’s book “Goodnight Moon.”
Raising antiracist children means teaching them to understand that, while our skin color may be different, we’re all human and, even though we’re not always treated the same, we are all equal.
“I think all parents of any child should be raising their children to be antiracist,” Kendi said. “We have to protect our kids of color from thinking that people of color in general have less because they are less, just as parents of white children have to protect them against the idea that white people have more because they are more. So any idea that suggests a racial group is better or worse is certainly not an antiracist idea.”
Conversations about race are often hard because there’s such fear, and hate, in offending. Feelings get hurt when race is the issue.
As hard as it is to engage adults about race, Kendi said, there’s a common assumption that it’ll be even harder with kids, when it’s actually much easier. Kids will give it to you straight. They don’t have the baggage that adults do.
“There’s also this perception, particularly among white parents, that, ‘I don’t want to say the wrong thing or introduce race to my kid.’ So there’s this belief that if you talk to them, you’re going to make them racist, as opposed to protect them from racism. And then there’s also the shame,” he said.
“I suspect when a white child says something like, ‘Dark people are bad,’ their parents feel ashamed. When a parent of a Latinx child hears their child say, ‘I want to have blue eyes,’ like with anything else, we want to walk away from the shame, as opposed to understanding that doesn’t mean we failed as parents. It means we live in a dangerously racist society that we have to protect our children from.”
His thoughts about raising children to be antiracist were amplified when his now 6year-old daughter, Imani, was born. It became even more crucial after the murder of George Floyd, when so many young people were demonstrating against injustice.
“We saw high school students demanding to be told the truth and were expressing how upset they were about the way that they had been raised,” Kendi said. “They did not want this sort of colorblind avoidance denial form of parenting to continue.
Then many parents and teachers saw that and started responding to it, looking for support or resources to guide them as they guided their students and children. I noticed that I had been sort of thinking about this personally.”
His daughter, like mine, has encouraged a wider dialogue about race at home. He tells the story of her attending a day care, where she played only with a blue-eyed, blondhaired doll for several days, and, by the fourth day, she had a tantrum because she didn’t want to leave the doll when it was time to go home. But there were no dolls at the day care who looked like her.
“She didn’t have another option. That taught us the importance of ensuring that her toy box, wherever she was going, that her environment, wherever she was going, that she was seeing the human,” he said.
Kendi continues to face criticism for his work teaching us about our humanity.
Cruz’s attack on his “Antiracist Baby” children’s book is a prime example. There’s nothing in the book that is controversial — racism is taught, we’re all human, and bad policies are the problem, not people. Still, it was a difficult time for Kendi.
“To see someone weaponizing and distorting my book to try to harm the prospects of someone who was extremely qualified was difficult to watch,” Kendi said.
“But to know that people saw through that, and saw he was trying to demonize and weaponize a book that is actually trying to work with kids and certainly parents to think differently and to appreciate racial equality is something I appreciated. Unfortunately, what he did is symbolic of how people have attacked my work. It’s been a consistent and constant distortion and misrepresentation, then attacking the distortions and misrepresentations.”
We need to arm children with ideas to make the world better and kinder.
“I think we’re going to make mistakes, and our kids are going to be harmed by racism, I don’t know if there’s a way in which we can completely protect them. Let me just say, when our kids are actually saying what they think about race and feel comfortable enough to do so, that’s actually a good thing.”
My son, who sees people in hues of pink and purple, said it perfectly, “I think people should be every color, like the rainbow.”