How Can Parents Teach Children to Respond to Racism?

How Can Parents Teach Children to Respond to Racism?How C
Sue Doyle, staff writer for California's Daily News, wrote an interesting piece entitled For Many Families, Racism is Fact of Life. In this piece she discusses the unique quandary faced by black families, who for generations have had (and continue) to face racism in America.

For new families, the key parenting question inevitably becomes, How do I teach my child to respond?

Is there a right response to racism?

Some parents, Doyle says, teach their children from young ages to accept racism as their fate, teach them that it is something they will inevitably face just because they are black. Others, however, are not comfortable conditioning their children to simply accept and not respond to racist behavior because they fear that reactions could result in suspensions from school, work or perhaps even arrest.

It is a question parents cannot afford to ignore; they must contemplate this tough challenge and agree on a strategy. When a child comes home from school time after time, scratched, bruised or emotionally hurt as a result of a racially motivated verbal or physical attacks, they must decide how they will help their children to develop the appropriate defenses.

Expect children to suck it up? After a while, it's very likely that frustration will build, that repeated incidences of embarrassing name calling, hateful jeering, and social exclusion will reach a boiling point and ultimately require some kind of release. But, what's an appropriate form of release? And wouldn't waiting for a boiling point reaction equate with risking a less constructive response?

Expect children to stand up for themselves? Take the chance that doing so will only confirm a pre-existing negative stereotype, result in punishment, lead to greater physical harm, or perhaps worse, translate into risk taken in the absence of any change or positive result.

Perhaps, as with most questions in life, the best answer lies somewhere in the middle of the classic either/or response, in a mix of both approaches.

This is Not a Challenge Every Family Faces

One summer, I visited an old friend of my husband's--a soft-spoken and kind-hearted southern White woman. During one of my stories about childhood, I casually mentioned the care my Irish grandmother had taken in preparing me at a young age for the bias I would inevitably face as a mixed-race, bilingual, brown-skinned girl in America. As I lounged on her patio, speed-talking in true New York style--one sentence running into the next--I almost missed the change in her expression. Her face, initially shaped by my story about a generously loving grandparent, had suddenly transformed from one of warm delight into one of shock which, I did not fail to notice, was tinged with a degree of irritation.

Applying the breaks on the replay of my childhood, I paused mid-sentence.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Your grandmother prepared you? She warned you, a child, that you would face prejudice and racism?" she asked in a tone that conveyed stunned disbelief.

"Well, yes" I said, and only then did I realize that her perspective as a White person might be different. So, I asked, "From your perspective, is that shocking?" I asked.

"I can't believe someone would tell a child they will face racism," she said. "How do you feel about that?"

I told her the truth: "As a chiild, I'm not sure I can say I completely understood. But, now that I am an adult, I can honestly say I am very thankful to her. When I did encounter prejudice and hate, it didn't come as such a surprise, first of all. Then, rather than interpret it as something wrong with me, which a child might very well be inclined to do, I recognized it as something wrong with other people's logic, something with our society. And my grandmother's wisdom and support empowered me to take constructive action rather than bottle it up."

"Wow. Well, I can't imagine saying something like that to a child," she concluded, making it clear that the idea didn't fit in with her view of proper parenting.

Although we ended the conversation agreeing to disagree on the subject, once again, I became acutely aware of a key difference in the lives of Whites and non-Whites in this country.