“Why bring it up?” Pushing back against White supremacy
by Sachi Feris
The other day, my dad was showing my children a video of his wife’s daughter’s circus performance and my three-year-old asked,
“Are they girls or boys?”
“They look like they’re wearing costumes that ‘girls’ more commonly use…but boys and men can wear skirts and dresses, too, and they could also be trans,” I responded.
“They are two women,” my dad retorted.
“You don’t always know by looking at someone how they want to be called,” I told my dad.
“They’re women. Why would you say they might be trans?”
“Because they might be.”
“But why bring it up?” my dad pressed.
The next morning, my dad drove my three-year-old, my 18-month-old, and I to a famous Brooklyn diner for breakfast. My three-year-old commented on the many images of Santa and “snow men” on the walls of the diner.
As usual, I responded with different language: “Yes, I see that snow person, too! That snow person could be a man or a woman.”
And with regard to Santa: “I notice that all of the Santas we see here have White skin…but remember the Santa with brown skin we saw at the pharmacy?”
Then, my son moved on to inquire about the row of nutcracker dolls decorating a shelf in the diner. All White-skinned nutcrackers. I started thinking about my experience of seeing the Nutcracker as a child at Lincoln Center. A childhood friend danced in the performance, and it was always hard to pick her out from our seats in the balcony. I remember my mom had instructions as to which row she danced in and what color bow she wore in her hair. Alas, all of the dancers (or nearly all in my memory) were White.
The Nutcracker performance was presented to me as a classic and as something very special. So, the unspoken message was that you had to be White to be “very special” or part of a “classic.” (In addition, The Nutcracker also reinforces traditional gender roles.)
By coincidence, my dad had also bought sugar cookie Nutcracker dolls/dancers (all White-skinned icing, of course, and napkins to match) for my children. He had bought nutcrackers for my boys and a dancer for my daughter. When I shared these cookies with my children, I noted:
“It seems like Grandpa bought nutcrackers for his grandsons and a ballet dancer for his granddaughter…obviously, a boy can be a dancer and like dancing and a girl can prefer the nutcracker.”
and
“I notice that the dolls all have White skin, on the cookies AND the napkin…that doesn’t seem very fair.”
My three-year-old didn’t have much of a response aside from pointing out the color of the nutcracker’s jacket and the fact that the color of his beard and mustache did not match. I don’t always want or need a response, but I do always want to take time to share my values with my children.
When my daughter got off the bus, I shared the cookie and my spiel with her, and she replied, “well, at least we’re White.”
This exactly the kind of a moment that many parents who take our workshops bring up as a “moment of crisis,” one that stirs up feelings of failure as a parent. They often feel an enormous pressure to “say the right thing” in this one moment. Luckily, the conversation about race and identity isn’t one 100-minute conversation. Thankfully, it’s more like 100 one-minute conversations…or even 1,000 one-second observations! I brought this understanding with me when I replied—without shutting my daughter down.
“What do you mean by ‘at least’?”
“Well, at least we’re White, so it’s good that the pictures look like us.”
“You’re right. It is good that a lot of the things we see show people who look like us. But it makes me really sad that people with brown skin don’t have the same. And I don’t like the message it sends that there are mostly White faces in advertisements…it’s like saying, ‘White is the better way to be’ and I don’t think there is only one way to be. I want people of all different skin colors to see themselves in advertisements and I don’t want anyone to get a message that who they are isn’t a ‘good’ way to be.”
Sometimes my daughter pushes back against my ideas—but I have faith in the multiple conversations we will have over the many days I get to share with her while she is growing up. So I will keep at it.
Back to my dad’s original question, “why bring it up?”
Because the values of white supremacy are everywhere and they are toxic. If I don’t call them out, if I am silent on this subject, than these values will get communicated to my children unchallenged. So I bring it up. Because if I don’t then I am complicit.
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