When children encounter racism: A story I grew up hearing

by Sachi Feris

When I was little, we almost never talked about race. But there is one story my mom told more than once about her mother, Rose. Though I never met my grandmother Rose, I “remember” her through stories. Rose was the doting grandmother (to my older cousins) and she was also a person who never stopped holding a grudge, who had a certain idea of how things should be and G-d help you if you didn’t fit into her vision.

All my mom heard, growing up, was about Jews being the best, the chosen people, about protecting Israel, raising money for Israel, and my adolescent mother would think, “What about everyone else in the world? Why are we any better than anyone else?”

In this story, my mom is in her early twenties (in 1967) and has just returned from her year in California, temporarily living with her parents. She is in the backseat of her parents’ car, no seat belt, on the way home to the Jewish enclave of Pelham Parkway, in the Bronx. Her father, Phil, is driving and her mother is sleeping in the front seat. Suddenly, the car swerves into a tree and turns over. My mom and Rose end up in the hospital with minor injuries, my mom with stiches over her left eye and broken ring finger and Rose with a broken jaw. Phil comes out of the accident without injury.

A few days later, in a post-hospital state of recuperation, my mom and Rose are sitting at the vinyl-covered kitchen table in her childhood home, talking. Rose’s jaw is wired shut, but this doesn’t prevent her insulting non-Jews.

“Shvartze,” comes out of her clenched teeth, a Yiddish word for someone who is Black, in this case used in a derogatory way.

This wasn’t the first time this had happened but it was the first time it broke my mom. Maybe it was the years of having hidden her Black friends from her mother, or the friends my mom was ordered to unfriend because they were known to have committed some crime in Rose’s estimation, of having dared to be different, maybe it was an unspoken fear of her mother’s wrath should she ever find out what her life had been like in California… 

In that moment, my mother explodes. They fight. They yell. My mother talks about remembering her feeling, so that I can feel it, too. The full body sensation of anger rising up inside. Shaking. An intolerance of her mother’s intolerance, of her lack of will to see, to change, an intuitiveness that came from my mom’s core that her mother was wrong. She has to get out of her mother’s kitchen.

My mother runs out of the house crying and makes a collect call to her sister from a payphone at the laundromat, still sobbing.

“Go back home, get your things, and come here,” my aunt instructs her.

My mom doesn’t remember how, but she knows that she got to Penn Station to take the Long Island Rail Road out to my aunt’s, where she stayed for a few months until moving into an apartment on West 23rd Street.

My nine-year-old knows this story now. Through multiple tellings and questionings of “why” my grandmother Rose was “a bigot” as my mother always said, or “racist” in the words of today, we have talked about how insular Rose’s world was, that she didn’t know anyone who wasn’t Jewish. We’ve talked about how she didn’t work outside her home, how maybe she wanted something more from life that she didn’t find, and wrongly blamed people who were different from her out of ignorance.

We’ve also revisited conversations we’ve had in the past about bias and what happens when children (and adults) see images that present Whiteness as “better” or “normal” over and over and over…that it makes all of us think that it’s true (that White is “better”) even if we don’t want to think that.

Rose died before I was born and cannot be called in to this conversation on racial justice…but many times Raising Race Conscious Children’s workshop participants share concerns about how to talk to their children about relatives who express racist statements, or how to engage with their own families’ history of racism.

I re-tell this story because it is a part of my family’s story and a part of our on-going journey as a White family actively working towards a more racially just world. I re-tell this story to echo my mom’s intuitive understanding that her mother was wrong…the understanding that resulted in her steadfast decision that her children would not be exposed to the overt racism displayed by her mother. I re-tell this story to explain to my children why we do talk about race and racism…so they stand up and use their voices against racism. Through telling stories about the past, my children will be able to tell a new story.

If you would like to reflect/engage in telling your own stories around race and racism to your children, join Raising Race Conscious Children’s new workshop series in March/April 2022, Writing for your children: Storytelling to support racial identity development.