In the face of Baltimore: Reflecting on conversations with my son about Ferguson
My son is 4. He is Vietnamese and White (Irish and Russian), I’m a White woman and his dad is Vietnamese, the first of his family born in the US.
During the weeks after the Ferguson non-indictment, I listened to many stories on the radio about Mike Brown. I thought about each one and whether the radio should stay on or off (when my son was present). I usually turned the radio off when there was a really gruesome description, but otherwise I left it on.
Parenting and Baltimore: Where to begin
During the weeks after the Michael Brown and Eric Garner non-indictments, various White friends asked me whether I thought they should be talking about these issues with their school-aged children. My daughter was just two-and-a-half at the time and I was not talking about it with her…but to my friends with four and five-year-olds, I answered unequivocally “yes.”
“Madeline,” race, and the problem with ‘good versus bad’
A friend of the family gave my daughter the book “Madeline” by Ludwig Bemelmans along with a Madeline doll. We looked at the Madeline doll together and noted that she has red hair. As we opened the book and started to read, we looked for Madeline but couldn’t find her at first. We then realized that she has blonde hair on some pages and red hair on other pages.
Negative stereotypes and the danger of students learning not to talk about race
I am a White educator of third grade students in Brookline, Massachusetts. I teach in public school within a very wealthy and somewhat diverse population. Our minority enrollment is 41% (mostly Asian, and only 3% Black). I am also the mother to a one-year-old boy. A few years ago, I took a class called Empowering Multicultural Initiatives (EMI ) that changed my life. This class challenged me to confront my White privilege and find ways to have courageous conversations about race.
Talking about bi-racial families with my daughter
My daughter has been playing with her vintage Fisher Price people on a daily basis since she was about a year old.
In one routine game, she puts the “children” (who are slightly shorter) in a circle and sings the “goodbye song.” Then, each“adult” (a slightly taller figure) picks a child up from school. When she first started playing this game, she would assign adults to children randomly, almost never putting them in the same pairs, and with no consideration to their physical appearances. The only thing she was emphatic about was that every child had to be paired with one adult.
How to explain racially-charged interactions (and gentrification) to my daughter
As a born and bred New Yorker, I expect an occasional terrible experience with a stranger. My worst stranger story involves a White man who spit in my on 5th avenue. So it isn’t always about race…but sometimes it is.
Last winter, I was sitting on the steps in the lobby of an apartment building in my neighborhood, trying to get my one-and-a-half-year-old to put on her shoes. I had just gotten her to sit down and was forcing her feet into the shoes and fastening the Velcro when a Black man entered the building and commented “Stairs are not for sitting.”
