Antiracist Parenting

It is frightening to acknowledge the power of the social media in our children’s lives. With a click of a button our children can witness the torturous murder of George Floyd and countless incidents of racial violence. They see “All Lives Matter” “Blue Lives Matter” “Defund the Police” “Black Lives Matter” and they have questions. Do they raise these questions with you? If so, how do you explore this with them? If not, why might that be, and what may be the impact of this silence on their development in an increasingly multicultural world.

Generation after generation optimistic adults speak of how the children of today will be the ones who change the world. However, there tends to be a disconnect between this hope and our actions needed to prepare our children to lead this transformation.

Residing in a culture where color blindness is a value, we learn “talking about race is racist.” Our learning about race therefore often comes implicitly, out of our awareness, and it tends to amount to reinforcement and retransmission of oppressive racial myths. When we desire to break this pattern and teach our children to be that change that they/we want to see in the world; we tend to realize that we are ill-equipped to act.

Anti-racist parenting is humbling. We teach our children by learning with them, sharing the value of knowing that we don’t know what we don’t know, building community, and living into our vision of justice.