I was raised all over the place. We lived in the middle, mid, center, smack-dab, equistat, heart of the heartland, Missouri; the deep, very southern, way down south in Dixie, Georgia; The blindingly cold, very very out of the way Northern Michigan; very easternly, very New England-y, very colonial Maine; and have finally settled out in this, the wild and untamed suburbs of the western states.
In all my travels, and in all my varied lives, I’ve had dozens of friends, of all different races and nationalities (now this isn’t just me bragging — I can’t help it if I’m wildly popular). I credit my immigrant mother and father with their progressive attitudes about race and ethnicity. I never as a child considered that someone wouldn’t like my dear friend for the hue of her face. But, I’ve got to be honest here, aside from all my childhood friends, race issues have largely untouched me.
My kids and I have been studying Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement together recently, and it’s a pretty tough story to swallow if you’re an eight year old. “People did what???? Why did anyone care!??? They couldn’t sit together? They couldn’t drink from the same fountains?? Mom, I don’t get it.”
I must admit, I’m pleased by this response. But I don’t have a clear answer to her questions. My answers have largely involved words like change, fear, corrupted traditions, arrogance. But they don’t really do the issue justice. It’s all well and good to throw out a rejoinder like, “Well, that’s just the way it was. There was no reason for it. It was just stupidity.” But the issue is so much more complex than that.
So, how do you address, with your children, issues about historical events or traditions that do not synthesize well with modern thought? And, more importantly, I think, how do you address issues of race today, when the issue is — by my count — more complex, not less? Race issues today are the result of hundreds of years of poor economic policy as much as being about the color of one’s skin. The issues that were once largely race related have morphed into economic and social caste issues that are far more difficult and unwieldy to manage. How do I explain all of that to an eight year old?
And finally, I perceive racial issues are migrating to yet another race of people. I fear my dear niece and nephews, who are from a partially Latin family, are to face ever increasing discrimination from a sector of the population. How do we extend Dr. King’s message of love to all people?
If I had to simplify the issue with one word I would choose the word ignorance. And today I would apply it to so much more than race. You are right–the issue has gotten more complex.
I don’t know think I would try to explain it when it’s hard for me to wrap my own head around it. But with my kids I watch for opportunities–and they come up all the time–to discuss it in terms of specific experiences. These would include things they see at school and among friends and what happens in our own family when someone adopts a child of another race and we worry about how family members of an older generation will accept her (thankfully it went well and now we can see change and growth can occur).
And we say an awful lot just by how we choose to interact with people, love and serve and what we ourselves say on a daily basis. I think our kids pick up a lot more than we sometimes realize.
My family (8 and 10 year olds and mom and dad) has had many conversations lately about the social dynamics you describe. I think racist behavior in this country began partially because of the tendency people have to “blame the victim” in order to justify their own behavior in their minds (Have you read Bonds That Made us Free?). Slave owners did this to justify their actions, and then those traditions were passed down. It’s easy to find little ways that each of us have this tendency, and therefore to better understand and guard against those tendencies.
I also think this country never healed from the Civil War. The writers of the book The Fourth Turning have an interesting theory on this. You have to read the book to totally get it, but the idea is that societies tend to evolve in patterns that include a crisis, the rise of a “hero generation” to carry us through, a period of rebuilding, a period of prosperity, an unraveling, and then another crisis. Anyway, a practically a whole generation was wiped out in the Civil War–more than in any of our other wars–and a hero generation never really rose up to carry us through. Interesting that the wounds from that period still fester in this country while we have healed and moved on from other crises. The kids and I talk about how important their future roles, whatever God may reveal them to be, are. How they are needed and should prepare themselves well.
Thinking of it with these kinds of models helps me to find applications for us, to move beyond “That’s crazy. I would never do that!” And try to think about what in human nature allows these things to happen, and how we can find pieces of that in our own lives.
Oh, wow. My 6 year old and I were talking about this exact thing on the way home from school on Friday. She told me all she learned about “Martin Luther King, the Dr. Junior”
and we talked about why he was such a great leader. She also had the same reaction that your son did –she was so confused as to why skin color even mattered. To be honest, I’m still confused myself!
So, we just talked about how it was wrong, and I let it go at that. She’s still kind of young to be delving deeply into these issues, but it’s good to just let her know what we believe now, and how important it is to love everyone.
I want to share what she brought home from her lesson on Dr. King:
She had made a poster with his picture, and there was a spot for her to write the following:
“If I had a dream, and could make the world a better place, I would: (teacher’s prompt)
be friends with all people and send books to poor children and send toys to poor children and have a good time in the world”
Hopefully she’ll do just that!
My high school Sociology teacher said that prejudice comes from ignorance. People can learn through experience that their misconceptions are wrong. The sad part about the human way of sizing things up as I have learned in some of my later studies is that people will look for any slipping up by a person of race as a confirmation of such a prejudice while at times discounting successes.
I also think people are prejudice at times due to fear that other people will take away from the quality of life that they enjoy. I saw a nice special that reminded us that the Latino population of immigrants are often much like the European Immmigrants that many Americans call their ancesters. I think they said how they are often very religious. I know that family is important to a lot of the current immigrants seeking a better way of life.
I thought the following was an interesting read:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jx7ZOzHASfdRPVzknxYRzJwJIepQD8UA68C80
I suppose my kids have better attitudes about race than I do. Nobody every said negative things about other races to me, but the attitude they had came through. It is hard to get rid of these attitudes once they are internalized.
The reasons why there was segregation in the south was to keep the races separated in order to sharpen the lines between slave and free peopl. Imagine what would have happened if people had been able to intermarry and socialize freely. How would the institution of slavery survived as long it did? It was all about economics, money, money, money.
I don’t know that our children could understand that any better than they can understand the vestiges of this horrid system that lingered on until 1964.
I think you teach kids about race relations the same way you teach them about anything complex–one step at a time. My son gets the basics–that not playing with somebody who has a different color skin is silly. There is time enough to explain to him the rest of it.
I had to take a sociology class once, and it provided some interesting insight about race relations. We talked about how people naturally migrate to and form groups with others who look and act like they do. There are exceptions, of course, but on the whole, you are likely to be most comfortable living in a community where people talk, act, think, and dress like you, who have the same education as you do, and who make the same amount of money as you do. We are speaking at a strictly biological level here, but once a pack, or societal group of unity is formed, anything that appears to be different than the group is immediately perceived as a threat. Now, while humans behavior can be predicted based on animal models, we still have the ability to go beyond purely biologically driven behavior, and, as intelligent beings, we are capable of understanding that somebody who is different is not a threat.
But let’s face it–sometimes we’re just all a bunch of animals.
A big eye opener for me is serving a foreign mission and having companions of different nationality and ethnicity , etc than myself.
But we still had the same faith.