Black History Month is first and foremost a weeks-long celebration of the pioneering black Americans who changed the course of our culture and country.
For white parents, particularly those who don't feel comfortable or prepared to talk with their children about race and racism, the month should also be seen as a timely opportunity to start essential, on-going conversations about racist ideas if they haven't already.
Black History Month, after all, often prompts kids to ask questions about slavery, historical periods like Jim Crow and the civil rights era, the lives of famous black Americans, and current debates over kneeling during the National Anthem and police violence.
For parents who have little practice discussing race and racism, it can be tempting to reach for the safest thing to say, or to say nothing at all. But generations of parents tried that and America remains a country steeped in racist policies and views, a reality that many white Americans can't seem to fully grasp. Just review the results of a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2017: Forty percent of white Americans polled said race relations were good, while only 28 percent of black Americans felt the same way.
Ibram X. Kendi, professor of history and international relations and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, instead advocates for a different approach. Parents should talk to children about how certain ideas are racist.
"If that child does not learn early about the real world of racism, then they’re more than likely going to become a practitioner of racism," he says.
"If that child does not learn early about the real world of racism, then they’re more than likely going to become a practitioner of racism."
Kendi is also the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, a book that traces the origins of racism in this country back to economic, political, and cultural self-interest, not primarily ignorant, malevolent people.
That distinction is critical because white Americans tend to view racism in extreme terms; unless someone was photographed doing something obscenely racist, people are hesitant to apply that label to a person.
No decent person alive today imagines themselves — or anyone they love — as capable of owning slaves or attacking black children out of hatred. So the failure to see racism as anything but the absolute worst version of prejudice often turns our attempts to talk candidly about racism into an exercise in hand-wringing over whether it brings harm to someone to say their actions, words, or behaviors are racist. Think, for instance, of when NBC News' Chuck Todd recently pressed Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown over whether he really believed President Trump is racist "in his heart."
If you think it's necessary to know someone's innermost thoughts and convictions to determine whether their speech or deeds are racist, you're missing the point entirely. Racist ideas can be shared and perpetuated by anyone -- even liberals who point to their political affiliation as proof that they could have nothing to do with bigotry.
Ibram says that white parents who want to do better must begin by educating themselves about racism. That means knowing enough about the history and contemporary use of racist ideas to understand, clarify, and explain it to children. Those who don't know where to start should check out the anti-racist syllabus Kendi recently wrote for "people realizing they were taught by their relatives and friends and the media how to be racist."
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If that self-education sounds daunting, Kendi recommends thinking of racism as the equivalent of a disease or illness their child could contract.
"Most parents would go on an extreme binge of learning about that disease," he says. "It's essential for parents to go on a binge learning of the issue, the same way as they would with any other issue. They can stop the transfer of racist ideas from their own mind to their child’s mind."
This is where some white parents might step back aghast, insisting their mind contains no racist ideas. Kendi says it's perfectly acceptable to acknowledge that racist ideas, or ideas with racist implications, come at us at all times, in various forms. Take, for instance, the border wall, drug sentencing guidelines, welfare reform, maternal mortality, school vouchers, home ownership, and lending algorithms. Racist notions about the humanity of black people define or significantly inform each of these issues. There's no escaping white supremacy, only confronting it.
"They can stop the transfer of racist ideas from their own mind to their child’s mind."
A parent can start doing that even with a toddler by talking directly about skin color and explaining that no hue is superior to another, says Kendi. If this seems unnecessary, research shows that infants are attune to racial differences and develop preferences for people whose race and gender match those closest to them. A recent study found that 4-year-olds have racial bias that is most pronounced against black boys. Kendi says the way children categorize human difference as superior or inferior is one of the "first, elementary" ideas of racism.
When talking to an older child about slavery, Kendi urges parents to discuss the economic motive behind enslaving people. Identifying the role of a larger power structure means a child will understand that slavery wasn't just about terrible slave owners but about a system that needed cheap labor to maximize profits. And when people challenged slavery, those making the profits defended it by saying that black people were better off in servitude than freedom.
"I've said that to kindergartners and they understood the context," says Kendi, noting that even young kids can relate to defending how they go about getting something they want.
When talking to a child about the civil rights movement, Kendi says parents should frame it as a response to Jim Crow policies that sought to make sure black labor remained cheap like it was during slavery and to also disenfranchise black Americans, as they had been during slavery. To justify such policies, political and cultural leaders had to cast black people as "fundamentally different," says Kendi.
"They took away the power and ability of those black people to vote," he says. "Civil rights activists recognized that as a bad thing and decided they were going to stop it."
Some white parents sanitize the civil rights movement by focusing on an uplifting speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., or by ignoring the fact that Rosa Parks spent years protesting segregationist policies before she rose to fame. But that desire to shield children — or one's self — from the more complicated truth is to deprive kids of the knowledge they need to understand racism.
So if you're a white parent who wants to truly honor Black History Month this year, start by teaching yourself and your child how to talk honestly about how racist ideas turn into racist words, actions, and policies.
