On Tuesday morning, I gathered with a group of local mamas, ours a tabletop conversation of talking to our kids about issues of race and justice. I read excerpts from my book and talked about how, as a white person, mine is a learned experience – and my entry point into the conversation primarily stems from doing my homework and understanding my privilege.
But in the midst of listening and learning (and listening some more), there’s also a responsibility to just do something, whatever our “something” is.
Austin Channing Brown, author of I’m Still Here and one of my favorite thinkers around issues of race and justice, said it this way on the For the Love podcast: “I have no idea what you should do, but you should do something. You can do something and it’s your job to figure out what that something is and to let that something lead to more and more somethings.”
I don’t know about you, but I yearn to be present to those somethings …and most of the time, those somethings all start in conversation.
Take last night, for example: my older son and I lay on his bed, reading books before bedtime. Headlamp on his head, he shined the light toward the page, scanning the words and pictures for him and for me. We read a couple of Christmas books, and then settled into a book we’d just picked up from the library, Memphis, Martin and the Mountaintop about the sanitation strike of 1968.
It wasn’t the first time he and I had talked about different events from the Civil Rights Movement, nor was it the first time we’d talked about racial inequality. But it was the first time he asked when the hate would end, when he asked for a timeline so it would make sense in his mind.
“What do you think, Mama?” He asked me after we closed the book, our bodies nestled close to one another.
“What do I think about what, buddy?”
“What do you think about how long until everyone understands that this is just the skin we were born in. One year? Ten years? Thirty years?”
“Oh baby, I would love for it to be only one more year but it doesn’t look like the hate’s gonna end anytime soon.”
From there, our conversation dove into present issues of injustice, about how even though everyone has been created equally in the eyes of God, not everyone is treated equally by their fellow human beings. I marveled at the words we shared, how he got it and he understood – how passionate he already is, both seeking to understand the legacies of Dr. King and his granddaddy and Jesus, and also in wondering about how we can eradicate the hopelessness of hate.
I want what he has, I thought to myself. At six years old, he gets it. He sees it. He understands the problem of race and justice, the problem I long believed didn’t have anything to do with me because of the color of my skin (and because of the supposedly colorblind world I lived in).
Even if he’s still figuring out how to articulate the thoughts percolating around in his mind, he understands the problem at its core: that everyone, no matter the color of their skin, is worth of dignity – simply because they’ve been stamped with the image of the Divine.
And as someone who’s daily learning how to color outside the lines, this conversation of somethings gives me hope.
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Hey! What somethings are you embracing today? If you’re a parent, how do you talk about issues of race and justice with your children?
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