Be Prepared

My first encounter with racism that was too overt to be explained away happened when I was in ninth grade. (The story of that encounter, written in part as my daily contribution to the Creative Act project, is here.)

There have been multiple subsequent experiences, but each time I have been taken by surprise. (I am someone who does not naturally go through my days with my guard up, and my journey through life is buoyed along by white privilege.)

I don't know when my son will experience racism that is so undisguised as to be unavoidable. (I don't think he has yet.) I think about what feels like an inevitability, and I want to try to help prepare him to be ready to confront it when it comes.

But how do I explain something so fundamentally unexplainable?

So far, we've been talking about prejudices in terms of how they play out in people's individual lives. D knows that some people (like George Bush) think that boys should only be able to marry girls, and girls should only be able to marry boys. He also knows that in our family we think that love is the thing that really makes the family. We've talked about the idea that good ideas have lasting power, and that the person who killed Martin Luther King, Jr. killed his body, but not his ideas or his dreams or the ideas and dreams of the people who learned from him. My five year-old son knows the story of Rosa Parks' and others' civil disobedience, and we've talked about how sometimes a country's laws are outdated and wrong and in need of changing. And we talk about how change is hard for people, and that some people's ideas are so out of step and old fashioned that it makes it hard for them and the people around them.

It's a start.

I remember that when we were hoping to become parents, the high school students I spoke to as a part of the local PFLAG speaker's bureau would often ask me, "Aren't you worried about what your kid will have to face as a boy with two moms?" And I said that for me, discrimination on the basis of sexual minority status is a known quantity. I've seen it, heard it, fought it, been laid low by it, and come back to fight again. I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to equip him with the tools he'll need to stand up for himself in that regard, in part because I know we'll have lots of life experience to draw on.

I'm much more nervous about my ability to prepare him to deal with racism.

(Thanks to Kwynne over at LesbianFamily.org for getting the ball
rolling on this for me, and to the Creative Act project
for their inspiration this month.)