My First Introduction to U.S. Race Relations

      When one is born into privilege, one could easily go one's entire life without ever realizing it.  As I'm fond saying: it's hard to convince a free swimming fish that it's wet.  That fish has just never known anything else, and unless it is literally pulled out of it's comfort zone, it might not be able to conceive of anything different.  For this reason, I believe that it's important to teach kids - especially White kids - about racism.
      I think a lot about my understanding of racism growing up.  I'm deeply grateful that I experienced no overt racism in my family.  My parents and extended family all believed in racial equality the way any ordinary person would believe in gravity.  I never heard a single racial stereotype growing up, and I never knew a single racial slur until I learned about them in a historical context.  I think the first time I heard the "n word" was reading Mark Twain in middle school.

This book includes the words "injun" and "nigger."  For that reason, it has been re-edited for some schools, and banned in others.  Still other people believe it is critical to leave the original story as it's written, because it offers a valuable insight into history.  What's your perspective?

      In some ways, I think this was a great way to grow up.  My mind wasn't poisoned with any senseless, stupid, cruel biases around skin color.  Thank the Powers That Be I didn't have that nonsense to root out of my head.  When I did learn about overt racism, it shocked me.  It shocked me to learn that the KKK still exists.  It shocked me the first time I heard someone say a racial slur in conversation.  I think those things should shock people: we should consider them so atrocious that they stun us to the core.*
      My parents sent me to good schools, that made an effort to teach kids about racism and U.S. history.  The classrooms had posters of famous authors and scientists of many different ethnicities.  During story time, the librarian read us children's tales from China, and India, and Africa.  We diligently revisited the bravery of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the other Civil Rights leaders every February.

This is a great example of the kind of equality-promoting propaganda used in my elementary schools.  It took me a long time to realize what was wrong with it.

      What we didn't have - and what I desperately think we were missing - was diversity in the staff and student body.  There were almost no kids of color in my elementary school, and not a single Black kid in any of my classes.  So my understanding of racism was purely academic.  I will give my teachers the benefit of the doubt; they were probably doing what was considered a 'best practice' at the time, and I think they wanted their students to have good values.  I did develop a strong moral value that prejudice based on skin color, language, or culture is wrong.  But I also learned some other lessons, that I've only identified in retrospect:

1) Racism happened long ago/somewhere else
2) Everything was better now
3) Relations between Black & White people were defined by mistrust

      As a psychologist, I now understand the power of learning through observation.  Where our personal experience leaves a void, book learning will fill in--but it will do so imperfectly.  This is what happened to me in early childhood.  Since I didn't know a single Black person, as a little kid I became afraid that Black people would assume I was racist, just because I was White.  I'm not sure I totally got over the misconception until adulthood.  And that anxiety prevented me from taking advantage of a lot of opportunities.
       Moreover, I feel that this mindset unintentionally set me up to be closed-minded about race-relations today.  Since I never SAW any racism growing up, and I had LEARNED about it only from a historical perspective, it was that much harder for me to accept the present day reality.
      I have no idea if anybody else had an experience like mine.  My brain may just work in weird ways.  But through the lens of hindsight, I do have some suggestions for elementary schools:

1) Deliberately integrate schools--there will be another separate post on this
2) Keep teaching about the Black leaders of the past, but also teach about Whites who helped; not to diminish the greatness of the Black participants, but to offer role models for dumb kids like me, who think that the struggle for equality and justice is something other people do
3) Incorporate the history into the present.  Always.  In all topics.  Especially when we have so many present-day challenges to overcome.

This is the kind of poster I wish had been in my schools: seeing and valuing difference, and realizing that helping others means strengthening all.

*Then we need to have the same reaction to systemic racism, like a court system that unevenly punishes African Americans versus Caucasians.  Unfortunately, a lot of privileged White people see those statistics as a glitch.  You can't assume somebody said "wetback" on accident.  You can assume that it's just coincidence Latino drivers get pulled over more often than Whites.