Raising White Children

A friend sent me a link to this blog post about queer parents raising white children. He was curious to hear my thoughts about it. It's a long post with a lot packed into it, and I thought I'd answer him on my blog because that way maybe three people will read my thoughts instead of just one and the work of reading and writing will feel more worthwhile.

First, I'll say that my experience as a queer parent is very different from Susan Raffo's. (OMG, I just realized, looking at Raffo's picture, that I am pretty sure I once shared a hotel room with her at OutWrite, the Gay and Lesbian Writing Conference, a long long long time ago. We had a mutual friend who set it up. It didn't go at all well. It was a formative experience for me: I am now almost completely unwilling to share rooms with people I don't know at conferences. Small world. Edited to add: Raffo probably feels the same way. We were the bad fit to end all bad fits.)

OK, back to the point: the reason our experience is so different is that, while I am just as queer as Raffo, I'm in an opposite-sex relationship. My kids have a mom and a dad. So some of the experiences her daughter has, my kids don't. We enjoy heterosexual privilege because, unless we make a big point of mentioning we're queer, folks make assumptions. And who can blame them? It's a whole different flavor of queerness.

Overall, though, I'd say Raffo has a way of writing about white privilege that doesn't resonate with me. For instance, she writes:

My Susanbrain knows that everything that Luca gets, all of that support and nurturance that I want to give her, exists on the backs of other children - either directly through their labor or indirectly through their lack of access. Too many of the basic aspects of our lives - the chocolate treats at holidays, the educational toys, the cheap kids clothes at Target - are themselves manufactured or harvested by children.

I disagree. I think this is an overstatement of the realities of the world, a kind of careless oversimplification that guilty white liberals seem to love to embrace. I am concerned about conditions for kids (and other people) and about equality, both within the US and worldwide. But child labor in factories, for instance, is still uncommon enough (and in China, during its liberalizing period, getting even more uncommon) that, when somebody points to a t-shirt or a pair of shoes and says that a child working in a sweatshirt made that item, they're probably wrong. I did a big reading project on globalization a couple of years ago, and it convinced me that things are not as bad as my white liberal friends liked to tell me, and a whole heck of a lot more complicated. I reject this notion that there's somehow a one-to-one correspondence between my children's comfort and some other child's suffering.

Once I got past that section of the entry, though, I appreciated Raffo's thoughtfulness about talking about race with her daughter. I've been reading more and more about the idea that what we nice white parents tend to like to do is not talk about race, or talk about it in these really abstract ways like, "Everyone is equal, honey, nobody is better than anybody else." (I just read a really good article about this, but now I can't find the link--I'll add it if I come across it later.) But because of the ways kids are developing, working on categorizing themselves and other people, they will end up developing racial categories on their own, putting some people into their own group and some people into another one. I've actually started noticing Carl doing this; recently we were driving and he saw a Black toddler walking with her mother, and said, "Look, it's one of Yehva's kind!" Clearly he didn't mean this in a way that excluded Yehva from the family, or in any mean-spirited way. He seemed more excited about it, to see another little girl who resembled Yehva. But I thought it was a good example of what I've been hearing about, that the children of well-intentioned parents who are too silent or too abstract on the subject of race will nonetheless construct racial categories. And, left to do it on their own, they'll probably do it badly.

I really liked the way Raffo describes talking to her daughter about things like, "Who is here? Who's not here? Why might that be?" I'm 100% not into guilt, and haven't wanted to talk to my kids about race and class in a way that would make them feel there was something wrong with them for being born or adopted into our family, which, like Raffo's, is educated, home-owning, professional. But Raffo's approach, of helping her daughter learn to recognize patterns in the culture around her, and her place within those patters, seems really productive to me.

My friend was especially interested in my response to this post as a parent who is raising a black child as well as two white children. One response I have (not very deeply thought out yet) is that it's much the same, in the sense that the conversations that I think need to happen about race and class seem pretty much the same for all my children. The kind of analytical thinking about race that Raffo is trying to do with her daughter would look much the same for all three of my kids.

It reminds me of something I've been meaning to write about, actually, the idea that, as people used to say to me so often, I have a responsibility to keep Yehva in touch with "her" culture. For about the first year of her life, people were always saying to me, "Of course, you'll help her develop a sense of her culture," and I would kind of say, "Oh, hmm, yes," but I really had no idea what anybody meant by that. Then I decided that the next time somebody said that to me, I would ask them what they thought they meant by "her" culture or "Black" culture. And of course nobody ever said it to me again. So I still don't know what they thought they were talking about.

But I actually have several responses to the question now:

• The Cynical Response: "Her" culture? The one she'd have been raised in if her birthmother hadn't placed her for adoption? The one where sexual and romantic relationships are fluid and provisional, where children are raised by their grandmothers or end up in foster care because their mothers are too unstable to care for them, where babies are born drug-addicted and people all-too-commonly reach adulthood without becoming so much as basically literate? Is that the culture I'm supposed to make sure she doesn't lose touch with?
• The "I'm-As-Liberal-As-The-Next-Person-But-I-Get-So-Tired-Of-Thinking-About-It" Response: Is there any meaningful way in which Yehva, having been adopted by us, can have an authentic connection to black culture and community? Or, is it just more true to say, that having been adopted by us, our culture becomes her culture by default, that whatever efforts we make--celebrating Kwanzaa, taking her to Black cultural events in Lansing, enrolling her in stepping class--will be partial at best, a kind of camouflage we can point to, that paints over the complicated and sometimes painful reality that, most likely, no matter what we do, she is going to grow up brown-skinned but culturally assimilated into middle-class white culture and values.
• The "How Is That Different From What We All Ought to Be Doing With Our White Children Anyway?" Response: I have always assumed that I would try to show my kids a story about their nation that includes its painful racial history, as well as the glorious energy of the Civil Rights movement and the Black History Month boosterism of Ten Notable Black Americans. I have always seen the history of Black Americans as part of the history of America, my America, and therefore my children's America. I don't know what I might tell Yehva about Black history, Black culture, the past and current state of race and race relations in the US, that I wouldn't also have wanted my sons to hear, even if they never had a black sister.

And this brings me back to Raffo, I think. I don't like her rhetoric all the time, I find a certain kind of liberal language about race and privilege...not useful. But I admire her commitment to not shying away from those things with her daughter, which I think is something I've been guilty of. I have not had a third of the conversations with my kids about race and class that I think need to happen; in some ways, I've shied away from it because I'm a big fan of the happy childhood and I have not wanted to be the one to introduce my children to painful truths. But even before reading Raffo, I've been re-thinking that, realizing that I need to get more active about addressing these things while my kids are still young, and Raffo offers what seems to me like a useful, experience-based way of framing those conversations. She wants to "make whiteness visible" for her daughter, so that it isn't just the water she's swimming in. It seems like she's doing a good job of it.