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Asha Sanaker's avatar

As a White woman who grew up in exactly the kind of environment that you all are raising your girls-- one of few white students in a majority Black public school in a majority Black city (DC)-- I applaud you for making the choices you're making, doing the intentional work you're doing as a parent and a citizen, because it really does matter. Does growing up that way give me a pass on racism? Absolutely not. But it does give me a particular perspective on race and particularly Whiteness that most White people in America lack, which I wouldn't trade for anything.

One of the most insidious aspects of Whiteness is how it normalizes itself and implicitly calls into question anything outside of itself. So, when White kids never, ever see a figure of authority in their lives (teacher, crossing guard, police officer, city council member, etc.) until maybe when they get to be adults they don't know how to process BIPOC as authority figures. They have been trained to resist it without even realizing it. When White children aren't surrounded by children of color (like, really surrounded. Not that there are a handful of token BIPOC children in their whole school) so that their social environment doesn't center them implicitly, then they never learn how to just interact with people as people, not as representatives of a group that feels somehow foreign, different, or implicitly "abnormal".

Raising children the way you are does trouble the notion of Whiteness on a really essential level, even if it doesn't fix everything. Your daughters will move through the world in a way that threatens the notion of their own supremacy. They will be able to see through the categorization of people and the implicit hierarchies of human value that are at the heart of White supremacy, and we need that. We need them.

Is growing up like they are always easy? Nope. But growing up is hard for all kinds of people. It seems to me you're choosing the right kind of hard.

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FR's avatar

I miss elementary school auditoriums and the magic that happens there.

Let me add a few more images- the baby chuckling in the audience to hear his sister's voice from the stage, the toddler climbing his best up the stairs to be part of it all, the little older toddler saying loudly in the audience at every break in the action: "I wonder what's going to happen!"

And the audience smiling at the way an elementary school is a family place.

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