Talking to my white son, as a white mom, about de/colonization

I recently realized I haven’t talked much with my kid (age six) about our country’s colonialist past and the fact that we live on stolen land. Which isn’t surprising considering my own thought patterns, which tend to focus on more recent indicators of racism/white supremacy/patriarchy. I’m aiming to educate myself about Indigenous cultures and history in my (Northeast) corner of the country; meanwhile, I want to also bring my son into conversations about the people who rooted in our area before many were overtaken by colonizing Western Europeans, and about what we can do in the day to day to actively oppose colonizer mentality. 

For years now I’ve asked and attempted to explain the question “does your heart feel open or closed right now?” with Finn, and I think he understands in his way. Connecting with friends and family; helping people who have less than we do; soaking up the beauty of nature and honoring the Earth by not littering, by recycling, by composting; expressing gratitude for the food that nourishes us and our shared companionship as we sit down for meals… Though in talking to Finn I haven’t really framed them as such, these are all things our family does that challenge the pillaging, winner-take-all foundation of whiteness in our country. 

This FB page was recently recommended by a friend as a solid resource for locating children's books that accurately represent American Indians and the European takeover—and here's an upcoming webinar (May 28!) I just learned about and will be joining. Glad for the support.

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The other night I asked Finn, “Hey, do you think it’s possible for humans to own land? Like, to say that parts of Mother Earth belong to them?” Finn: Smiling, knowing I’m talking serious here. “Yeah.” Me: “Really? Like how we can go to a store and pay money for a book that we can then take home with us because we bought it?” Finn: Pausing, appearing to think on it. “You can buy a toy Planet Earth from the store.” Me: “Ah, yep. But that’s a toy, right? Different from the earth we walk on.” Finn: Quiet but possibly absorbing.


While distractions were, as always, the norm (“I want dessert”; “where’s my giant shark tooth?”), Finn appeared to more or less stay with me, probably in good part because of his current interest in weapons/violence, as I talked about how hundreds of years ago white men sailed across the ocean in search of more land/wealth/power, which they made sure to secure, wiping out entire peoples as they went along. I told Finn that even though I don’t believe land can truly *belong* to any person, the first people to discover the land he knows as the United States—the Native tribes that the white men encountered—had lived on it and honored it for thousands of years before the white men came and declared it theirs. Finn: “Maybe they did that because someone treated them unkindly when they were a kid.” Me: “Yes, I think that sort of thing is often a factor. But there’s more to it, and we can keep talking about it.”

Supermarket Blues: Classism in America

I recently watched this brief video with my six-year-old. Afterward, Finn, who lately is interested in dramatic situations and intense emotions, wanted to talk about the one parent’s departure early on and the mother’s tears over not consistently being able to feed her family due to working a low-paying job. I took the opportunity to talk about the fact that, unfortunately, because of the way our country is set up, there are big differences in the amount of money people are able to make at their jobs, with a small number of folks making a lot more than the rest, which can make things really hard (and sad) for some—plus the added difficulty that some families face when only one parent is able to bring home a paycheck. I had Finn’s ear for this. I then mentioned the wrongful assumptions that are often made about folks who ask for money outside grocery stores and other places (not hard enough workers, lazy), which my kid wasn’t as present for. (I know better than to go beyond a minute with this stuff!) But I know we’ll return to the topic—Finn may even bring it up himself, in his own six-year-old way.

Talking with my white kid, as a white mom, about mass incarceration

April 2018

Scene: It’s bedtime, and I’m chatting about this and that with my kid while he flips through a book. 

Kid: Mama, what is jail?
Me: Well, basically, jail is a place—a big building—where some people go when they do things that are very unkind and that hurt other people a lot, or that the people who are in charge of the country have decided are what’s known as “against the law”—
Kid: [Cutting me off, because at five he’s ready to move on] What do they do there?
Me: Well, not a lot. And that’s because jail isn’t supposed to be fun or anything—it’s a place where people go because they maybe did things that are really uncaring or wrong and the idea is that, in jail, they spend a lot of time thinking about what they did. And the food doesn’t taste very good. But there are things that people in jail can do—like read books and do exercise.
Kid: [Clearly listening to me now] Oh.
Me: And honestly, I don’t agree with a lot of the things about jail. Often there isn’t really a chance for people in jail to get the help they need, like by talking to helpful people about things they’re having a hard time with and about why they might have done unkind things. 
[My kid is quiet but still with me. So, inspired by the experience of a fellow white Parenting for Racial Justice workshop participant who’d addressed the topic of racist policing with her little one, I decide to keep going.] 
Me: You know another thing I don’t like about jail?
Kid: What?
Me: Well, black people get put in jail more often than white people do. And it’s because black people aren’t treated the same as white people by police officers and other powerful people—they’re not treated as well—and it’s unjust and unkind and not right, and your dad and I are very against it.
Kid: Oh.
Me: Yeah. There are a lot of things about jail and about how black people are treated differently from white people, and they’re kind of hard to explain and understand, but we can keep talking, more and more as you get older—and I want you to know you can always come to your dad and me with more questions about any of these things. OK?
Kid: OK.

Reflections (specific): In the wake of the above exchange, I felt pretty good about how I’d proceeded. As usual, I saw room for improvement in the form of using fewer words, but for the most part my kid had seemed interested in what I was saying. 

Reflections (general): I'm always primed for my kid to go off on tangents and topics to run away from us if I pause too long or ask him his thoughts—but I know it’s important to try to involve him in a meaningful way if the social justice topics that are important to me are going to speak to him as well. Also, as I remind myself, I’ll be living with this person for at least another 13 years, so chances are excellent that opportunities for follow-up conversations will arise.

We Are the Immigrants

Topics of immigration and asylum seeking continue to be front-and-center in the U.S., with 45 taking every opportunity to make his unabashedly racist positions clear. The other week I realized that these are topics I hadn’t to date explored much with my almost-six-year-old, so I dug around online and found some great resources to support my conversations with him, including the animated short “We Are the Immigrants." The film, thesis project of Catalina Matamoros, an award-winning animator and illustrator from Colombia, narrates the hardships of a girl and her family as they cross the Mexican-U.S. border in hopes of reuniting with the girl’s mother. I sat down with my kid to watch, and we were both drawn in straight away, with Finn especially taken by what he called “the ghosts” as well as the appearance of, sigh, guns (topic for another post; related). 

At the end of the film I explained to Finn, who was actually paying attention to what I was saying (hardly a given with five-year-olds), that many of the families who are trying to enter our country from the southern border want to get away from governments that are doing things to hurt or potentially hurt them—but that Donald Trump, who Finn has heard his dad and me describe as cruel and only liking people who look like him/are white, doesn’t want to let them into the United States. He had just one question for me: “So where can they go?” I was struck, hearing that, and I struggled to answer in a way Finn would follow and without painting the bleak picture I guess I was trying to avoid. I pretty much said that was the problem—that they didn’t really have any good/safe options. Finn and I both went quiet, and I sensed that he’d picked up on the gravity of the conversation.