Hey White Parents! tw: racist abuse of children, internalized racism, assimilation, desensitivity to racism

Hey white parents!

Hey, yeah, I’m talking to you! You right over there, you specifically! You!

Listen up!

You need to teach your brown children about racism.

Now, let me guess your first reaction:

You probably even have that same horrified, bloodshot face!

Now let me explain why.

I’m a person of color; I’m a mestiz@, and I am gay/polysexual, disabled, genderescent, and half-white. I have a white mother whom I adore, and a Latino dad whom I also adore.

My parents didn’t teach me about racism.

I know they meant well. Don’t even act like I don’t know that. My parents are good people and they love me. But they bought into the insidious, stupid white lie that colonialism always tells brown parents: raise your children white, and they will be white, and they won’t suffer like you did.

This is wrong. Factually wrong, immediately wrong, morally wrong, and intuitively wrong. It’s also one of the biggest pieces of propaganda advanced by colonialism. It’s evident in the reward systems set up to incentivize assimilating and whitewashing brown children under colonial and white supremacist structures.

Guess what? I’ve grown up under not one, but two of these colonial structues. And they are toxic, abusive environments for brown children. They are designed to teach brown children how to suffer for, work for, and ultimately die for white children and adults.

Now for the hard facts.

If you’re a white parent of a brown child who has a brown parent, odds are that your co-parenting partner will have read this far and gotten this. It doesn’t mean that you necessarily won’t, but you might.

If you’re a white parent of a brown child who has no brown parents, what the fuck are you doing? I mean that seriously. You are essentially deciding that you are qualified to raise a brown child and odds are that you aren’t. If you want to raise your child well and without emotional scars, you need to listen—not just to me, but to people of color who are willing to share their experiences of having white parents.

Now, no matter what, I’m assuming from this point on that you are not an abuser and you love your child. If you are an abuser and/or don’t love your child, kindly make sure that your child has a better parent and find yourself a soul.

Onwards!

Now the first reason why white parents react to my statement with the horrified “no” is because white supremacy teaches white people that if people of color know anything, then it will be regurgitated and flavored with patriarchal enlightenment through other white people.

The second reason—and the first reason white parents will be willing to admit to—is that you want to preserve your child’s “innocence”.

That’s noble, idiotic, and impossible.

For starters, I question the notion that children have “innocence” of pain and hurt. Children know what physical pain feels like early on; they know that people get sick for no reason and hurt; they know that not everything goes well and it hurts; they know that bad things happen and they hurt. If your child is exposed to any white Western media at all, they will have seen violent imagery of people hurting one another.

Assume your brown child has some form of innocent after this. I do remember being a child and not understanding, for example, what death was, or just how scary life could be, or what racism was.

Now innocence is all well and good when your brown child doesn’t need the intimate knowledge of how to survive in a world designed to keep them dying, miserable, subservient, and powerless. 

Guess what?

That’s not for long.

Parents teach children how to trust their fear of people for good reasons: because children need to trust their instincts because danger exists. Parents teach children to not touch fire, to stay away from sharp objects, to not climb onto unstable objects, to stay close to parents, to look both ways before crossing the street. Teaching a brown child how to recognize racism and how to put the racism that they will/are/have experience/ing/ed is the same thing as any other danger, because it is dangerous for brown children to not understand racism.

Now suppose you’re a noble idiot and you don’t teach your children about racism.

They will still learn about what racism is.

The first real memory I have of knowing what race was is this: I’m standing (more likely cowering) against a classroom wall. A white boy is throwing a chair at me. He is screaming something horrible that I’m fairly sure is “spic”. He is screaming spic at me while I am cowering against a wall and he is throwing a chair at me.

Yes, this really happened. Don’t ask me about this memory. Don’t try it.

Now, see, this is not a normal memory. This is a fragmented piece of a memory. As a matter of fact, the only time I even recalled this was earlier today when I saw a thread of people of color discussing their first memory of race. And reading that triggered that memory, which in turn triggered a delayed reaction of violent self-hatred, internalized racism, and silent crying. In other words, a memory of being physically assaulted because of my race triggered an emotional breakdown which I am still not okay from.

Do you want this to happen to your child?

The thing about this particular traumatic memory is that it stands out in only one aspect: it is so obviously physical assault and clear danger. I have a lot of memories of racism, transphobia, homophobia, sexism, and ableism, many of which are traumatic when added together, and some are traumatic on their own.

The only real difference between the years of abuse being piled on top of one another and this incident is that nobody has ever denied that this was assault and dangerous. Having a horrifying supercrip burnout with depression and family circumstances is not considered to be dangerous; being groped and asked invasive sexual questions by heterosexual girls is not considered to be assault and harassment.

I do not want this to happen to your child.

I do not want this to happen to any child.

Now, as for how to do it:

You cannot teach your brown child about racism if you do not understand racism yourself. Corollary to this: you cannot teach your brown child about racism if you do not understand how racism relates to people of color.

White people’s relationship to racism seems to be one where white people love racism. White people worship white supremacy, call it “badass” and “efficient” and “funny” and “a civilizing influence”. When white supremacy kills, white people either celebrate, or don’t seem to give a shit at all. Some white people with a basic sense of morality may feel guilty for racism, and many will offer useless apologies that are not backed by action and solutions. Even white people who genuinely desire to not be racist often are ignorant and unwilling to learn; the few white people that desire to not be racist and are willing to learn are first ignorant, and second of all must overcome their whiteness as a barrier to them understanding the true scope of and the unbelivable horrors of racism.

People of color’s relationship to racism is so complex that I could not express it if I gave you everything ever spoken of or written on racism by people of color.

The fundamental difference between how even assimilationist people of color relate to racism and how even basically decent white people relate to racism is this: people of color feel racism and feel its effects, and white people think about racism and know its effects.

White people can often rattle off lists of hate crimes, mountains of theory, and dozens of racist slus and jokes; people of color can quietly, with soft voices and powerful words, bring a whole room to inconsolable emotion by telling one of our stories.

Even the most educated, the most vigorous, and most determined white people will define racism by and remember it as “a system of social inequality and violence where white people oppress and destroy another racial group”; even the most academic, the most assimilationist, and the most verbal people of color will define racism by and remember it as “the fact that a white boy threw a chair at me and screamed that I was a spic that should just die and he got away with it”.

I would recommend that white parents of brown children begin with the most “radical” people of color, the people of color who do not write in academic jargon or sugarcoat the horrors of racism. Personally speaking, Haunani-Kay Trask, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Subcomandante Marcos, and others whose names I do not know are, quite simply, the greatest people to break through the opaque wall of racism in the mind and dispell the hideous myths of white supremacy.

And all you need to tell a child to start with is this, taken from my earlier emotional breakdown:

“something went very wrong with this one group of people

and they taught each other to hurt each other and hurt other people

and now they don’t know that hurting people is wrong”

And from there on out, your brown child will understand a few very important things that I did not: that being hurt is not normal, is not your brown child’s fault, is not a simple fact of life, is entirely the fault of the racists who hurt your brown child, and is not a random event that dropped out of the sky.

Now here’s another thing that I don’t ever want to happen to your child:

I don’t want them to say “It’s okay, I’m used to it”.

Because that’s what I said, what I thought, and what I justified my institutional and interpersonal torture with: It was okay, I was used to it.

It was okay being called a spic or a p*ki, I was used to it.

It was okay being told to go home and kill myself, I was used to it.

It was okay being groped and called a whore, I was used to it.

It was okay being called a whale and disgusting, I was used to it.

It was okay hating myself, I was used to it,

It was okay growing detached from my own face, I was used to it.

It was okay burning myself out, I was used to it.

It was okay to want to kill myself, I was used to it.

Don’t do that to your brown child. They should not get used to it.

Sometimes (often) bad people have children. Why are we, the kids, expected to forgive and accept things we would be called crazy or weak for accepting from partners, friends, coworkers?