The Rookery

It was strange talking to the Herons about George Floyd last Tuesday. We've had hard conversations about race in the past year but we've always been together in the meeting area for them. These faces that are usually so immediate when we are in a conversation were isolated in their own squares.  Their looks of confusion or hurt or anger were obscured by the screen pixels.  But they asked questions.  Some shared what they knew.  Some shared historical connections. Many wondered how it could happen…again. I shared factual information (and where I was getting my information) and gently clarified some historical information.  But the conversation that would normally have taken on a life of its own was shorter and more circumspect that it would have been if we were in person.  And, as I said, it felt strange.

Afterward, I had a chance to ask a student how it had felt for her.  "Oh, fine.  It was just like one of our dinner time conversations."

I was relieved.  For her, at least, the connection and safe space that I had tried to create for the Herons had survived the transition to distance learning.  Our zoom room, miraculously, had the casual, secure feeling of her dinner table.  Her point was also that her family talks about race at the dinner table, which meant that ours was not the only conversation she would be having.

If conversations about race are not happening at your dinner table, they need to.

The conversation that the Herons had can't be the only one.  Race has to be a part of the conversation we are having all the time.  For families of color, this isn't an option.  It can't be for white families either. 

It's not comfortable. Kids ask questions in these conversations that I don't know the answers to.  Some are giant existential questions about good and evil and I can answer honestly,  "I don't know…I don't understand either."  Others are questions about history or law that I can answer honestly, "I don't know yet…but its' my job to find out."  And it is.  If a deep understanding of race relations was not a part of your education (and it certainly wansn't mine) then it's part of our work now as parents and teachers to learn.

We can't wait for the topic to come up – and the conversations can't just be reactive when something happens (athough those are important, too.)  We have to initiate and make these conversations the normal.  As I told the Herons one day after we looked at an article about kids in Baraboo who were doing the Nazi solute because a photographer told them to and "they didn't know any better" — we need to know better.  And the only way they'll know better is to talk with them.

There are a lot of great resources out there.  Here is a radio interview with Jennifer Harvey, author of Raising White Kids about having conversations about race with children.