These days, we are involved in a great debate about whether and when we should teach kids about race, gender and sex in our schools.
But here’s the thing: There is no way for teachers to avoid teaching about race and sexuality, even in early grades. The only question is how we do it. To illustrate, let me share a story.
When my daughter was 2, we were visiting my mother in Southern California. We went to the supermarket. My daughter rode in the cart as I pushed through the store collecting items. As we worked our way through the produce section, passing along the lettuces and greens, another Black American woman was shopping just ahead of me. She was a middle-aged woman, dressed simply and sensibly, going about her business in an altogether ordinary way. My daughter watched her, and then looked up at me and said, “Mommy, I think it’s not good to be Black.”
What did I say in the moment? I don’t exactly remember. But probably something like, “Black is beautiful, my love. That woman is beautiful.”
My daughter was a precocious talker, yes. She talked early, though she didn’t talk often. She has always been a quiet and hyperobservant child. One preschool teacher said, “Still waters run deep.” When she had things to say, she said them in complete sentences. And though I think she was 2, she might have been 3 or maybe 3½. It doesn’t really matter. The point is that children learn from the world, and the world provokes questions — and when children ask their questions, their elders teach back.
My daughter’s statement was a question. Its subtext went like this: “I’ve noticed something, Mommy. It seems like it’s not good to Black. But can that be right? You’re Black. I love you. How can these things fit together? And what does this mean for me?” In that moment, I needed to teach my daughter that it is good to be Black. I also needed to teach her that she was accurately observing something about the world — that Blackness is stigmatized. And I needed to give her the capacity to set the stigma apart from the reality.
When I was 7, my father had me read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” To many, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” caricatures Black experience. For my father, it provides a clear statement about the moral agency and equality of Black people — a permanent and visible fact, even in the midst of stigma. In having me read that very long book, he was teaching me.
I was a precocious reader.
But that doesn’t really matter to the story, either. What I can assure you of is that even before any of our kids, of any racial or ethnic background, get to school, every Black family in the United States is having to teach its children about race and the history of enslavement and stories of overcoming that have played out generation after generation. The same must be true for kids raised in LGBTQ families, with regard to the history and contemporary experience of gender and sexuality. I’m sure every family is doing the teaching differently. Some talking, some reading. Some looking at pictures. Some singing songs. But all are teaching.
This means that the only way you can keep knowledge and questions about these histories, experiences and perspectives out of the school curriculum in early grades is to keep Black people or members of LGBTQ families out of schools.
To recognize that fundamental fact is as if to hear a ghost whisper a revelation from a deep and ugly past. The wandering and cold-breathed ghost whispers that our old history of segregation — our now legally abandoned practices — was at some deep and existential level simply a way of evading the truth. The truth of our history and how it has been marred by racial domination. The truth of our present and our continued struggles with race. The truth of our moral responsibility to one another as human beings facing a future together.
To say it again, there is no way for teachers to avoid teaching about race and sexuality. We cannot legislate against children’s questions.
Out of charity, I will assume that the various efforts by state legislators to control when and how teachers engage with these subjects comes from an effort to open a discussion not of whether to teach in response to the questions children have but rather about how to do this. This is a profoundly important topic. And I would agree that some ways are better than others. But I hope we can take this issue of how to teach the histories and presents of race and enslavement, of gender and sexuality, out of the political maelstrom and turn them into a real conversation about how to raise healthy, loving, responsible children with a strong sense of self-confidence, purpose and charity for others in their hearts.
We grown-ups don’t get to decide whether we teach about race, gender and sexuality.
Living in our world as they do, our children have already determined that we will so teach.
Complete Article ↪HERE↩!