When my daughter was two, we visited my mother in Southern California. We went to the supermarket. My daughter got on the cart while I wheeled it around the store, picking up items. As we made our way to the produce aisle, past the lettuces, another African American woman was shopping right in front of me. She was a plainly dressed middle-aged woman who minded her business on a completely daily basis. My daughter looked at her, she looked at me and said, “Mom, I think it’s not good to be black.”
What did I say at that moment? I don’t remember exactly. But I probably said something like, “Being black is good, my love. That woman is beautiful.”
My daughter spoke early. She started talking early, even though she didn’t do it often. She has always been a quiet and hyperattentive girl. A preschool teacher told me, “The still waters are deep.” When she had something to say, she said it in complete sentences. And while I think I was two at the time, I could have been three or three and a half. She really doesn’t interest me. The point is that children learn from the world and the world raises questions. When children ask questions, their elders should teach them something in response.
My daughter’s statement had been a question. Her background said something like, “Mom, I noticed something. It seems it wasn’t cool to be black. But could that be correct? you are black I love you. How can these things fit together? What does this mean to me?” At that point, I had to teach my daughter that it was okay to be black. I also needed to teach her that she was sensing something correctly in the world: that blackness is stigmatized. And I needed to give her the ability to differentiate stigma from reality.
When I was seven, my father made me read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For many, the book is a caricature of the black experience. For my father, it provided a clear statement about the moral will and equality of the black population, a fact that is permanent and visible, even amidst the stigma. By making me read that long book, he was teaching me.
I was an early reader. But that’s not important to the story either. What I can assure you is that even before any of our children of any racial or ethnic background went to school, every black family in America had to teach their children about the race and history of slavery, as well as the stories of overcoming that have developed generation after generation. The same must be true for children raised in families of the LGBTQ+ community, with respect to the history and contemporary experience of gender and sexuality. I’m sure every family teaches differently. Some talk. Others read. Some see photographs. Others sing songs. But they are all teaching.
This means that the only way knowledge and questions about these stories, experiences and perspectives can be kept out of the curriculum in the early grades is by not allowing people of color or members of LGBTQ+ families to come to school.
Acknowledging this basic fact is like listening to a ghost whisper a revelation from a deep and cruel past. That wandering, cold-breathing ghost whispers that our old story of segregation—now a legally abandoned practice—was, at a deep existential level, just a way of evading reality. The reality of our history and how it has been tainted by racial domination. The reality of our present and our ongoing struggles with race. The reality of our moral responsibility to each other as human beings facing a future together.
In other words, for the avoidance of doubt: There’s no way teachers can avoid teaching about race and sexuality. We cannot legislate against children’s applications.
For goodness’ sake, I assume that the various efforts of state legislators to control when and how teachers engage in these issues stem from a desire to initiate a discussion not about whether to teach in response to children’s questions, but rather about how to to do it. This is a deeply important issue. I agree that some ways are better than others. However, I hope we can take this topic of teaching the stories and realities of race and slavery, gender and sexuality, the political maelstrom, and turn it into a real conversation about raising healthy, loving, responsible children who have a strong sense of self-confidence, purpose and charity for others in your hearts.
Adults can’t decide whether or not to teach about race, gender, and sexuality. By simply living in our world, our children have decided that we will teach them these subjects.
