Gulp. Book review.

[nwhiker]

I just finisehd White Kids (Critical Perspectives on Youth) by Margaret A. Hagerman.

I hope to be able to take the time to do a decent review, but that was a difficult read. Or maybe I'll just write now.

It was an insightful book into what white parents do and don't do in raising affluent white kids in a racialized society.

Moment of white fragility: these parents are my demographic, the kids are my kids' ages (my oldest is probably a year older than the oldest kids in the study), and my kids (mostly) went to private school, we live in suburbia, and is it only be sheer luck that I didn't raise a bunch of little white supremacists? Shudder. White fragility over.

Anyhow. In some ways, the book felt a bit... dated. I mean without the context of the recent protests, coming in the middle of the pandemic.

My biggest takeaway is that given society as it is, it's almost impossible for white parents to do everything right. That much is clear. What comes next, is figuring out what we need to do to balance the conflicting demands of:

1. "do nothing": this is not acceptable. We need to raise kids who will strive to do better, not perpetuate the structural inequalities and flat out injustice of our society. To quote the author (typing and thus typos mine, bolding as well):

After all, at the very same time that white parents contemplate how to raise kids with structural privilege, parents of children of color strategize how to raise children in a society that does not value their lives. They do not have the luxury of giving up.

So no, doing nothing is not an option. Not that we didn't know it before, but the past few years (I personally think Trayvon Martin's murder was a turning point) and the past few weeks have also made it clear that if we -speaking a white person- want to live in a healthy society, we have to step up and do, well, something. The leaders of this movement are going to be, need to be, the people of color who are the most affected. We need to support, and we need to raise kids to support, a change in society.

2. "do something". Yay, let's do something. But there lies the pitfall of falling into a the whole white savior phenomenon. Hagerman talks about making opportunities (in this case, a science and tech kid team) available to kids of color, which is good, but how doing that can allow us to fall (smugly, no doubt) into the role of white savior, which she contrasts with opportunity hoarding. She does a practical suggestion:(paraphrasing) bring kids of color into the science team, or any other team etc, and invite their parents along.

Very clearly, we need to "do something". What and how is going to be fraught with balancing all the demands and expectations and societal roles. We clearly need to move away from the white savior mentality, and more to an acceptance of "we fucked it up, we have to take a part in fixing it, but we can't swoop down and fix, we need to listen, learn, and follow".

My own track record, like most, is mixed. I acknowledge that and I am going to try to be more proactive. It's easy to write a check, something I have done, and will do again. It's more difficult to actually go out and do something, which makes my introverted does not do well with people soul to its roots. But clearly, we're all going to have to work on being better.

Back to the book and the raising kids part.
The book is not particularly, as the author herself states, hopeful. It does not give a roadmap for raising a white child of privilege who will go one to make things better. Hagerman's conclusion, in some ways, echoes what we tried to do, raising our kids, even if we live in suburbia and did send them to private schools (which, btw, were more diverse than public in my area, public has changed a lot in the last 20 years, in a good way):

Collectively, the challenge ahead is to rethinking taken-for-granted assumptions about what constitutes a "good" school or a "good" neighborhood or even a "good" kid and to decide instead that being a "good" parent means being -and actively raising- a good citizen.

Ah well.