Letters to the Editor
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Another eye roller from DD...
If her essays like this one are any indication of the intellectual rigor to which she plans to hold her kids, then I wish those kids luck.
"We live in snow-white upstate New York, but was he really so clueless?"
She should look in the mirror for the answer. I'm very acquainted with upstate NY and the idea that it took a special occasion for her kid to find out that there are people up there who are "burned" brown like his mother is stunning and telling.
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who is the rabble rouser here?
Surprise, surprise. The nitpicking and clawing is well underway.
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Get a Grip
What was soo hard about saying mommy's black and daddy's white. Tell them they look more like their father, but they share two heritages. Why are you so afraid to share your family history with your children? Certainly there are things they won't be able to understand until their older, but geez please be honest enough about yourself to share yourself completely with your children.
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Exactly... "Get a Grip"
Why all the dramatic nonsense, like tatoos are "boo-boos", and whatnot? The situation is fairly straightforward and not particularly unique.
There's something very odd about "not forcing" your son to share your heritage to the point that he thinks you're burned and is shocked at the presence of black people. Somehow, I don't think he thinks his father is bleached and he's probably not shocked to see white people. Strange.
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Uh huh
Funny, but for all the hand-wringing and buying special books and treading so carefully to teach her kids balanced views about race and prejudice and whatnot that Ms. Dickerson shows, my Latin parents managed to teach me the same thing with none of that hooha and paraphernalia. They did it very simply: by example. Neither my mom nor my dad ever treated anyone of another race any differently, either from other Latins or from each other. In their eyes, as long as people behave well towards others, don't act irresponsibly or in a hurtful manner, they are all worthy of the same courtesy and respect. That's what I grew up learning, and that's what made racism, homophobia and other such hateful prejudices not only foreign to me, but utterly incomprehensible. I simply can't grasp the mind-set of someone who has any of those problems; it just seems insane to me.
The easiest way to teach your kids not to have racial prejudices is not to have them yourself. Kids learn far, far more from example than from "teaching" or lecturing or having books and/or videos pressed on them. Act decently toward others, and your kids will have a good foundation on which to base their own views.
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my experience was more like debra's "Victoria Crawford"
my kids discovered race in first grade, but then, we didn't have a political marriage. "jeccat" the word you were searching for is "lingu-ist" not "racist". i really don't know why so many men seemingly diavow their children, they must be missing the best part of their Y chromosome.
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It's so easy to criticize when you're anonymous.
Good God. We're calling people Sambo now? Way to raise the level of discourse. It'd be so easy for me as a white male to say that Ms. Dickinson is overstating the racism her kids will face, but what do I know about living in a place where I'm the only one who looks like me? I can't buy the line that the primary cause of racism in post-Civil Rights America is that black people won't stop making the point that they're black. Are there ways in which black America isolates itself? Absolutely. Is this a reaction to hundreds of years of slavery, segregation, and discrimination, that is culturally ingrained and not likely to disappear just because things are better than they used to be? Undoubtedly.
I'm amazed by the audacity of people who presume it'll be easy for Ms. Dickinson's children to grow up biracial. There will be black kids who don't think they're black enough. There will be white kids who think the opposite. They'll be asked "what they are" by half the people they meet, and I don't blame their mother for worrying about how they'll deal with it. And I don't blame her for wanting her kids to know their black heritage either. If an Irish-American mother puts her kids in an Irish dance class, nobody accuses her of "making race an issue." By the tenor of these letters, you'd think Ms. Dickinson was singlehandedly keeping America from colorblindness.
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I hate this self-loathing cow.
We get it. You hate your skin color. It's sooooo haaaaard, y'all, bein' Black!
I don't know. I find that I love my lovely, dark skin, love my heritage, and seem to be able to love everyone else. And, funny, I've never had any problems with racism. EVER.
You'll find problems if you look for them. I mean, get a grip. You can't even tell your kid what the hell a TATTOO is?
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Ah, yes, Mr. or Mrs. "What a crock of shit"
Thank you for your kind feedback to my earnest liberal question. I will now stop worrying about the fact that I live in a very race-segregated society, discontinue caring that my lack of experience with people of color makes me less effective when I work with them, not to mention a less well-rounded person. I now vow to put no effort into confronting my own ignorance, and simply twiddle my thumbs waiting for "life" to do the work for me. How silly of me to ask an open ended question about how we might, as white people, find ways of de-segregating our own lives that do not smack of tacky voyuerism.
And Ms Dickerson, I suppose, should do no thinking whatsoever about how her children will deal with their racial identities because thinking about racism is what makes racism happen, right? Cause if we all stopped thinking about it, there would be no huge economic disparity between black and white in this country and no recent history of slavery and institutionalized segregation, and certainly no pervasive harmful racial stereotypes. And certainly, if we all just miraculously stopped noticing race we'd all just live in a happy smappy rainbow colored world in which no one would suffer injustices of any sort.
Sheesh. Crock of shit indeed.