Steps Towards Raising Anti-Racist Children with Britt Hawthorne
“How do we get everyone on board? That’s the wrong question because we’re never going to get everyone on the same page because we’re humans.”
It’s a hot button topic, especially with the fight against the teaching of critical race theory in schools. A lot of people have strong emotions and feelings toward this subject. Although I would like to sit here and say that yes racism is just taught, which is true, it’s also ingrained in our social construct and systems.
Here’s where a lot of people get confused. I know it’s one thing to hear of the injustices but sometimes we are not always aware of the racism found in our systems, especially if we are fortunate enough to not be on the receiving end.
To answer some of my questions in regards to this subject I got to speak with Britt Hawthorne, educator, advocate, and author of, “Raising Antiracist Children A Practical Parenting Guide.”
We talked about her book, how to get everyone on the same page is the wrong question to ask, where we start and how to have these tough conversations with friends and family. Below are highlights of our interview with Britt, to catch the full thing scroll down to the bottom of the article where you can listen to the entire podcast episode.
So let's talk about these five components you address in this book.
Yeah, so the book right away grounds us in defining our understanding that you know, even if you've been in this work for quite some time, we know that the language changes and it shifts. That's something we all have to lean into and enjoy that fluidity of language. The reason why language is always shifting in this conversation is that it's always kind of in resistance to discrimination. So when I first started doing this work, I was using the term “minority” and then I moved to “people of color” and then I moved to “BIPOC” Black indigenous people of color. Now I've landed to “people of the global majority.” So it keeps shifting and moving so defining our understanding is all about that language. Why I choose to use the phrase, “white immunity” instead of “white privilege,” especially working with young children and that is a term that Dr. Nolan Pereira coins, and kind of just grounds us.
Healthy bodies is when the part where we say it's a practical parenting guide starts to come in. Where we start talking about things like fatphobia and we talk about body positivity. We talk about the pink tax and the patriarchy. Those are things like with our children when we are at the store we're looking at razors I want to point out to my children, “Hey, these are both the same brand of razors. Yours are blue and minor pink. Hmm, that's curious.” My nine-year-old can already say like, “Oh, why did they gender razors?” I'm like, “huh, that is curious.” Then we start to look at the cost of the razors. We'll do that with body wash. We do that with our shampoo or conditioner. And so then we start to have conversations like “gosh if I were to buy all of these things because they made it lavender, how much more money would I have to spend on the same product?” Right?
Radical minds is what is it going to take for us to start to have other new open conversations, these honest conversations, what does that look like to develop boundaries for ourselves? What does it look like to have advocacy statements for ourselves for our youngest children? I am intentionally teaching my children from a young age to show up for themselves and then they also learn how they can advocate not only for themselves but also for their friends. That's also in the chapter if you're asking how do I actually teach my child about racism? Or how do I introduce racialized identities? That's going to be radical minds.
Conscious shopping because we live in a capitalist society. It's so important that we're talking about how we're spending money and what we're consuming. So that section is all about conscious consumption. When you talk about having some guidelines what works well for us, is that whenever we're buying something that is a want, but not a need, we really look to support women-owned businesses, we’ll look to support black-owned businesses and look to support queer-owned businesses.
The last chapter is about Thriving Communities. This is where it's like how can I, with my children, start to have small actions that allow us to be an advocate or an activist in our community? So we have like a writing station in our household. We have one of those $2 IKEA picture frames where we have our mayor, our senators, and our governor. They have their name and their address written down and then we also have things that they're in charge of. So that whenever our children notice something that's unfair. It's not like, “Oh, we're just talking about it.”
How do we get everyone on the same page?
I always say that’s the wrong question because we're never going to get everyone on the same page because we're humans. In anything, we're never going to be on the same page and that's not the goal. Besides, if you're waiting to get everyone on the same page, you are waiting forever, right? Paul Borski has this quote, and he says, “if you go at the pace of the most resistant person in this work, you're going nowhere fast.” So instead what we want to do is we want to focus on the people that are willing to listen and work. Focus on those people. Because what we know is you need less than 5% of a group's population in order to evoke change.
How is racism showing up in children’s media without us realizing it?
In our home, we're learning about Asian Americans, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islanders. So one thing that we're working on identifying both our 15-year-old and our nine-year-old is how much in children's media there's this constant perpetuation of the othering of those three groups. So I checked some books out from the library and these books are very, very common children's books that have Asian Americans represented in them and that are in most classrooms. I asked them what they noticed on the first few pages of these books so my children started flipping through the book and my 15-year-old identified it first and he was like, they all start with like, a similar phrase, like in a faraway land, or like, over the ocean, and I'm like, yes. Before you even got into the book we're already othering or distancing ourselves. So what could we do with this book, to rewrite it, so that it would actually be inclusive?
The way I think about it is we have Asian Americans that live in this country. We have Asians that live on the continent of Asia. This happens in the classroom too. Whenever I go into a classroom, they'll have like a little doll or icon they’re holding and are saying something like look at this person and look at what they're wearing, they live in this country. And I'm like, they actually live here in the United States. If you just go to a coffee shop, you might see someone wearing a sari and we don't have to go over the ocean to find them. Every time I'm working with educators, and I say that they're like, “oh, my gosh, you're right.” And I tell them it’s because you're so focused on the diversity framework which is a faux way to be inclusive. It's not real, instead of really just focusing on the justice portion of what is fair and what's unfair. I mean children as young as four years old can start to tell you.
To listen more to our conversation make sure to check out our podcast episode. Stay up to date with everything Britt is doing by following her on Instagram.