Mommy, who's Jim Crow?
I was reading Atlantic this morning, the June 2014 issue whose cover has no art, just some stark and lovely typography related to Ta-Nehisi Coates's article about reparations for slavery in the US. (You can see it here.) Which is an excellent and depressing and eye-opening and heartbreaking article, and everyone should read it right now. SP was sitting at the other end of the couch doing whatever it is she does on weekend mornings when she's avoiding getting dressed and brushing her hair and getting breakfast, and she looked up and read the top two (biggest) lines of type -- "250 years of slavery. / 90 years of Jim Crow." -- and said, "Mommy, who's Jim Crow?"
So we ended up having this long conversation about the legacy of slavery in the US. And then eventually, somehow, about the preponderance of black NBA players. Conversations are more complicated when your child is edging towards adolescence, but some things are still impossible to explain in a way that makes sense. Like why anyone ever thought it was okay to treat people like property because of the colour of their skin, and how much we are still refusing to deal with the fallout of that all these centuries later. (Coates notes that there's a guy, John Conyers Jr., who's been trying for a quarter of a century to get Congress to at least study the question of reparations. He can't even get his bill onto the House floor. WTF. Is Canada any better, with our ongoing refusal and/or inability to listen to what our First Nations are saying? Yeah, probably not.) I suspect I didn't succeed very well, because, well, I don't understand it either.
(I also had to try to explain Alan Turing a few weeks ago (because we were discussing The Imitation Game, which I may possibly be a teensy bit obsessed with ...), specifically what happened to him that led him to kill himself. Why would a grateful government prosecute, convict and chemically castrate a man who made such an incalculably critical contribution to winning a horrendous war? Whenever we have conversations like this, I find myself saying "I really don't know" a lot. :P)
SP kept saying, "But not in Canada, right?" And ... no, but still in some ways yes. COMPLICATED.
The thing is, I'm glad and grateful to be raising my kid in a place and time where systematic, legal discrimination on the basis of race or sexual orientation seems bizarre and wrong. So glad, so grateful. But it would be so easy to say, "People used to think like that, but they were wrong, and we don't think like that anymore!" -- easy, and self-congratulatory, and wrong. Because maybe we don't, but lots of people still do. Or ... maybe we don't think we do, but we don't know what we don't know.
I'm cis, (primarily) straight, white, with a university degree and a full-time job: I have a whole backpack full of privilege. I'm also Jewish, a woman, and grew up in a female-headed household with an emotionally abusive father on the side: I have an inkling of what it's like to be on the outside looking in. But only an inkling. We went without things, but never food or shelter or winter boots; I've been told I'd never be good at certain things, or didn't deserve to have certain things, because I was a girl, but never that I didn't deserve to live; I've been bullied and talked down to and belittled, but never literally beaten; I've been sexually assaulted, but lived to tell about it; I've had to explain my religion/culture to people who've said unbelievably ignorant things to me (as well as to many people who've asked perfectly reasonable questions), but I've never feared for my life as a result.
I live in this hugely multicultural city in a multicultural country, and it's easy to focus on how great that is -- it really is great, and I love it -- while eliding and ignoring the problems we still have around race (certainly first and probably foremost, Canada's uncomfortable colonial history and the brokenness it's left in its wake). I want to raise my daughter to value the diversity of humans, their cultures and their languages and their experiences and their voices and their colours and shapes. I have to be conscious that I'm coming at this from a position of privilege, and when I sometimes fail and say something stupid, I need to not be that person who pitches a fit when called on their stupid.
Just a memo to myself.
So we ended up having this long conversation about the legacy of slavery in the US. And then eventually, somehow, about the preponderance of black NBA players. Conversations are more complicated when your child is edging towards adolescence, but some things are still impossible to explain in a way that makes sense. Like why anyone ever thought it was okay to treat people like property because of the colour of their skin, and how much we are still refusing to deal with the fallout of that all these centuries later. (Coates notes that there's a guy, John Conyers Jr., who's been trying for a quarter of a century to get Congress to at least study the question of reparations. He can't even get his bill onto the House floor. WTF. Is Canada any better, with our ongoing refusal and/or inability to listen to what our First Nations are saying? Yeah, probably not.) I suspect I didn't succeed very well, because, well, I don't understand it either.
(I also had to try to explain Alan Turing a few weeks ago (because we were discussing The Imitation Game, which I may possibly be a teensy bit obsessed with ...), specifically what happened to him that led him to kill himself. Why would a grateful government prosecute, convict and chemically castrate a man who made such an incalculably critical contribution to winning a horrendous war? Whenever we have conversations like this, I find myself saying "I really don't know" a lot. :P)
SP kept saying, "But not in Canada, right?" And ... no, but still in some ways yes. COMPLICATED.
The thing is, I'm glad and grateful to be raising my kid in a place and time where systematic, legal discrimination on the basis of race or sexual orientation seems bizarre and wrong. So glad, so grateful. But it would be so easy to say, "People used to think like that, but they were wrong, and we don't think like that anymore!" -- easy, and self-congratulatory, and wrong. Because maybe we don't, but lots of people still do. Or ... maybe we don't think we do, but we don't know what we don't know.
I'm cis, (primarily) straight, white, with a university degree and a full-time job: I have a whole backpack full of privilege. I'm also Jewish, a woman, and grew up in a female-headed household with an emotionally abusive father on the side: I have an inkling of what it's like to be on the outside looking in. But only an inkling. We went without things, but never food or shelter or winter boots; I've been told I'd never be good at certain things, or didn't deserve to have certain things, because I was a girl, but never that I didn't deserve to live; I've been bullied and talked down to and belittled, but never literally beaten; I've been sexually assaulted, but lived to tell about it; I've had to explain my religion/culture to people who've said unbelievably ignorant things to me (as well as to many people who've asked perfectly reasonable questions), but I've never feared for my life as a result.
I live in this hugely multicultural city in a multicultural country, and it's easy to focus on how great that is -- it really is great, and I love it -- while eliding and ignoring the problems we still have around race (certainly first and probably foremost, Canada's uncomfortable colonial history and the brokenness it's left in its wake). I want to raise my daughter to value the diversity of humans, their cultures and their languages and their experiences and their voices and their colours and shapes. I have to be conscious that I'm coming at this from a position of privilege, and when I sometimes fail and say something stupid, I need to not be that person who pitches a fit when called on their stupid.
Just a memo to myself.