My daughter is in fourth grade in a New York City public school. Their unit of study right now is focused on immigration and social justice in this country. This isn’t some knee-jerk liberal reaction to the times we’re living in, but has been planned from the beginning of the year. That it is happening concurrent with the events that are happening around us is either a coincidence or goes to show the alarming regularity that such events take place - less coincidence than matter of course.
In one of her lessons a couple of weeks ago, my daughter was shown a picture, without a caption or explanation, and asked what she sees and can infer from the picture. It was the picture at the top of this post, of Iesha Evans protesting the murder of Alton Sterling* in Baton Rouge in 2017 (photo credit: Jonathan Bachman) (*see above re: alarming regularity, rinse and repeat).
Her answer, not knowing any information about what was happening was: “A girl is stepping up and shaking [the police officer’s] hand.” And if one looks that photo, blissfully ignorant of the world we live in, that could be what is happening. The height of innocence. Also the height of privilege. Of whiteness.
We’ve had discussions with her recently about the unfair treatment of black people and other of color in this country. She’s old enough now to take these things in, but she still doesn’t understand. I don’t know what I was thinking about at age 10 in the heart of the Reagan era, but it wasn’t racial injustice. She doesn’t have that luxury. I shouldn’t have either, but I was taught about the scourge of slavery (but it was so long ago) and then how like 100 years later Martin Luther King, Jr. won the hearts and minds of people using the power of love, and now things were so much better! So she’s got a leg up that her school is delving into some realness, sharing photos of Black Lives Matter protests.
But the fact that my daughter could see a photo of Louisiana state troopers in militaristic riot gear rushing towards an unarmed black woman and see it as a peaceful greeting goes to show what a privileged life her skin color has afforded her. And what a privileged experience it is as white parents to have had the luxury to have been able to wait to have these conversations with her until she’s “ready.”
In the next part of the assignment, she was given the caption of the photo and then to state what the people in the photo were actually doing. Unfortunately, the caption is a very news-sanitized one, so she came away with only that Iesha was being arrested because the police had closed the street and she wasn’t supposed to be there. Sigh.
We’ll continue to have these conversations. I want her to grow up knowing and naming her privilege and knowing how she can use that privilege for good by standing up for those that don’t possess it. I am going to make sure that she knows the things I wasn’t taught in school, about how history is written by white people who have use their privilege to not include some painful things because it would involve them holding up a mirror to themselves. I hope in the process I continue to become a better person, a better ally. How privileged am I to be given such an opportunity?