Maybe I Need a Script

Have you ever read Holes, by Louis Sachar? It's a juvenile fiction book that won the Newberry award some ten-plus years ago. I read it as an adult (since it didn't come out until I was on my mission) but really enjoyed it. Lately I've been reading it with M every night, and there were a few things about the story that I had forgotten about before I plunged into it with my daughter.

I won't give away the story (in case you'd like to read it-- it is a great book), but there is a subplot that involves a white woman falling in love with a black man in the late 1800's in Texas. Of course, this was NOT a normal thing at that time in a small Texas town so it doesn't turn out well. But when we came to that part of the story, M was confused, to put it mildly. So we ended up having a discussion about a whole list of race-related things, including:

What the word "Negro" means

Segregated schools

Why people thought God would punish a white woman for kissing a black man

What a lynching is

I thought for sure the idea of an interracial relationship being a sin would raise the most questions. It didn't. Apparently, we have taught her well enough that she just shrugged that off as people not understanding God. However, she had trouble with the idea that the black students and white students would have to go to different schools. So that led to the next question (the one she felt was most relevant to herself).

Where did the kids who were both white and black go to school?

I tried my best to give her a simple explanation to that one, and obviously it sunk in because the other day I heard her giving J a whole lecture on the subject.

"J, did you know that way long ago, like a hundred years ago, white and black kids couldn't go to the same school? And the kids that were both were considered black and they had to go to the black kids' school. So if we were alive back then we would have had to go to the black school. . . ." Fortunately, this wasn't something that she or J found upsetting, just interesting.

Terence and I have done our best to raise our kids to be color-blind, so they really see skin color as just another individual difference (kind of like hair color or eye color). But now that they are getting older, it's gotten a lot trickier, like navigating a minefield. We don't want them to be ignorant of what things were like, but we don't want to raise them to feel like victims either, which seems to be the goal of so much "racial awareness" nowadays. I've had some good experience both on my mission and living on the Navajo Reservation, plus in all my years with Terence's family on the different ways people can look at their minority heritage. Those who focus on all the negative stuff in the past tend to see so much of it around them in the present (like they are constantly getting discriminated against). Those who just accept it but don't feel like it has anything to do with their present lives seem to feel like they are treated like equals by almost everyone around them. Most importantly, those who don't automatically see themselves as victims seem happier. That's what I want for my kids.

It's just funny, though. I never realized that as a parent I was going to end up having so many conversations that would leave me sweating bullets and second-guessing myself at the end. Did I say too little? Too much? Was that too scary? Should I have waited until she is older or he is a bit more mature? I have the "birds and the bees" talk coming soon with M. It might just make the race questions seem like a walk in the park. Something to look forward to, right?