When my husband and I decided to halve our work commutes by moving to an itty bitty town between two of South Carolina’s biggest cities, we thought the kids would be okay — good even. I was raised in a small one-stoplight town, after all, and I turned out okay. And there were clear advantages: we were able to get a nice, big Victorian farmhouse for the kids to grow up in (something we never could have afforded in either city) and chickens!
The disadvantages, that reared their ugly heads soon after we moved in: schools and friends for the kids. The public school has a rating of 1 (out of 10). The private school has a higher rating and is affordable, but there is next-to-no diversity (maybe two people of color in the entire school). Also, after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, they handed out a gun with ammo (their fundraiser’s grand prize!) at the baseball game. No thank you.
My kids are now home-schooled, after a short stint at the private school. Neither my son nor my daughter left with friends there. My daughter was bullied in her small class of eight peers, labeled a “weirdo” because she gushed about going to Uncle Alec’s and Uncle Michael’s wedding and because she likes President Obama. My at-the-time preschool age son was too young to have made lasting connections.
They both have friends in the city where I work, and we’re part of a great homeschool group that plans tons of field trips, but my husband — who grew up in a neighborhood with lots of kids — wants very much for them to have a network here at home. So he found them one earlier this summer. He was playing frisbee with the kids and noticed a boy who lives a few houses down. He invited him to play. Now my kids are part of a group of five. We’ll call the new friends, just for fun: Ben and Jerry and Stephen (as in the ice cream duo and Colbert).
They played all day that first day they got together. My daughter had a blast. That night, though, when I asked her if she had fun, she said “yes” enthusiastically … then hesitated … then said: “But, Mom, they say bad things.”
“Like bad words?” I asked, imagining “damn” and “shit” and being pretty unconcerned, truth be told.
“Like one bad word,” she said. And she proceeded to tell me that while in our front yard, one of the three boys yelled the “n” word at a little African-American boy who was riding his bike down the sidewalk.
I lost my mind.
“What did you say?” I shrieked. “Nothing,” she moaned. Apparently, she was going inside for a drink of water and froze with her hand on the doorknob when she heard it. I had to remind myself that she knew this was serious enough to tell me about it, to come to me for help, albeit later than I would have liked. I wish she had shouted, “WHOA, NOT COOL” and sent the boys home and invited the boy on the bike over to play instead. And I told her so.
“This isn’t the group you want to be in,” I said. “It’s like you were hanging with Draco Malfoy today! You don’t wanna be besties with Draco Malfoy!” [In our house, Harry Potter references abound.]
“But Ben [her favorite] didn’t say it,” she said, “Jerry did!”
“Did Ben tell Jerry not to say it?”
“No.”
“Well, then! Ben and Stephen are Crab and Goyle, and Jerry’s Draco. But you don’t wanna be besties with Crab and Goyle either!”
And that’s when she reminded me of that time I talked sympathetically about 12-year-old Draco, because he was clearly parroting the racist rhetoric he heard at home, from his racist dad, Lucius. I had told her that it’s hard, when you’re a kid, to break away from people you trust — like your parents — and build your own and contradictory worldview.
“Can’t you talk to them?” she asked me. “Can’t you tell them it’s wrong? — because maybe they haven’t been taught that it is.” And, then, she hatched a plan … a way for me to know what they had said without her having ratted them out: we have a video camera on our front porch, which we installed after her bike was stolen off it a year ago. We watched the footage from the day and saw everything unfold, just as she had said it did.
When the boys came over the next day to play, I asked them to sit around the table on our front porch. I pointed out the video camera, explained that we have it to deter theft, but that we happened to hear something disturbing on it instead.
I didn’t bring in photos of lynchings or show clips from the film Selma (even though I thought about both), but I did talk about the history of the n-word, the violence perpetrated to this day against black communities, and I told them that they must abide by the Golden Rule — treating all people equally, as they expect to be treated — whenever they’re at our house.
And I told them that they’ve probably heard adults use the n-word, but that not all adults are right, that they get to choose in situations like this whether to be like the adult who uses racial slurs or the adult who won’t tolerate them. They denied they ever said the slur in the first place (despite the video footage), insisted that they have black friends (so they can’t be racist!), and left with my daughter (who gave me a subtle thumbs-up) to play hide&seek in the backyard.
I’m left wondering what else I could have/should have done, wondering what I can still do. I wish more than anything that I could find the boy on the bike and apologize, but I wasn’t able to see him well on the video camera and the boys claim not to know who he was. I teared up then and tear up now just thinking about how the little boy felt — because he heard, my daughter said, and kept on riding … because what else can you do when you’re outnumbered and being treated with open hostility?
I wish I could apologize to his parents, for what happened on my property, in my front yard no less. I hate that there are racist houses … I pass one on the way to my parents’ with no less than three confederate flags flying in the front yard … but I never in a million years thought that my house would be seen as “the racist house.” Now I worry that it is, because I’m realizing something I hadn’t thought of before (thanks a lot, privilege): that there are more markers of racism than confederate flags. One of those markers? Racial slurs volleyed about on front lawns.
And this is why white people don’t discuss race at their peril. People of color discuss race, because they know they have to. They must tell their children that they’re just as important as children with white skin. But we must tell our white children, explicitly, that those with dark skin are just as important as they are, and we have to reinforce that truth with our actions. None of this “we don’t talk about race, because we don’t see color” nonsense.
We must think, too, about how to counteract the culture of hate so rife this election season against both African-Americans and Muslims, a hate that cannot become normalized. From “Make American White Again” campaign signs to Trump’s proposed Muslim bans, racism has seeped into all our houses via our computer screens and internet feed. I think I’ll sit down with my daughter tonight, and talk again about what’s wrong with both of the above … and then use Facebook to share, in no uncertain terms, what the Fisk family thinks about it all.