Black, white, rich, poor, and how to raise your kids

Hmmm - not sure how to respond.

I guess class/gender/race have differing impacts depending on where/when/who you are - despite the earnest struggles about which is the paramount split! And I always feel unentitled to comment a lot on race issues, anyway.

The author's discussion of the effects of gender/class on her, rather than race, is interesting.

Anywho, Nimh - bumping, at the least!!!

I wonder if this is the same woman with an very similar outlook and history as the one I have heard on NPR a few times. I'll have to check.

At first blush, I think it's weird to even suggest 'raising your child white/black'...but, it seems to be a reality facing some people.

I have worked on a very large staff that was overwhelmingly black--and before I did, I really had myself fooled that they were 'just like me'. Boy, was I wrong. The great majority of blacks do have their unique culture. I don't think of whites really having a 'culture', but maybe I can't see the forest because of all these trees...

The most surprising thing to me is what is considered 'acting white'. Speaking properly, studying, being a 'joiner' at school. That aspect of black culture is very damaging to children. I was also surprised, since blacks have suffered so much discrimination--that they put light skinned blacks on some superior hierarchy above dark skinned blacks. You would think it would be the other way around.

Anyway, boy did I go off on a tangent.

I enjoyed the article. I wish there was a fuller dialogue in the black community about these issues.

Probably for that very reason. It's called internalisation, I think (of the perceptions that are held of you by the group that dominates popular culture, power, education ... whatever channels apart from family one's conception of self comes through). Racism between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned (people of colour) is & has been very prevalent

Ms. Dickerson is absolutely right about the inequity among social classes. It isn't just that middle-class kids have more general information--which of course they do.

Hearts have doors which ope with ease
With very, very little keys.
Don't forget that two of these
Are "Thank you, sir" and "If you please".

Middle class kids grow up knowing that a courteous request is likely to get what you want. Lower class kids have no such sense of the inate power in politely assuming entitlement.

Great piece nimh. Thanks.

We have a racial situation here in Canada, as does the US, and Australia and NZ, related to our indigenous peoples. It's heart-breaking to see the struggles they are often up against precisely because of the 'internalization' nimh speaks of.

I've mentioned this anecdote elsewhere, but will relate it again here. One summer back in my home town, I drove taxi. A lot of our trips were to or from the various reserves about town. One morning I picked up a young girl of about 16, and as we drove along talking, she pointed up to the telephone/power lines and said, "I can't figure out how they get the water through there." Their culture has, in so many cases and in so many ways, fallen victim to notions of worthlessness. And that's a comparative thought, not at all helped by how we often them.

There was a lovely article I read years ago in the New Yorker on the history of history books in North America, and the change in portrayal of the native people. It was a slow and steady progression from positive to negative.

nimh--

Thanks for introducing me to Debra Dickerson. I've just finished the first installment of her memoirs An American Story and I 've requested that the local library buy the second volume, The End of Blackness so I can read that, too.

She is an excellent writer with a lot to say.

Missed this the first time around, no time now, would like to come back to it.