"Why Do They Do That To Theyselves"

I tried to talk to my kids this morning about what was happening in our country.  I told them that sometimes people are so full of hate, that they will hurt someone else just because of the color of their skin.  “That’s sad!”, said my three year old daughter.  “And it’s mean”, said my five year old son.  I then asked why they think someone would want to hurt someone else because their skin was different, and my son responded that he didn’t know.  My daughter said, “It’s just…It’s just nasty.  Why do they do that to theyselves?!”  Then my son asked to watch BattleBots, and I knew our lesson was over, but the more I consider Tallulah’s question, the more I realize that she understands the problem of racism more as a three-year-old than we do as adults.  We do we do this to ourselves?  I don’t intend to teach my children to be colorblind.  I want them to appreciate and savor the differences in people of other races, and I want them to know about the history of injustice, but I also want to instill in them an inability to conjure hate based on any stereotype.  I want to stick my head in a hole this next week as I am sure some of you will believe that Dallas is your justification to continue to hate.  After the BattleBots intrusion, I did get back to talking about the racism and violence topic.  I told them that we need to love everyone and Hayes responded, “yeah, but I don't really like bad guys”.  Lula agreed, of course, and then, again, surprised me with her response, “How does God love bad guys if they’re nasty?”.  Wow - how do you answer that question?  How do we continue to love the ones that are responsible for the killings while admonishing their hate?  I’m having a hard time doing it. I’m sitting here like someone in shell shock, unable to play with my kids, unable to form a coherent thought, because I can’t understand how we have let the hatred multiply as it has in this country.  Police are supposed to be there to serve and protect, and yet, some don’t.  Some kill, because either they are hateful or scared or somewhere in between.  And then people get angry.  Anger can be righteous, but not when it is covered in hate and murder.  I teach a culture and diversity class and we discuss racism, obviously.  I live in Rockford, IL, one of the most segregated cities in this country, and many of my students brought me to tears with their stories of segregation.  One, a black woman, told me how her family was on a trip to the southern coast, and they were pulled over for two hours as the cops searched their car for narcotics.  None were found.  The officers wouldn’t share their names and finally let them go.  Another student, a hispanic woman, told me how the officers had impounded her car because she hadn’t been able to find her insurance card.  I was pulled over once and couldn’t find my insurance card.  The officer let me go with a warning.  Because, I’m a white woman.  But here is where many things go awry; this is where we see the injustice and let it infiltrate our love and consume us with hate.  Instead of holding the individuals responsible for their actions and calling our country to act in effective ways, we resort to violence.  Those responsible for the deaths in Dallas, the officers responsible for the deaths of innocent black men, those that respond on Facebook with hate and justify their hatred with the hatred of others, they just hurt theyselves.  We have grown up in a culture that says there are certain situations where violence are ok.  My friends and I just discussed this last weekend.  We grow up living under stereotypes and in a culture of acceptance or at least complacency of evil!  I refuse to let my children learn that violence is acceptable.  It is NEVER acceptable.  Hating another person because of their skin, is NEVER acceptable.  Racism is no longer overt in many of our worlds, but we have become sneaky about it, something sociologists call “covert racism”.  So, let me borrow a few key points from the textbook I teach from, explaining Color-blind Racism, which falls in the Symbolic Interactionism Theoretical Paradigm:

1 - First, whites tend to hold onto ideals such as equality, individualism, and choice in an effort to explain why racial groups are disadvantaged.  In other words, people are only poor because they made bad choices, not because of some historical or cultural connection that supports racism

2 - Second, white people often use cultural stereotypes to rationalize racial inequality.  Rather than understand the sources of the problem, too many people simply latch onto stereotypes to explain the issue.

3 - The third factor is the false belief that segregation is a personal choice.  The suggestion is that it’s natural for racial groups to prefer “their own kind”  Often this attitude prevents white people from understanding the complex role institutionalized racism has on “segregated” communities.

4 - Finally, many whites in the United States simply believe that racism is a thing of the past and deny that it has any impact on minorities’ lives today.  Such thinking serves to defend the way things are, add excuses the dominant group from any responsibility to make things better. (Carl, 2013, p. 46)

PLEASE, I BEG OF YOU, do not allow the violence of Dallas, or Minnesota, or Baton Rouge, to bubble up your hatred, or your stereotypes.  Instead, let’s all take a step back and evaluate what is happening, what needs to change, and how we can be a part of facilitating that change.  My impact will be most felt on the lives of my children, who are begging me to come play, so I am going to have to finish this soon.  I can teach them that each person is deserving of love and that their world is going to try to teach them to believe things about other people that are not true.  As my husband left this morning, I was in tears, explaining to him my fears over what the future holds for them, and he said, “They are the ones who can change it”.  So, please, let’s teach our children that evil should not repay evil, that we need to stand up for our black brothers and sisters and lovingly find a way to give them the rights that we all pretend they received with the Civil Right’s Movement.  Let’s teach them that a joke about someones race is just as harmful as hitting them.  Let’s teach them that if an officer kills a black man, we should be enraged and we should fight, but with our words, our policies, and with change, not with violence.  Otherwise we are just going to keep doing this to ourselves.

Carl, J. D. (2013). Think social problems, 2013. Boston: Pearson.