Stocksy

Although race and racism are at the top of Americans’ public discussions, it turns out that most white parents in the US don’t talk about those issues with their kids.

Research on how white parents discuss race with their children is sparse. However, past research has shown that conversations about race, much less racism, are rare, even when these issues are highly visible — for example, during the Ferguson protests in 2014.

One study found that even though 81 percent of white mothers believed it was important to have these discussions, only 62 percent reported actually doing so. Of those who said they did, fewer than one-third of those people could actually recall a specific conversation.

Teaching generations

To examine the issue more deeply, we examined surveys of more than 2,000 adults ages 18 and older, collected from May 21 to June 14, 2020, in four major US cities (Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and New York City). We wanted to understand how people’s views on race were influenced by their parents.

Our initial findings indicate that among white respondents, 65 percent said their parents had “never” or “rarely” had conversations with them about racism when they were children. In general, we found that younger white people were more likely to have parents who talked with them about about racism compared to those in older generations. Surprisingly, however, those in the youngest age group — 18- to 25-year-olds — were less likely to have parents who talked with them about racism “very often” (only 7 percent), compared to 26- to 40-year-olds (16 percent) and to those 41- to 55-years-old (12 percent).

We found that those whose parents talked with them about racism were themselves more likely to talk with their own children about it. But even during this period of unrest, 27 percent of white parents of children between 6 and 11 years old told us they “never” talked with their kids about the need for racial equality. Another 15 percent said these conversations were “rare,” and 34 percent said they happened “on occasion.”

Missing the point

Research shows that the relatively small number of white parents who do discuss race with their children often use what are called “colorblind” approaches that downplay racism’s significance in American society. These conversations usually involve emphasizing the sameness between all people and minimize or deny the idea of differences between races. Typical themes include “not seeing race” or “treating everyone the same,” which ignore or even reject the existence of white privilege and racism.

These discussions can promote a myth of meritocracy that claims anyone can succeed in the US regardless of their race, a belief shared by 57 percent of the white respondents in our survey. But the problem with this colorblindness is it ignores how racism is embedded in society — for example, in where people live and what kinds of jobs and educational opportunities people have.

Sometimes conversations can also be explicitly or implicitly racist, relying on racial stereotypes premised on the idea of inherent differences between racial groups. Seldom are such discussions anti-racist. An anti-racism conversation with children involves acknowledging racial inequalities and the historical and present-day reasons why they exist. It also includes talking about ways that a child could help actively undo racism and how not to be a bystander when they see it being perpetrated.

Changing perspectives

Our data showed that white people who were taught by their parents about opposing racism and the importance of fighting for racial equality were supportive of doing more to help racial minority groups hit harder by COVID-19. By contrast, people whose parents had never or rarely talked to them about anti-racism were more likely to feel that racial minorities are themselves at fault for their higher death rates from COVID-19.

We also found that parents’ discussions with their kids helped them grow up to have more nuanced views on other aspects of racism in the US. Three-quarters of adults who had, as children, talked with their parents “very often” about racism said that racial minorities do not have the same opportunities as whites. A similar share (69 percent) said race plays a major role in the types of social services that people receive, such as health care or daycare, and 69 percent also agreed that race plays an important role in who gets sent to prison.

Of the adults whose parents “never” or “rarely” talked with them about racism, fewer than half (47 percent) said racial minorities have different opportunities than whites. Similarly, fewer than half of these people felt that race plays a role in the types of social services people receive or in incarceration (49 percent and 48 percent, respectively).

Resisting racism, challenging racist societal structures and advocating for equity have been an uphill battle shouldered predominantly by individuals, families and communities of color. Our research indicates that the more white parents talk with their children about the realities of American racism, the more aware those kids are, as adults, of inequalities in American life.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

Watch David Chae’s TEDxGrandRapids talk here:

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David Chae ScD will be joining the Department of Social, Behavioral, and Population Sciences at Tulane University, School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in September 2020, where he will serve as Associate Dean for Research. He is an elected fellow of the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, the honorary senior scientist society for those whose research is at the interface of behavior and medicine; Associate Editor of the journal Health Education & Behavior; and on the Editorial Board of Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology. His research focuses on the social determinants of health inequities and the psychobiology of racial minority stress.

Leoandra Onnie Rogers PhD is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University. Her research curiosities lie at the intersection of psychology, human development and education. She is interested in social and educational inequities and the mechanisms through which macro-level disparities are both perpetuated and disrupted at the micro-level of identities and relationships.

Tiffany Yip PhD is a Professor of Psychology at Fordham University. Her research focuses on ethnic identity, discrimination, and sleep among ethnic/racial minority adolescents and young adults. She is an Associate Editor for Developmental Psychology. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, and her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Molly Mendoza

Many people want to help in the ongoing struggle for equality and equity, but they don’t know what to do.

Activist DeRay Mckesson explains how we can all show up and stand up:

1. Own your privilege.

“Acknowledge that there is a privilege you have [if you’re white], and use the privilege to disrupt that privilege itself. I’ve had people say to me, ‘Well, I didn’t benefit from white privilege.’ [You need to realize] every Band-Aid in this country looks like your skin and not mine, baby dolls look like you, and the color ‘nude’ is your skin color. That’s what the privilege of whiteness looks like — it’s not about what you’ve done; it’s about what society does when it treats white as normal. It’s about you saying, ‘I have privilege, I have power, and I will seek out how I can use that privilege and those resources. I’ll ask marginalized people, ‘What is the help you need?’ as opposed to just saying, ’I think this is what you should do’.”

2. Talk about what’s uncomfortable and what’s important.

“There’s no winning in silence. If we allow white supremacist ideology to spread without being challenged, people continue to replicate it. And the question is: what do you do? You need to talk about it — you can’t change what you don’t talk about. And while we’ve had a great conversation [in the last year] about the symbols and about Confederate monuments, there is still so much work to be done that we actually don’t talk about — like what to do about police violence, or bail, or rehabilitation for people who are coming out of prison, or the opioid crisis. You don’t always see the trauma — it doesn’t show up in the same way as a man running a car through a crowd of people — but the impact on people’s lives is as disastrous as anything else.”

3. Be strategic in what you say and how you say it.

“People don’t respond well to being shouted down at the dining room table. If your goal is to change somebody’s mind, that isn’t the most effective strategy; if your goal is to make a point, then that isn’t an effective strategy. Try to show people what you mean, as opposed to just saying, ‘I’m right.’ It’s a long-game solution. Rarely do people come out of one conversation and say, ‘You know, my whole worldview has changed.’ It’s about setting a foundation, so that people over time can change. This isn’t everybody’s work — some people are much better at having conversations than other people.”

4. Activism isn’t just about protests and marches — it means voting, too.

“Many of the things that will change people’s lives are structural, so it’s about voting where you are and pushing for or against legislation in your city and town. Use your institutional power to change structures and systems. Who shows up to the hearings about police violence? Who is working on welfare reform? Who is working on bail reform? Are you willing to come out for three weeks of hearings, sit, and say, ‘This is an issue that is important to me, too’? Even when it may not be convenient? That’s what it means to show up.”

5. Figure out where and how you can do the most good.

“I think there’s a role for everybody. The things I care about might not be the things you care about, and vice versa, which doesn’t mean they aren’t all important. For some people, their space is being on Twitter and on Facebook and pushing out messages. There are some people who are better in the street than I am, and some people who need to skip the street because they can just go to the governor’s mansion. If the governor is your friend and you can talk to him in his dining room, do that. We don’t all need to play the same role. The cacophony of all of us doing work together will actually lead to systemic change.”

6. Start where you are.

“Harriet Tubman knew that something could be done. She started where she was and started small, and it turned into the Underground Railroad. It can often start with you and another person, or you and two people, having a conversation about what the world can be and here are the steps you can take. You need to take concrete steps — small ones, like steps on a ladder — to get to systemic change. Ask people what they need, stand in concert with those who’ve been doing the work longer than you, listen, ask more questions than talk. Those are all the hallmarks of the people I’ve seen who are the most effective.”

7. Ask yourself: what do I want the future to look like?

“When we think about resistance, we focus almost exclusively on the absence of oppression. We think: How do we end mass incarceration? How do we stop the disparities with regard to police killings? How do we stop police killings altogether? But when we tear down these repressive, oppressive systems and structures, something has to replace them, something that’s better.

For example, we know there will always be rules, there will always be people who break the rules, and there will always need to be consequences. Do the people who enforce those consequences have to be the police? No. Does that enforcement have to mean prison? Absolutely not. We need to spend more time now talking about potential solutions. How do we help people imagine a conception of safety that doesn’t center on the police? How do we help them imagine a world where every adult can read? How do you help people dream in a big way that will actually change lives? It’s hard because we haven’t lived in that world before. But it doesn’t mean that world’s not possible.”

8. Feel the fear — and act anyway.

“Martin Luther King said, ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ It bends, because people bend it. There are so many people who understand the power they have. They’re standing up across the country when the odds look like they’re against them, and they’ve learned to make sure fear doesn’t overpower everything else even if fear is still present. There are just so many incredible people who are willing to put something on the line to make the world a different place. That gives me hope.”

These remarks were taken from a Facebook Live conversation conducted with DeRay Mckesson at TED headquarters in New York City. To learn more, watch the video.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deray Mckesson is a civil rights activist, organizer and educator. He is also the host of the podcast “Pod Save the People.”

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Public-interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson delivered the remarks below at TED2016, following a talk by architect Michael Murphy (TED Talk: Architecture that’s built to heal), who is designing The Memorial to Peace and Justice. The memorial is scheduled to open in spring 2018.

Today in America we are not free. We are burdened by a history of racial inequality and injustice. It compromises us; it constrains us. We live with the legacy of slavery, and that legacy has created a shadow that undermines so many of our best efforts to get to something that looks like justice.

The great evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude and forced labor. To me, the great evil of slavery was the narrative of racial difference, the ideology of white supremacy that we created to make ourselves feel comfortable with enslaving people who are black. We’ve never addressed that legacy.

To me, the great evil of slavery was the narrative of racial difference, the ideology of white supremacy that we created to make ourselves feel comfortable with enslaving people who are black. We’ve never addressed that legacy.

In the 13th amendment, we have language that prohibits involuntary servitude and forced labor. But we never talked about the narrative of racial differences, and as a result, I don’t believe that slavery ended in 1865. Instead, it turned into decades of terrorism and violence and lynching that terrorized people of color. Thousands of people were pulled into courthouse squares in America, brutalized and sometimes even burned alive.

Before the Civil War, the 3 children pictured here were sold as slaves in the United States. 1863 albumen print, carte-de-visite: ‘Rebecca, Augusta and Rosa. Slave Children from New Orleans’. Image courtesy of George Eastman Museum.

The demographic geography of this nation was shaped by terrorism. The black people who moved to Cleveland and Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles and Oakland and New York and Boston didn’t go to those communities as immigrants looking for new economic opportunities. They went to those communities as exiles and refugees from terrorism in the American South, and they are burdened by that history.

Even during the Civil Rights era, we never confronted all the pain and anguish that was created by decades of segregation. During that time, we said to black people, “You’re not good enough to vote because you’re black”; we said to black kids, “You can’t go to school with other kids because you’re black.” I started my education at a colored school. My parents were humiliated every day of their lives when they saw those signs that said “white” and “colored.” They weren’t directions; they were assaults. We haven’t addressed this. We try to press on instead, but now there’s a presumption of dangerousness and guilt that follows black and brown people in this country. It’s why kids are being killed on the streets by police officers.

An older black man said to me, “You see the scar I have behind my right ear? I got that scar in Greene County, Alabama, in 1963, trying to register people to vote.”

We cannot recover until we commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation. We need to create a new relationship to this history of ours. I was giving a talk one time in a church. An older black man in a wheelchair came in while I was speaking. He sat in the back, and he looked at me with such intensity while I was talking. He had an angry, almost mean look on his face. I got through my talk, and people came up to speak to me afterwards. That man kept staring at me, and I couldn’t figure out why. Finally, when everybody else had left, he got a young kid to wheel him up. The man got in front of me and said, “Do you know what you’re doing?” I just stood there and looked at him. He asked me again: “Do you know what you’re doing?” I mumbled something. He asked me one more time, “Do you know what you’re doing?” And then he looked at me and told me, “I’m going to tell you what you’re doing. You’re beating the drum for justice.” He said, “You keep beating the drum for justice.”

I was so moved. I was also relieved, because I hadn’t known what he was going to do. Then he grabbed me by my jacket and pulled me towards him. He said, “Come here. I want to show you something.” He turned his head and asked, “You see the scar I have behind my right ear?” He said, “I got that scar in Greene County, Alabama, in 1963, trying to register people to vote.” He turned his head and said, “You see this cut I have down here at the bottom of my neck? I got that cut in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1964, trying to register people to vote.” He turned his head and said, “You see this bruise? I got this bruise in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1965, trying to register people to vote.” He said, “I’m going to tell you something, young man. People look at me and think I’m some old man sitting in a wheelchair covered with cuts and bruises and scars. But I want to tell you something.” He said, “These aren’t my cuts; these aren’t my bruises; these aren’t my scars. These are my medals of honor.”

If we create spaces where we resurrect the truth, we can get to something that feels more like freedom.

I tell you this because our history has scarred us, it has bruised us, and it has injured us, but when we tell the truth about our history, we can change things. If we create spaces where we resurrect the truth, we can change the iconography of the American landscape; we can get to something that feels more like freedom; and we can achieve something that looks more like justice. We can shift this narrative that has burdened us and resurrect the hope that animates many of us.

That’s why I’m excited about projects like The Memorial to Peace and Justice, a memorial to victims of lynching in Montgomery, Alabama. It’s a place that will tell a hard story but a necessary one. You can’t go to South Africa without seeing these incredibly difficult but important monuments and memorials to apartheid; you can’t go to Rwanda without being reminded of the genocide; you cannot go 100 meters in Berlin, Germany, without seeing a marker or a stone that’s been placed at the home of a Jewish family abducted during the Holocaust. The Germans want people to go to Auschwitz and reflect soberly on the history of the Holocaust. We do the opposite in this country, and I think this kind of space will invite us to look at this truth. And when we do, we will find ourselves — maybe for the first time — freer, more just, more motivated and more liberated from our history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. Under his leadership, EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill and aiding children prosecuted as adults. Stevenson has successfully argued several cases in the United States Supreme Court and won an historic ruling that mandatory life-without-parole sentences for all children 17 or younger are unconstitutional; he and his staff have won reversals, relief or release for over 115 wrongly condemned prisoners on death row. He is also a Professor of Law at the New York University School of Law.

Art credit: Martin Luther King Jr. memorial poster, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture

Angélica Dass / Humanæ

Teachers often use TED Talks in the classroom to introduce a lesson topic or to frame a student discussion. Here are 10 TED Talks about race in America that teachers may find useful for starting difficult conversations in the classroom:

1. We need to talk about an injustice

In an engaging and personal talk — with cameo appearances from his grandmother and Rosa Parks — human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson shares some hard truths about America’s justice system, starting with a massive imbalance along racial lines: a third of the country’s black male population has been incarcerated at some point in their lives. These issues, which are wrapped up in America’s unexamined history, are rarely talked about with this level of candor, insight and persuasiveness.

2. How to overcome our biases? Walk boldly toward them

Our biases can be dangerous, even deadly — as we’ve seen in the cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner, in Staten Island, New York. Diversity advocate Vernā Myers looks closely at some of the subconscious attitudes we hold toward out-groups. She makes a plea to all people: Acknowledge your biases. Then move toward, not away from, the groups that make you uncomfortable. In a funny, impassioned, important talk, she shows us how.

3. How to raise a black son in America

As kids, we all get advice from parents and teachers that seems strange, even confusing. This was crystallized one night for a young Clint Smith, who was playing with water guns in a dark parking lot with his white friends. In a heartfelt piece, the poet paints the scene of his father’s furious and fearful response.

4. A tale of two Americas. And the mini-mart where they collided

Ten days after 9/11, a shocking attack at a Texas mini-mart shattered the lives of two men: the victim and the attacker. In this stunning talk, Anand Giridharadas, author of “The True American,” tells the story of what happened next. It’s a parable about the two paths an American life can take, and a powerful call for reconciliation.

5. My road trip through the whitest towns in America

As America becomes more and more multicultural, Rich Benjamin noticed a phenomenon: Some communities were actually getting less diverse. So he got out a map, found the whitest towns in the USA — and moved in. In this funny, honest, human talk, he shares what he learned as a black man in Whitopia.

6. Does racism affect how you vote?

Nate Silver has data that answers big questions about race in politics. For instance, in the 2008 presidential race, did Obama’s skin color actually keep him from getting votes in some parts of the country? Stats and myths collide in this fascinating talk that ends with a remarkable insight.

7. The untapped genius that could change science for the better

Jedidah Isler dreamt of becoming an astrophysicist since she was a young girl, but the odds were against her: At that time, only 18 black women in the United States had ever earned a PhD in a physics-related discipline. In this personal talk, she shares the story of how she became the first black woman to earn a PhD in astrophysics from Yale — and her deep belief in the value of diversity to science and other STEM fields. “Do not think for one minute that because you are who you are, you cannot be who you imagine yourself to be,” she says. “Hold fast to those dreams and let them carry you into a world you can’t even imagine.”

8. How we’re priming some kids for college — and others for prison

In the United States, two institutions guide teenagers on the journey to adulthood: college and prison. Sociologist Alice Goffman spent six years in a troubled Philadelphia neighborhood and saw first-hand how teenagers of African-American and Latino backgrounds are funneled down the path to prison — sometimes starting with relatively minor infractions. In an impassioned talk she asks, “Why are we offering only handcuffs and jail time?”

9. Color blind or color brave?

The subject of race can be very touchy. As finance executive Mellody Hobson says, it’s a “conversational third rail.” But, she says, that’s exactly why we need to start talking about it. In this engaging, persuasive talk, Hobson makes the case that speaking openly about race — and particularly about diversity in hiring — makes for better businesses and a better society.

10. The beauty of human skin in every color

Angélica Dass’s photography challenges how we think about skin color and ethnic identity. In this personal talk, hear about the inspiration behind her portrait project, Humanæ, and her pursuit to document humanity’s true colors rather than the untrue white, red, black and yellow associated with race.

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