Sleeping Beauty’s parents thought they were protecting her.
According to the Disney movie, the witch Maleficent — salty about being snubbed for a christening invite — cursed Princess Aurora to one day prick her finger on a spindle and die. The king and queen order all spinning wheels destroyed. But Maleficent, being a resourceful sorceress, conjures one up anyway. Aurora finds it, does indeed prick herself and winds up falling into that deathlike slumber she has to be kissed out of.
The story always struck me not only as a lesson in lack of consent, but a missed parental opportunity to prepare one’s children for impending danger. What if they’d said, “Hey, we’ve tried to remove the threat, but just in case, here’s what a spinning wheel looks like”? Because sometimes spindles happen. And sometimes, someone calls your little Black kid a monkey.
I had dreaded that moment my son’s whole life, and when it finally happened, I felt all the expected emotions. Sadness. Anger. Fierce protection. Helplessness at knowing it’s probably not the last time. Hana Pugh, the fiancée of Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, recently wrote on social media that something similar happened to her child.
It was a painful reminder of the inevitability of this sort of pain. Of how my kid and hers don’t get to live in youthful innocence. Of how some parents have to have these conversations with our kids at ages that others think theirs are too young to even consider such things.
But the kid who called my son a monkey wasn’t too young to know that word was specifically harmful to my child and people who look like him. If your kid can be racist, we can talk about race. Pretending they don’t understand is pointless and a little stupid.
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“It’s a sad fraternity,” Deana Cruz said of finding out your child has been racially targeted. “It’s like, ‘I’m sorry you’re here.’” The Deale resident joined the sad club when her Afro Latino son was in first grade. “One of the little Caucasian boys in class said, ‘Hold up, n----r.’” The ensuing investigation was unsatisfying, and the incident was dismissed as just a child repeating a word he’d heard on the bus with other Black kids.
“It happened so early. I had been anticipating, in my mind, that it might not happen till middle school. It took me aback, actually,” Cruz told me. “I had to say, ‘Unfortunately, this is a cross you might have to bear as you go through life.’ And honestly, it’s true. I hate that.”
I had to have that same conversation with my son earlier this year. It cut me deeply watching the painful little cloud on my baby’s face that this terrible thing was not over and wasn’t something I could protect him from. I had to stop myself from crying. We have been talking about racism since he was 3, when I refused to let him play in the yard with a water gun lest someone see a Black kid and assume it was real. But when the moment someone else strips away that innocence finally happens, you feel like a failure.
Sometimes, the hurtful words — and don’t believe the lie that words can never hurt you — aren’t about race. My friend Dara Dixon Kluger, who was my editor at the York Dispatch in York, Pennsylvania, at the beginning of my career and now lives in Mechanicsburg, was startled when her son told her a ninth grade classmate threw pennies at him in the cafeteria and said, “Isn’t that what Jewish people like?” Her child didn’t know what that meant, and she had to tell him, “‘This was so anti-Semitic. They’re saying you’re money-hungry, and it’s a horrible stereotype.’”
Kluger, who is white, didn’t grow up directly being the victim of racism, but she did deal with it by association. She was called the N-word along with her predominantly Black classmates at William Penn Senior High School in York by students from other schools. When she converted to Judaism before her marriage to her husband, who is Jewish, “The rabbi asked me, ‘Are you prepared to be a minority, to be judged and scrutinized in a way you would not have if you had not converted?’ I hadn’t thought about it.”
Knowing this kind of thing might happen to you is different than when it happens to your kid, though. “The first feeling is anger, and the second feeling is hurt,” Kluger said. “Here we were in 2015, and are you kidding me? I couldn’t believe that someone had the audacity to throw pennies at my child. The claws come out and you want to go to the school and find them.”
Of course, you can’t do that. But you can talk to your kids, and to other parents. Cruz said when her son was called a slur while online gaming, the white mother of one of the friends who witnessed the incident called her. She found herself “having to calm that mom down. I had to tell her, ‘It’s not something that’s not going to happen. And there’s not much you can do about it.’”
I will say that it’s helpful when people outside of a marginalized community see it happen and are horrified. It’s then harder to laugh it off or say “Are you sure that’s what happened? Did he really mean it that way? Wasn’t it just a joke?” I was called out of my name more than once in middle school, and it was always helpful when there were witnesses.
I am comforted my son’s experience was handled well. School staff, one of whom witnessed the event from across the room but didn’t hear exactly what was said, believed him, which is important. Parents were contacted and the school district’s restorative justice process was put into place, in which the racial nature of the slur was acknowledged and not downplayed. The aggressor acknowledged there would be consequences the next time it happened, and my child felt like he was part of the solution.
But what happens the next time, at a different school? Or on the playground? Or at the shopping center? When Cruz’s son was slurred online, “it had happened before, and he said, ‘Don’t talk to me like that’ and kept going. We’ve told him, ‘When someone calls you a name, you say, ”Don’t call me that,” and come home, and we will fight the battle,’” she said.
The truth is that at some point, this is not a battle we’ll be able to fight for our kids, who will always be our babies. All we can do is hope to prepare them.
We can’t burn down the world to protect them, even if we want to.
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