lolz, albert. I know what you meant; I didn’t understand what bhs is saying in the quote. 
I grew up in a small town with basically no black people. I really was not around very many before moving to a city, and even then they were not typically in my classes or type of work, until a few years ago when I began adjuncting at a college which has many, many minority students.
One of the challenges I have found there is to distinguish between all the young black men in my course sections. (Last spring 25 of 70.) Simply describing them as young black males doesn’t help when there are so many of them. True to stereotype, many of them appear alike to me at first, and I have to struggle to focus on their other features and attributes in order to get them straight and mentally attach their names to them. This is compounded by the fact that some of them do not attend regularly, and too many are named “Michael”, lol. I’m not sure why this is difficult for me, because in reality what I find is that they are extremely diverse, but I know that it takes a conscious effort. Maybe after a few more years…
It is extremely difficult for me to read, but I’ve read it straight through twice now and different sections repeatedly. Although the book has been really popular with upper middle class white women, he definitely didn’t write it for us and it didn’t bother me at all he wasn’t in any way excusing thoughtless, though perhaps unconscious, racism. When I have to confront the fact of white privilege, I have to reevaluate everything that has ever happened to me my whole life. I don’t think white privilege necessarily means I am an evil, racist person. But it does mean I have benefited from an an evil, racist society and that is a pretty difficult concept to take in for someone like me. Avoiding thinking about systemic racism is much easier.
There was some discussion in this thread about what we teach our children. The older I get the more I think what I teach at home won’t matter unless the whole world changes. Yes, one mind at a time is a good thing. But I do not see the results of that changing the world fast enough for my taste.
What was really useful to me in the book was seeing the creation of racism in a historical perspective. Also, I am very interested in how the way in which we label ourselves and others impacts our personal version of reality. This thread has been discussing whether some labels are good labels. At this point in time, it seems to me the best we can do is to respect the labels individuals give themselves…
…
Why White Women Should Read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Book (an excerpt)
*After all, it’s not Nicki Minaj or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ responsibility to undo systemic racism. Those of us who, by virtue of our white skin, have benefitted from white supremacy and racial hierarchy are the ones who must destroy it. As Coates writes:
[W]e cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.
But, Coates adds, “I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free.” If that assertion also makes you uncomfortable, good. Read all of Between the World and Me and get even more uncomfortable. Discomfort, self-critique, and self-awareness are progress. Then try to spend the rest of your life helping yourself and the world around you get free.*
http://www.elle.com/culture/books/a29572/what-i-learned-from-reading-ta-nehisi-coates/
" I think young black men desparately need more mentors and role models and while I, as a white woman, can’t probably provide that, there are things I can do more behind the scenes the support the organization and there were plenty of concrete suggestions. One of the very simple things they were doing was setting up collections of children’s books at barbershops and then having an incentive program for kids to read them."
All very noble and good initiatives, to be sure.
I think sometimes it’s hard not to be inadvertently racist when one notes that for other ethnicities/backgrounds, it’s not necessary to get “good” white people to “fill in” the gaps that the community isn’t providing. I mean, on one hand it’s obviously great to collect books and provide incentives for parents to read to their kids, etc. OTOH, it’s hard to be neutral about the concept that it’s not indicative of great cultural values that you haven’t figured out that it’s a good idea to read to one’s children.
I haven’t participated in the book club on here, but maybe Between the World and Me could be one of the monthly options?
^^I think that is an excellent idea!
There have been several book threads that weren’t part of the regular monthly book club. All of them grew out of a thread discussion and have been really wonderful.
I highly recommend watching this video.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/neurophilosophy/2011/aug/15/people-other-races-look-alike
Interesting notion of a biological basis behind finding it harder to tell people of a different race apart from one another. I’ll be honest – this applies to me. I got chastised on the Orange is the New Black thread once because two black characters were indistinguishable to me physically and I couldn’t tell them apart.
@mom60 thanks for the post. I totally get why you are open about race in Ca. In another thread I asked about housing for my D1 who secured an internship in the Bay Area. It was my first visit to California when I went with my kiddo to get settled and do some sightseeing. When I finally spoke to my hubby, he said somewhat do you think?i said " this is the first time I remember not being conscious of my color". Seriously NO ONE treated me differently, for the 5 days I was there. It happens on a regular here in e Midwest.
Thanks for the link, 88. I had seen the first part but not the second. I think I might have punched Jane Elliott in the face at that prison training if I was Karen!
I did not know that “all ___ look the same” to some people was an actual thing. Is it common?
PG, at #147: My oldest son, still in college, finds all such neurological research related to what the mind allows the eyes to see and recognize compelling. Your link may be one he has not stumbled upon. Thx.
“True to stereotype, many of them appear alike to me at first, and I have to struggle to focus on their other features and attributes in order to get them straight and mentally attach their names to them…I’m not sure why this is difficult for me, because in reality what I find is that they are extremely diverse, but I know that it takes a conscious effort.”
Now, @sylvan8798, that took some real stepping out of the box to say here. While I don’t understand or relate to the effort it takes to distinguish who is who among the young people you mentioned, beyond there simply being hundreds of kids with whom you come into contact, what you have said is truly something I will be thinking about.
I recognize your submission here as courageous, and hope that is not received as condescension.
“I did not know that “all ___ look the same” to some people was an actual thing. Is it common?”
Yes, ucbalumnus - that’s why I linked the link I did upthread. Have you had a chance to read it?
“OTOH, it’s hard to be neutral about the concept that it’s not indicative of great cultural values that you haven’t figured out that it’s a good idea to read to one’s children.”
When my youngest kid was in first grade he simply was not getting over the hump of decoding sound groups such that he could consistently read and spell words with any real demonstrated skill. His teacher sent home a note to the effect of “studies have shown that it is beneficial to read to children, and while she understands that we may be tired and overworked and want nothing more than to decompress in the evenings, she encouraged us to begin to read to him so that he could become familiar with looking at words, and not view books and reading as outside of his normal activity.”
This, despite all of his book logs being filled in for months indicating that we read both children’s stories, unabridged classics, and translations of Russian literature to him. Additionally, he read many of the children’s books in his collection to us, though of course he could have learned and recited his favorite stories page by page.
Clearly, I felt, the woman had decided to approach my son’s difficulty with meeting targeted reading goals as an issue of a cultural chasm and disconnectedness from “the word,” small ‘w.’ Such did her language impress me.
Full disclosure for those who do not know, my son appears Caucasian, and in first grade had long silken blonde hair. I am Black. So she knew at least my contribution to his household make-up, and had never met my husband.
I always felt she took the approach and tone in her note because she knew I am Black.
To your point, Pizza, I have mixed feelings.
Societies, I know, certainly are no longer able to provide only those transmitted values which allow a kid to work in the family business, and most have long ago abandoned the idea that the oral tradition is the way we preserve information and knowledge of cultural practices, stories and traditions.
But I have come into contact with plenty of people, all immigrants to this country who live in enclaves where English is not the language used to communicate, who do not read to their children because they cannot read. I also know that there are in our ranks plenty of homegrown Americans, Black and white, who have no real reading skill, and are functionally illiterate.
I simply do not want to overlook some of the reasons that the gulf in who reads to whom may exist.
At the same time, yes, there is a huge problem yet to be sufficiently tackled, such that the idea of doing something which may be scary to the poor reader, or deemed outside of one’s own cultural milieu and so not readily embraced, can be seen as best practice.
Sample size two, but I’ll share this anyway: A family member’s spouse is black. Spouse was married before, to a white woman. They had two children together. Dad pushed his children to do well in school; mom said to them that they didn’t need to do homework if they didn’t want to. Dad is the only member of our extended family, other than my late father, to earn a Ph.D.
@Waiting2exhale your story about your son’s teacher brings to mind one of the many negative experiences we had with my D’s 2nd grade teacher. At the time, that school had a program where the teacher came to each home before the beginning of school to meet the students and their families. Teacher showed up with the librarian in tow, and presented D a book. It was essentially a beginning reader, if you could call it that. I later looked it up and it was designed for preschoolers, with only 30-some words in the entire book. BUT, it had a black kid and a white kid meeting, so clearly the teacher knew ahead of time that D was black. She proudly presented it to D- who was going INTO 2nd GRADE and asked if she liked to read. D said that yes, she did. So the teacher patronizingly “helped” D read this book. Then she asked what D liked to read.
“Well, I’m reading a biography of Harriet Tubman and just started Harry Potter.” There was quite an awkward silence.
As the year went on, it became clear that this teacher had one set of expectations for black kids and another for white and Asian ones. Also, the black kids got into trouble more often, especially the boys. It’s not always about the student’s homelife when a teacher decides a kid is trouble or not “on track”, is it?
@sseamom:
“‘Well, I’m reading a biography of Harriet Tubman and just started Harry Potter.’ There was quite an awkward silence.”
I love it.
Reading was a challenge for me in early grade school even though my mother use to frequently read stories (though somewhat haltingly) to us from one of the few books my family owned, a classic bible story book I vividly remember because it had the most incredibly beautiful engraved black and white illustrations (which I later learned to be the work of famed printmaker Gustave Dore’) which I would stare at for long periods of time. But my first reading instruction was by way of the look/see method, using the classic Dick and Jane readers (mind-numbingly boring but for those idyllic color illustrations), and for a long time, I didn’t progress beyond that very rudimentary level of reading comprehension. The desegregated school I later entered, however, was implementing a phonics-based method that, for me, suddenly broke reading’s impenetrable code wide open. Soon I became absolutely voracious, bringing books to the dinner table (which interestingly enough, my parents didn’t mind), and reading under the covers with a flashlight after bedtime.
It’s at this point that those of you whose little darlings taught themselves to read at age three can pat yourselves on the back, because my D definitely wasn’t one of those. Despite the fact that she as born into a household of “aware parents” who knew the importance of reading to children from infancy, and who indeed was read to from a prodigious home library of picture books on a consistent basis, she struggled with reading in early grade school as well; only, we hadn’t a clue she was struggling until her entire class was tested in third grade, and she was found to be reading a full two years and four months below grade level—this despite the fact that she had been on the A honor roll since starting school! Looking back, there’s an eerie quality of deja vu to all of this, because our local school system had chucked a successful, time proven phonics-based reading system and conveniently implemented something called “Whole Language Learning” (which was all the rage in California, you see!), just in time for D’s entering Kindergarten class. The Whole Language experiment, for the most part, proved a resounding failure throughout our school system, with many, many children testing poorly in reading comprehension during the five years of its use. D was quickly enrolled in an intensive reading remediation program, a phonics-based one that did for her exactly what phonics had done for her mother waaay back in the day, and she too became an enthusiastic reader who soon bounded ahead of her peers in reading comprehension. By the end of grade five, she was testing at an eleventh grade reading level, but I feel like we dodged a major bullet.
I’m grateful no one told us they blamed my D’s early struggle as indicative of a lack of
without knowing jack-a-lope dung about us other than the fact that we are from a “minority” demographic.
Like others here, we are a family of readers with an extensive library. We read to our kids all the time, because we like to read and because they were very wild and busy, it was the only time they would sit still. Even videos were an interactive experience for them. By the time they were early school age, we had read them the Hobbit, and Rings trilogy twice, along with lots of folklore and natural history. They picked out a lot of text books on evolution from the library because they were obsessed with dinosaurs for a very long time. Sometimes we just put them in our laps and read out loud whatever book we happened to be reading ourselves at the time. I remember my husband paraphrasing a few parts of Name of the Rose.
For a very long time they were stubborn non-readers. One day I overheard them talking amongst themselves. One said, “Don’t let them make us learn to read. Then they will never read to us anymore” WHAT? Finally Goose Bumps did the trick. They wanted to know what was in those books, and I just refused to read them out loud.
We homeschooled. One kid learned with whole language. Another needed phonics. I honestly don’t understand how anyone ever learns to read. When we were struggling, I asked an acquaintance who is a first grade teacher and she said she didn’t know either. Most of her kids came into the classroom already with reading skills. I thought it was a good thing my kids weren’t in her class. The expectation in that school seemed to be parents taught those skills before the kids went to school. That just floored me.