087: Talking with children about race, with Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series. We’ve laid a lot of groundwork on topics related to race by now: we learned about White privilege in parenting, and White privilege in schools, and even how parents can use sports to give their children advantages in school and in life. Today my listener Dr. Kim Rybacki and I interview a giant in the field: Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of the now-classic book (recently released in a 20th anniversary edition!) Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race. We begin by assessing what is White parents’ responsibility to help dismantle structural racism, and then learn how to discuss race and racism with our children.  And in the next episode in this series I’ll have some really in-depth resources to support you in having these conversations with your own children. Dr. Tatum was featured in a short piece with Lester Holt on how to talk with children about racial injustice that you might also find helpful - she describes ways you can answer their questions honestly and fully in an age-appropriate way.  You can find a link to the interview on her website here.   References Bonilla-Silva, E., (2004). From bi-racial to tri-racial: Towards a new system of racial stratification in the USA. Ethnic and Racial Studies 27(6), 931-950. Cheney-Rice, Z. (2018, November 11). Bernie Sanders and the lies we tell White voters. New York Intelligencer. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/bernie-sanders-and-the-lies-we-tell-white-voters.html Derman-Sparks, L., & Olsen, J. (2009). Anti-bias education for young children and ourselves. National Association for the Education of Young Children. Available at https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/books/anti-bias-education Hagerman, M. (2018). White Kids: Growing up with privilege in a racially divided America. New York, NY: New York University Press. Helms, J. E. (Ed.). (1990). Contributions in Afro-American and African studies, No. 129. Black and White racial identity: Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY, England: Greenwood Press. King, M.L. (2010). Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community? Boston, MA: Beacon. Kivel, P. (2017). Uprooting racism: How White people can work for racial justice (4th Ed.). Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society. Miller, S. (2017, December 8). Reading race: Proactive conversations with young children. Raising Race-Conscious Children. Retrieved from http://www.raceconscious.org/2017/12/explicitlanguageracebooks/ Roda, A. (2015). Inequality in gifted and talented programs: Parental choices about status, school opportunity, and second-generation segregation. London, U.K.: Palgrave MacMillan. Stalvey, L.M. (1989). The education of a WASP. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Sullivan, S. (2014). Good White people: The problem with middle-class White anti-racism. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Tatum, B.D. (2017). Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?. New York, NY: Basic. Van Ausdale, D.V. & Feagin, J.R. (2001). The first R: How children learn race and racism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"]   Jen: 01:25 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a very special episode lined up for today and I’m recording this introduction separately, so as not to take time away from the interview. If you’re a regular listener, you might have heard my episodes on White Privilege and Parenting and also White Privilege in Schools in which we looked at some of the structural racism that’s present in our society that we might not have recognized until now, especially if we’re White. I’d also like to direct you back to the very beginning of the show because in episode 6, which was called “Wait, is my toddler racist?” We discovered how implicit bias works, how it’s often present even in very young children and how just not talking with children about color or what is known as the colorblind approach is one of the more effective ways to raise a child who experiences racial prejudice. Jen: 02:10 Having been completely immersed in the literature on this topic for the last couple of months, I’m also going to adjust my terminology to be more in line with the language that my guest uses. Racial prejudice describes a person’s attitude while racism or structural racism is the system that confers advantages on White people and disadvantages on people who aren’t White by reinforcing ideas about White superiority. If you haven’t already listened to these previous episodes then I would strongly encourage you to do so as a lot of the ideas and language we’ll use today was established in these episodes and we won’t spend a lot of time laying groundwork today so we can maximize our time on the really deep questions. I also want to acknowledge that when we use terms like White privilege and implicit bias, that it can make it seem like White people are innocent if ignorant recipients of an unfair advantage. Jen: 02:55 We didn’t ask for this privilege after all, we were just born into a system in which we have it, but in reality, there are a lot of things that White people do every day to perpetuate and even reinforce the system. We talked about some of them in our episodes on White Privilege. These can be as simple as things like finding a resource related to education that not everybody knows about and sharing that information among networks of White people, which makes it more difficult for people of nondominant cultures to access these resources and of course they can take much more insidious forms like electing racist leaders who explicitly perpetuate Whites’ advantage. So today we’re very lucky to have two special guests with us. The first one needs almost no introduction. Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum is former president of Spelman College, licensed clinical psychologist and nationally recognized authority on racial issues in America. Jen: 03:45 Dr. Tatum holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Michigan and for 18 years she taught a course called Psychology of Racism at three different institutions. She’s the author of the seminal book, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, which was revised and updated in 2017 and is a nationally renowned expert on the subjects of race and racial identity development. And here with me today to help me co-interview Dr. Tatum is Dr. Kim Rybacki who received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the City University of New York, and is on the Behavioral Sciences Faculty at Dutchess Community College in New York. Dr. Rybacki is in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group, which you should join if you’re not already a member, and we had a conversation in the group about things that she’s trying to do to “fight for a better system while doing the least amount of damage in the current one as possible.” But she seemed very unsure as to whether she was doing the right things or even enough of the right things and so I realized she’d be the perfect person to talk this through with Dr. Tatum. Jen: 04:42 I mentioned in the introductions to the previous two episodes that I acknowledged that race can be a difficult thing to talk about. To some extent, I think it’s sort of like talking about sex and even anatomically correct names for body parts, the more time you say vulva and penis, the less ridiculous it feels and the more ridiculous it feels that it feels ridiculous to say these words. So even if you’re feeling some resistance to the idea of listening to this episode, I would encourage you to sit tight with us, especially if you have a goal of raising race conscious children. So, we’re going to start off today by talking about the structural racism and what is our responsibility as parents to change the system and then we’ll talk about things that we can talk about and do with our children specifically on issues related to race. Jen: 05:22 I’ll also remind you that we’ve began each of the episodes in this series by having both me and my guests state our privileges. You’ve heard mine a couple times already by now, so I’ll just state them quickly and then we’ll start by asking our guests about theirs. So, some of my main privileges are my Whiteness, my economic status in the upper middle class, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness and my education. Now let’s hear from my guests. So, welcome Dr. Tatum it’s great to have you here. Dr. Tatum: 05:49 Thank you so much. Glad to be with you. Jen: 05:51 And welcome Kim as well. Kim: 05:53 Thank you. Great to be here. Jen: 05:55 So, I’ve already stated my privileges in the introduction to this episode. I wonder if you wouldn’t mind starting by having each of you state your privileges in turn perhaps by starting with Dr. Tatum, please. Dr. Tatum: 06:06 Sure. Well, when I think about privileges, I define that in terms of the ways that I’m systematically advantaged and so I’m systematically advantaged as a heterosexual. I identify as Christian and living in a Christian dominant society that...