Dismantling White Supremacy and Patriarchy on MLK Day

In this short ad hoc episode that was originally recorded as a Facebook Live, I discuss ways that my family is working on dismantling both White supremacy and patriarchy (and having a go at capitalism while we're at it!) this Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend. The best part is that this doesn't have to be heavy work that brings with it a huge sense of guilt. It's about building community that lifts all of us up, and gets us out of the 'stay in my lane' mindset that White supremacy uses to keep us in line. And it also doesn't have to happen only on the holiday itself - this work is just as relevant and important the rest of the year. Prefer to watch rather than listen? Click here to join the free YPM Facebook group and watch the video recording of the episode   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan 00:01 Hello, everyone, it's Jen. And I just wanted to do another live episode as it were in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group because I did one recently for the events after the US Capitol siege. And responding to that, and actually looked at the analytics on it and found that it was one of my most recently downloaded episodes. So, this is sort of just another informal episode. And we'll be back to regular programming next week, but wanted to share some thoughts on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, which is today here in the US. And I think this is actually the special—the first holiday recorded an episode that I've done ever. So it feels kind of cool to be doing it for this particular day for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And I wanted to share some thoughts that actually I concepted on a bike ride, which tends to be how these things come about when I have some time to think. And I'm really sort of thinking, “Okay, what is it that parents need to know in this right now? What's important about continuing Dr. King's legacy?” And I talked in the episode from last week about the events in the US Capitol, about the anti-racist work that we're doing, and that is so necessary that has to continue, yes, we have to keep doing that. We also need to do things like learning about the achievements of Black people, both in history and today. And at all that I really enjoy for that is, if you're not watching on Facebook Live, I'm holding up these Black history flashcards. They're published by an organization called Urban intellectuals, which I believe is a Black-owned company. And we've actually been storing them in a little teacup on our dining room table, and my daughter will request that we go through at least one and up to three of them, I draw the line at three because then I don't get to eat dinner at the dinner table every day. And we talk through not just sort of the what are the bullet points on the back of the card that each of these individuals on the cards did.   Jen Lumanlan 01:55 But what does it mean? What does it mean that to say that they were entrepreneurs, trappers, and traders in the 1700s is one of the people that we read about last night was what kind of circumstances came into place to even make that possible when the vast majority of Black people in that period who were over in the Americas were enslaved. What kind of circumstances and personality and situation were involved in this? And so I think that that is really helping us to put some kind of context around. It's not just that there were millions of Black people here in the US, and they were all enslaved, and they were sort of this monolithic entity. But these were individual people who had individual lives and individual concerns, and they made incredibly valued and undervalued contributions to our culture, you know, inventing things and setting up one of the people we read about last night set up the city of Chicago, he founded a settlement that turned into the city of Chicago, the leaders, former leader of Kenya and Ghana, who negotiated independence from the UK. And so obviously, that focus is very much on history. And we also need to be talking about the work that Black people and other people of color are doing on an ongoing basis today. But it's just sort of an additional way that we are making this because of sort of baking these ideas into the fabric of our everyday lives.   Jen Lumanlan 03:18 And then, yes, we need to do our overtly anti-racist work, we need to be talking with our children about these ideas that don't just leave them with the impression that Black people were victimized and victims of their circumstances that they had agency in their lives and continue to have agency in their lives. And don't need rescuing. They don't need us to come and save them, they can tell us what they need and we should be listening to that. But I think it goes even deeper than that because I'm not sure that many of us myself absolutely included, fully understand the ways that White supremacy and patriarchy, and even capitalism show up in our lives. And so we've discussed before on the show, the interview with Dr. Carol Gilligan, and a bunch of times since then, in a variety of other episodes, about how patriarchy operates and how that shows up in ourselves. And one of the ways it does that is through creating separation, both within ourselves and between individuals. And so it separates, it crazy separation in ourselves by setting up these sort of arbitrarily masculine and arbitrarily feminine qualities. So masculine qualities might be things like logic and reason and, and assertiveness and confidence and all these things you stereotypically associate with men.   Jen Lumanlan 04:39 And then the feminine categories might be things like intimacy and tenderness, and unconditional love, and sort of the soft, feminine sides. And of course, the point here is that we all have all of these characteristics. There's nothing inherently masculine or feminine about any of them, but by dividing them, we're able to privilege one set, we're able to privilege the masculine set and say, Well, this is what we should be working towards, which is why we tell our girls that they should go and do STEM careers and, and exceed in traditionally male-dominated fields. But we don't tell either our girls or boys that yeah, it's okay to care about other people, it's okay to be in caring professions, and to want to have that be your life's work. So there's that sort of split within ourselves, but it also separates individuals by, in a way sort of policing our behavior and telling us what's acceptable and what isn't. And one of the ways it does that is by making it really difficult to ask for help, or even to offer help. And because we're all supposed to project this image of, “Well, I've got it together, everything's fine. There's no problem here, things are under control.” And if that's not the case, for any reason, then we can always buy something to help us fix that circumstance, like, we can buy a service, like a cleaner or somebody to outsource a part of the work that we're feeling is not in control too.   Jen Lumanlan 06:07 And so it's not even okay to offer help, I think, because that sort of breaks down the idea that the person you're offering to has it all together. And even if we offer, then the person sort of supposed to say, “Well, yeah, I'm okay, thanks, everything's fine, I don't really know of anything you can do.” And then we as the offer are sort of just supposed to stay in our lane and let it go. And I think the reason for this is that we are under a patriarchal White supremacist capitalist culture. We're not supposed to have this true sense of kind of community, because if we had that, we wouldn't need to buy as much stuff. Because we would just help each other out. And so there wouldn't be this need to just buy stuff to fill the gaps that that we have in our lives because we aren't able to be in true community. For example, my neighbor is running down to the store the other night, she was going already, and she lean down the car window on the way pass and she said, “Do you need anything?” And I had just been to the store early that day. And forgotten to get yogurt and said, “Hey, would you mind get me a quarter yogurt?” And so I didn't need to call down to Instacart. I didn't need to go down to the store again, myself. It was just a simple, you know, do you need anything, and me saying yes, rather than, “Well, I don't want to burden her or, you know, I don't want to go upstairs and get money right now.” And of course, when you do this often enough, the money can just kind of flow back and forth and it becomes less of a big deal. But she offered help. And I said, “Yeah,” in that moment, I would love to have some help. Thank you very much.   Jen Lumanlan 07:41 And so this holiday weekend, one of the things that I'm focusing on most closely, and I think my focus sort of shifts every year as I learn more, and I feel like my the ideas that I want to look at change. So for this year, what I'm doing right now is taking steps to reach out to my community, and specifically a community that was right around me. And so, I emailed the listener for all the people who live on our street. And I told them about all the things that my daughter Carys is interested in, which currently includes salamanders and invertebrates and fungi that are popping up around our neighborhood when it sometimes rains, not so often as it should be at the moment. And asking for their help and finding these things. And so we immediately got inundated with information like, “Is she interested in spiders?” “Oh, I have some orange fungi in my yard. I'll try and remember to bring them over.” We had one neighbor who said, “Hey, can we do a trade? I have a photography...