Recently, I took my four-year-old to her first protest. It was a pretty safe choice, a family-friendly demonstration in our town to support Black Lives Matter, but I was a bit fearful that someone driving by would shout something unfriendly- or, even more uncomfortable, that she would tell her friends and teachers her mom was driving her around to marches and we would be labelled “radicals.”
The tension of raising anti-racist kids in a relatively homogeneous Ashkenazi community is often on my mind.
In my first attempt to explain to her why we were showing up, I said, “We are here to do a big mitzvah and show our support to people who are hurting.”
“Why are they hurting?”
“Because in this country, people with darker skin than yours and mine are sometimes treated unfairly, but a lot of people feel like we do and are working for change.”
My daughter looks scandalized. She often says that she wants to wake up with “dark brown skin” – she says it the same way she says she wants to wear Elsa’s dress from Frozen. She’s in the age of wanting to try everything on. It’s also not every day that I refer to adults as behaving in a way that is “unfair.”
“That’s a big mistake, isn’t it?” I go on. “Thinking that someone is different because of their skin color. You know that Hashem makes people with different skin, hair, and eye color – and He loves all of us no matter our colors on the outside.”
My daughter brings up her red-haired aunt as a comparison, and I think she’s accepted Lesson One: we all look different but that doesn’t say anything about our insides. Though I haven’t yet explained the concept of race, she’s four, and these are our gentle beginnings. At the protest, she holds up her sign that reads “Kids Against Hate” with great pride and celebrates the supportive honks of passersby. But the next day she doesn’t wake up asking for dark brown skin.
She does, however, ask how long Pharaoh and Haman had to be “in jail” after they were mean to the Jewish people, and whether those who treat Black people without kindness have to be in jail for the same amount of time.
Such an eye for justice.
I find that many of the Jewish families, synagogues, and organizations I’ve come to know are comfortable teaching about our own slavery in Egypt and countless other events in Jewish history that are darker than your average episode of Shalom Sesame, but stay silent on race, except for the occasional platitude about being opposed to discrimination. More than we’d like to admit, Jewish kids are raised without any diversity in their lives, live with a vague discomfort of the unknown, and racial bias is transmitted to the next generation. It can be traumatizing, I am sure, to be a Jewish POC in such an environment, without any sense of direct allyship.
So you’re a Jewish parent and you want to raise anti-racist children. What do you do?
You make yourself an anti-racist, first of all. And that doesn’t mean asking yourself whether you like Martin Luther King, about whom there is no controversy in 2020. It means examining your level of comfort or discomfort with today’s civil rights movement. It means educating yourself about race enough that you would never be silent about it with your children. It means digging deep into your core to answer, not whether you have racial biases or not, but which ones, how many, and how deep? (Credit to Brene Brown for that one.)
Next, it means engaging in activism in your own home and community. If your children are very small, help them to give tzedakah, and tell them about the cause you are supporting in age-appropriate terms. Buy books, dolls, and other toys that feature racial diversity among characters (main characters, not just minor ones, and not just when the topic of the story is race). And, as your kids grow up, begin to teach them about the history of this country and the concept of equality. Let them in on the fact that this is a work in process, and empower them to speak up and also to listen. If diversity is not actively celebrated at your children’s school or synagogue, ask questions, offer to volunteer or form a committee to discuss how inclusivity can be brought to the forefront.
After all, Jewish parents and educators often excel at teaching moral bravery. We tell them the story of Avraham, who defied the idol worship that was completely ubiquitous to everyone he knew. We teach them to do all kinds of things that their non-Jewish friends might find “weird,” from what they eat or don’t eat to excluding themselves from America’s shiniest holiday. We can certainly expect our children to be able to live with the fact that not everyone understands racial justice, but that doesn’t make it any less important.
And hopefully, as we teach our children and encourage our communities to embrace anti-racism as an extension of Jewish values, this soon won’t feel like a bold initiative at all.
