We were recently watching an old Family Guy episode where a human Brian from a parallel universe comes to live in our own. Since he was a “white” dog he was transformed into a “white” human and Stewie says, “Hey, You’re White! You have NO idea how BIG that is here.”
Indeed. The work done in the 60s and 70s to bring forth racial and gender equality is in NO WAY done. Tweeting about injustice, acknowledging that our forefathers were dicks, and waiting for the oppressed to “change” their own circumstance is not enough. People who hold the power in society have to care and have to help.
I am one of those people. My son will be one of those people. So, I’ve been thinking about what I can do and also how I can better raise my son into the kind of man that not only cares about injustice, but takes responsibility for it.
Since he’s nine, I’m focusing on awareness. We basically just talk about it when the moment is right. And it comes up a lot more than you might think, probably because we live in a racially diverse city. But, seriously, if anyone else has ideas in regards to teaching my son about this, leave a comment. I could use all the help I can get.
“I could use all the help I can get.”
Don’t we all. Confronting injustice is exhausting because it’s everywhere. It’s confounding because being white Americans, we’re shielded and blind to a lot of suffering. It’s overwhelming because the problems are often as old as our species.
But it is necessary because of so many other reasons but the primary one is that the cost of letting these things continue greatly outweigh doing something about them.