Monthly Features

What Color are Your Friends? Race Relations and Child’s Play

A few years ago, Kelly Johnson and Leonda Keniston met on the playground of their children’s preschool and hit it off within the first five minutes. They talked politics and social issues by the slide or over the pumpkin pie at the school’s Thanksgiving party.

Later, Kelly asked Leigh to help her bring a movement called Eracism to Richmond.
The goal of Eracism is to facilitate meaningful conversations among people of different races so that prejudice and misunderstanding can be erased. Trained discussion leaders moderate small-group sessions, creating a safe haven for addressing tough questions.
Kelly worked as a lawyer and adjunct professor before staying at home with her six children. Leigh is a sociologist currently teaching at John Tyler Community College and is mother of three.
They sat down with Richmond Parents Monthly recently and talked about parents, kids and race. Kelly: One thing that always bothered me was that my children don’t see people of color in our house. I thought, “They’re not seeing people in our home, which means they’re not having real relationships.” I think change comes through real relationships.
There’s definitely racism out there, but there are a lot of people like me. We’re not racist, but our paths don’t intersect. We’re still living these parallel lives in Richmond and in a lot of cities.                                  Leigh & Kelly Photo Frost
When you are not engaged in real relationships with people, you live with an ignorance you cannot escape.

Leigh: We live in a very diverse world. One of the biggest consequences of [leading non-intersecting lives] is when we finally get out into the world and we’re not children anymore, our experiences are so limited in terms of dealing with people from a different class background, a different racial background, different nationalities—it inhibits us.
We may not know how to talk [to each other], and we may bring stereotypes into our interactions with one another. We assume behavior or attitudes that may not even exist.
When we don’t get together, it continues generation on generation of ignorance.

Kelly: Do you remember that discussion we had, about that guy who said, “Phil Donahue is my brother, Ellen DeGeneres is my sister and Oprah is the queen”?

Leigh: I was saying to Kelly that many whites don’t see African-Americans as a part of the family. Ellen, she’s a part of the family, Phil is part of the family, but Oprah Winfrey is not part of the family; she’s the queen.

Kelly: Which she is, but—

Leigh: But she’s not a part of the family. She’s not a sister—

Kelly: —or the mother.

Leigh: A lot of people don’t consider folks who are different from themselves as part of the one human family, their family.
I believe in seeing the diversity around us—appreciating it, celebrating it, in fact, and loving it. That makes us who we are as human beings and that’s something we can pass on to our children.   

What can children gain from an appreciation of diversity and from regular, meaningful interactions with people of other races?

Leigh: My husband is white, so my children are bi-racial. (I hate using the word, but—) We have a lot of friends who are Iranian, Persians, white, African-American, African, from Latin American countries. My kids have ease in interacting with other children and adults who are different from themselves.
We’ve been around kids who have very little interaction with children outside of their racial group and they are visibly uncomfortable. They don’t know what to do! They don’t know how to interact.
When you have your kids grow up playing with other children, they don’t say, “This kid is really different from myself.” Instead, they learn, “Oh, we both like Barbie” or, “We both like to run fast,” “We both like to jump high.”
When you don’t have that ability to find things in common, all these assumptions, these barriers, go up.

Kelly: I see a benefit to the world. Racism in the sense of ignorance is so insidious. It’s a hindrance to action.
In other words, we can abide the fact that kids in the poor parts of Richmond are primarily African-American, they have crummy schools, they don’t have the supplies they need. Somehow we abide that here in the West End. I think there’s an element of that when we see children on TV who don’t look like us, who are suffering in Afghanistan or Africa.
When you’re white and look at that and you don’t have any black friends and you don’t have any Iranian friends, there’s that ability in your head to have it be “them”—“those people, those people, are really suffering, that’s not my people.”
If you have friends who are of a different race, it’s much harder to stand by and allow injustice to continue, much harder not to show up at a march or to vote a certain way.
It’s great with all this diversity, but the bottom line is, we’re all souls in different bodies, we are all human beings.

Leigh: I guess for every parent that’s a real challenge, teaching your children not to attribute certain things to groups of people [who are different than you].
Even my own kids, they still say things, because racism is a disease and we’re all infected by it to a greater or lesser extent. As a parent, I feel it is my responsibility to nip it in the bud because I don’t want meanings being created, stuff becoming attached to whomever they’re talking about.
If there’s a Hispanic boy in my neighborhood who pushes another child down, I don’t want my kids to say, “Hispanic kids are mean,” and then letting it escalate from there.

Kelly: Sometimes that’s really subtle. One of my kids—we were talking about race a few years ago—he said, “I like black people.” And I said, “I understand your sentiment, but there’s sort of an underlying assumption in that statement that they are a group, separate from you, that you can like or not like.”
We tried to talk that through, because he wasn’t really getting what I was saying, but I thought it was an important point. He would never say that if he had friends who were black. He doesn’t say, “I like Italian people.”
He had no personal knowledge. He hadn’t loved a friend who was of a different color. It was still an abstract group, it was still a group.

What do you do if you’re a parent who wants to build real relationships for yourself and for your kids?

Kelly: There are so many ways a problem has to be looked at and dealt with, so I don’t want to oversimplify this, but I’m trying to look at my corner of the world, and what I can do. I would urge parents to get the word out, “We are interested in forming a multiracial playgroup, getting together at such-and-so park and having our children play.”
There’s this idea: gosh, now that civil rights is here and things are changing so much, everyone’s going to get along—. It’s not happening. These relationships aren’t happening naturally.
The job of our generation is to find ways to make our paths cross. To say, “This is what we’re willing to do.”
I believe there are mothers of different races who would be interested in having playgroups, in having people in their homes of different colors, in having a safe place to talk. That’s part of the key, having a safe place. I ask Leigh lots of questions that are very hard for me to ask.

Leigh: As a sociologist, I tend to be a bit more pessimistic. I think in terms of: where do you live, how do you cross those bridges? What incentive is there to reach out to another person? Is it to feel good about yourself? Is it to make relationships? Are you thinking about your children?
When I think of it, there has to be a commonality. I like the idea of a playgroup, but you have to convince the parents to do it. Multiracialism, just wanting to get together because we’re all different and yet we’re all the same race, that’s not enough to keep people together, that’s not a strong glue.

Kelly: I agree, you can come together with that strong desire that your children learn, but ultimately you have to like the person and feel like you have common passions.
Starting a playgroup is complicated. You’d have to make it easy—an easy place to meet, an easy time. Maybe through sporting groups—. I’m just trying to brainstorm here.

Leigh: It’s so hard to get people out of their boxes. When Kelly and I started talking, it wasn’t even about race, it was about marketing to children. So we found a common interest.
Okay, okay, here’s an idea, just talking off the top of my head. At work, I intentionally ask people to come to my house for dinner and that is a way—

Kelly: —You haven’t asked me to your house for dinner.

Leigh: I know, and I’m so ashamed!

Kelly: pretends to cry

Leigh: Okay, come to my house for dinner! I have no excuses, I’m sorry!

Kelly: Let me write that down.

Leigh: So that’s something. Invite someone you want to get to know better, someone who’s interesting to you, into your home.

Kelly: Or you could do a dinner party group.

Leigh: Or invite people to go see a play together.

Kelly: It does have to start as an organized effort of some kind, because it’s not happening on its own. Maybe this isn’t an answer, but at least it’s a step. Maybe it will lead to an answer.

Web Extra! Leigh and Kelly highly recommend the article "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Backpack," by Peggy McIntosh. In it, she discusses the ways in which white people have advantages that they may not even recognize, such as "I can take a job as an affirmative action employer without having co-workers on the job suspect that I got it because of my race."  You can read the article here: http://www.uakron.edu/centers/conflict/docs/whitepriv.pdf

Make the Paths Cross

If you’re interested in organizing a playgroup or in learning
more about or being a part of Eracism,
contact Kelly Johnson at kellyhj@verizon.net.

For the story of Eracism’s origins in New Orleans, see eracismneworleans.org.

 

Archive Features :