One of the ways that the racial divide in the United States showed itself recently was the difference in how white parents and parents of color responded to the murder of a young African American man, Mike Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

Many parents of color described their grief and outrage – not just for the criminal loss of Mike Brown but for the way that loss hangs as a threat over every Black child and forces every Black parent to balance the intense intimacy and connection of parenting with the very real prospect of it being severed by racist violence. White parents, on the other hand, seemed disconnected from the reality of immense loss. We focused instead on to-do lists – some of which had good intentions, including thinking about how we might raise the topic of race with our white children. But almost all of them bypassed what is perhaps the most important first response, and that is grief. The second most important response is to resist the temptation to base our actions in personal choice. It sounds like it shouldn’t be that hard, but the whole culture, including our advice columns, is always pushing us that way.

And you thought parental advice columns were relatively benign? Apparently, not so much – at least when it comes to race.

For African American mother, Stacia L. Brown, events in Ferguson left her feeling the ultimate parental helplessness. Looking at her 4-year-old daughter, she eloquently describes all the promise she sees in her, yet at the same time she has to acknowledge how easily that could be yanked away. Just last week in her city, a three-year old girl was gunned down.

Adjacent to the street where Mike Brown’s body lay in the hot sun for four hours and then was unceremoniously carted away in an SUV, children played in a bouncy castle. I wasn’t there, but I heard about it from Reverend Sekou during his sermon on a recent Sunday at the First Baptist Church in Boston. These children were attending a back-to-school event that I imagine was supposed to celebrate the coming school year and implicitly the children’s futures, all of their potential, their unfolding in this world. And yet, instead they got an object lesson in what can happen to black and brown bodies in this world. No matter how conscientious you are as a parent, trying to remind your children that they are precious and that they matter, there isn’t enough parenting in the world to contradict that kind of message. It’s no wonder that, for African American parents, parenting can sometimes feel like (in Stacia Brown’s words) a “fool’s errand.”

For decades now feminists of color and some white feminists have made the case that reproductive freedom is more than just the right to abortion and birth control. Reproductive freedom needs to include the right to have babies if and when you want them – something that is not always a choice for women of color who have been disproportionately sterilized against their will or who are systemically deprived of resources, thus making parenting even more difficult. Add to these stresses the stress of feeling that heartbreaking love parents have for their children and then having to feel that love in the context of a family that is targeted by racist violence. As Tamura Lomax in Feminist Wire says, “I am a black mother and a black wife. I fear for my beloveds’ safety every day.”

The murder of black youth is indeed a reproductive justice issue, as Dani McLain argues in The Nation. Perhaps we might add that reproductive justice extends to being able to send your child to a play on a bouncy castle at a back-to-school event without having to worry that your child will at the same time have to see a young Black man being murdered by authorities and then a young Black body being treated with obscene disrespect.

Meanwhile, advice columns were generated for white parents. Many of them were written by well-meaning white parents who have a sincere interest in using their role in the family to address racism in our society. Yet many of these advice columns unwittingly reinforce the dynamics that keep us mired in the racism that is at the root of the crime that happened in Ferguson (and has happened in so many communities across the country).

For example, from white parents, we got well-meaning advice about how we need to remember to talk to our kids about racism. Many of these pieces came to us in numbered lists: Ten Ways White Parents can Fight Racism, Five Reasons We All Need to Talk about Race in America, and Six Things White Parents Can do to Raise Racially Conscious Children – as if checklists can help us address racism with our children in the same way that chore charts and grocery lists help us feel functional and in charge.

A key problem with these lists is they sidestep what makes us most human – our ability to empathize. White parents: by not letting ourselves grieve, by not sharing our grief with our children, we are not being fully human. We are acting like white people who actually believe that those murdered children are other people’s children. We need to grieve these murdered children not as if they were our children but because they are our children. Our destinies are intertwined. Our children don’t get to be fully human unless everyone gets to be fully human.

Which is a reminder that we white people should also be grieving for Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot Mike Brown. Darren Wilson has, after all, been dehumanized as well. His uniform, his gun, his training, his fear, and his trigger-happy index finger were, on some level, a narrow and lethal channel through which flowed a great wave of social, political, cultural messages that construct Black life as something that doesn’t matter. By allowing himself to become this channel, Darren Wilson is dehumanized. He bears personal responsibility for his actions, but white people bear responsibility as well. A first step for sorting out how to make sense of that is to acknowledge him as our son as well, and to grieve what we lose when the society we live in helps turn our white sons into killers.

Another problem with these lists is that they promote talking – as if it’s an end in itself. White parents talking to their white children about racism is of course important. White kids need verbal explanations of what’s going on in the world around them. They need to hear about history and special responsibilities that come with being white in a racist country. But talk is not enough.

A private conversation between you and your kids is exactly that – private. Racism is not private at all. It often plays out interpersonally, to be sure, but it is fundamentally a structural and systemic beast. Ask yourself: what action am I taking against systemic racism and are there ways I could let my kids witness my work and accompany me in my work so they begin to learn gradually and in age-appropriate ways what it means to enter into a long-term, grassroots, diversely-led fight against a multi-layered, complex institution such as racism?

Some of the advice to white parents includes taking action, but the actions are things like: make friends with more people of color, “integrate the toy chest,” and buy picture books that feature brown and black people. These are fine ideas, too, but, like talking, they send the parent into private solutions. I can imagine white parents guiltily counting up the number of people of color they count as friends and setting up a strategy to try to “get” more. I can imagine white parents conscientiously shopping for politically correct toys and books and wondering if this book is okay or if that toy will help, and deftly trying to steer your kids towards those things when what they really prefer is “Where is Waldo?”

Worst of all, I can imagine white parents taking this advice to heart and thinking this is enough. It’s not.

Who knew parenting advice could double as instructions for how to act like a neoliberal – focus on the individual and buy more stuff?

For the non-neoliberal approach, maybe we as white parents could try turning outward from the home. Maybe we could act like adults who see ourselves as actors in the world, as people who understand that change happens when we join with others to collectively take action about what matters the most. This changes the message to our kids in a significant way. It’s not all about them and their personal choices. We don’t get to be relieved that at least we didn’t raise a Darren Wilson. Or at least our offspring don’t behave in outwardly racist ways. Racism is much bigger than our private parenting choices. And we should show our children that, as their parents and because we care about all children, we are in the fight against racism on a larger level. We are searching for ways to work with others to make a difference in how our society works.

As parents, we will of course attend to hearth and home. Our kids need us to think about them and to talk things through with them. And it’s not a bad idea to be thoughtful about what toys and books populate your home.

But these actions don’t address racism and they don’t ensure that we are raising “racially conscious children.” If anything, these actions may do the opposite. They may support your children to see racism through their own private lens. “I am not racist,” they might think. “I have read books on Harriet Tubman.” Or even more tokenizing: “I have Black friends.” Meanwhile, the mammoth beast of racism rages on right in front of us with people of color systematically murdered, locked up in prisons, and locked out of access to resources, education, decent jobs, and health care. As white parents, we need to model for our children how we take that on, how we refuse to be seduced into private solutions, how we refuse to de-humanize ourselves and our children by buying into the idea that we are safe even if others are not.

Cynthia Peters is the editor of The Change Agent. She is a longtime activist and a member of City Life/Vida Urbana, and she serves on the board of a youth justice organization called The City School and the alumni board of Social Thought and Political Economy at UMASS/Amherst. She lives in Boston and writes for ZNet and TelSUR.

---