Proximity Isn’t Understanding

When I write about and to white parents of Black children, I do recognize the complexity that surrounds parenting a reality you cannot fully know, cannot control, and cannot protect your beloved baby from. That is inherently painful, which is exactly why I try to emphasize such awareness around yourself, your partner, and your family’s relationship to racism.

Your proximity to Blackness doesn’t absolve you from a dominant cultural practice built on a lens that “others” people deeming them as less than. Culturally, our language follows this pattern effortlessly; culturally, our opinions of beauty follow it; culturally, our food choices follow it. So do our perceptions of body image, our religious practices, how we eat dinner, how we share, what respect looks like. All of it moves in the same current.

This doesn’t have to get complicated if we simply recognize that the dominant society’s cultural practice is to protect and comfort white, cisgender, heterosexual, affluent men. If you fall outside of those identities, you get limited access to decide how dominant societal cultural practices will serve yourself or others. Some of us follow this cultural practice with absolutely no chance of ever having full access to institutional power the way those chosen identities do. That doesn’t stop the culture from being practiced. We all practice a culture that fully serves that one group, and it was never consensual. We were taught that this transactional way of existing was normal and necessary. The issue is that the better you perform this societal cultural norm, the more you seem to gain favor, perceived control, access, power, and safety. That is enough to keep you comfortable or striving depending on where you fall.

This cultural norm is not designed for people to connect. It is purely designed to function transactionally and to uphold labels of class, race, and societal value. Some people held as less valuable no matter how well they perform this culture’s tenets. It is not meant for growth, or self-love, or understanding of nature and each other. It is not relational in any way.

The issue is, well there’s plenty, but I want us to look at sub-cultural practices that don’t fit inside this dominant societal cultural practice. Depending on your race, region, gender, ability, and economic status, you will compromise yourself to fit in. You will be told it’s necessary; to not make trouble, to get ahead, to be considered for progress and opportunities otherwise unattainable. For people whose natural cultural practice is relational, this act of “code-switching” or “tap dancing” can cause a severe identity crisis. Sometimes consciously, more often subconsciously.

Back to parenting: we want our babies to fit in. We teach them what we know. So if you know that the societal culture will accept your baby better, or that life will be easier because they’re lighter-skinned, or their curls are less coily, or that you as their white parent can “teach them” to behave in a way that’s acceptable to this culture, you are teaching from a place of idealism without acknowledging society’s very real pressure on a child who is Black. If you know that the dominant societal culture punishes Black children, especially boys, for being high energy, we need to understand how many forms discrimination can take, even under what we perceive as good intentions. We need to see how constantly being made to help but never be the star of the play or the class can be experienced as a microaggression, and how over time that can cause serious self-image and self-confidence issues. More importantly, when you qualify their experience as legitimate or not legitimate, you’ve just unconsciously told your child, in more ways than one, that they are on their own in this reality of daily racism.

Your partner may be Black. I’m here to tell you that doesn’t automatically mean they understand the intricacies and layers of how this societal culture has shaped their own reality. They may be wholly uncomfortable with the Black experience as a whole. They may simply have never realized they were being discriminated against themselves. They may not be Black American, and may struggle with the idea that within these United States whether you’re from the Caribbean, an African country, or elsewhere, you are judged by the hue of your skin, and that means you are seen as Black as a native Black Alabamian. We have to remember that just because someone is tall doesn’t mean they play basketball. Being Black doesn’t make you a historian, an activist, or an advocate, or mean you understand the systemic practices of racism, by default.

This is one of many reasons why your proximity to Black people won’t mean “you get it.” It is not comparable to your lived experience. But here is where your agency actually lives: in the moment you choose to investigate. When you don’t know how to proceed, the first move is humility, and the second is action. If your three-year-old feels like something’s off at their daycare, believe them, and find out what it is. If your kindergartner doesn’t think their teacher likes them, don’t settle for the easy explanation, look into it yourself, and put racism on the list of possibilities you’re willing to consider, not off it. The choice, to investigate rather than assume, is not passive! It is one of the most powerful things you can do as their parent, and it’s entirely within your control.

We may not always know what our Black children are expressing, because they won’t, or don’t know how to. But the worst thing you can do is question their experience before you use your own knowledge of systemic racism to rule out that it’s happening in ways the dominant culture will insist are normal. You are their first line of defense, and where we live, racism is on the menu, so work diligently to recognize what’s being served, even when it’s covered in rose-colored B.S.

None of this makes you powerless. Every time you choose curiosity over defensiveness, every time you take your child’s discomfort seriously enough to look past the easy explanation, you become the barrier between them and a world that conspires to ensure they doubt themselves. This is a piece of the work, and it is entirely yours to do. A child who grows up trusting that their parents will believe them, investigate on their behalf, and name what’s real, even when it’s uncomfortable, carries that trust into every room they walk into for the rest of their life. Do this consistently, and you give your child something too few kids get: a parent who sees clearly and acts accordingly. That’s not only protection, starting young enough it is a foundation they’ll stand on long after they’ve outgrown your house.