If Your Kids Feel Bad About Being White, That's Your Fault

I ran across an old discussion of how book bans disproportionally affect minorities while researching something else and was struck again about concern for making people feel bad for being white. It strikes me again how much of that concern is about what the parents teach their kids rather than what the books teach their kids.

I am possibly the whitest person in America. My favorite sport is hockey. I think almost all rap is worse than the average verse at your local coffee shop’s poetry slam. I unironically like mayonnaise. My favorite music is punk, even though I am too young to have experienced it when it was a thing. I listen to show tunes for fun. If I was any whiter, they would make me a member of the House GOP caucus whether I wanted to be or not. And I have never felt ashamed to be white. (Well, maybe the show tunes thing.)

Why not? Aren’t I supposed to be ashamed of all the bad things people who looked like me did? No — why would I? I did not do those things. And to the extent I benefit from the legacy of those things, that, too, is not something I can’t control. In the same way that I want all medical care and education to be free, because when I was poor (and I have been so poor I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from, and it sometimes didn’t come) I needed that help, I want people whose place in the line of opportunity has been artificially suppressed to have help overcoming that circumstance. To the extent that the slows my progress in the line of opportunity, the solution is not to step on other people but to ensure that the line moves quickly for everyone. But at no point have I ever felt that just because my ancestors were probably assholes (and so where yours, no matter who you are) does that make me somehow a bad person. Anyone who does has probably been taught to feel that way.

If your kids feel that learning history impacts them, makes them bad people, I am willing to be that is because that you taught them to believe so. You taught them that their membership in a group meant more than them as individuals. You taught them that they were special or good or blessed not because they behaved as good people behave, but because they happened to have a specific genetic pattern. I promise you, being more susceptible to sunburn does not make you uniquely good or uniquely bad. It just means you spend more on sunscreen.

Nothing in history will makes you ashamed of being born into a certain group unless you have been taught that your group membership makes you special. Only children who have been erroneously assured that they are good not because of what they do but because of what group they were born into. You taught them to value their skin more than their actions. History should be lessons in how to not be a bad person. No person living today gets special demerits or points because they share a genetic makeup with anyone who did anything in the past. All that history can do, should do, is help us identify good and bad actions and help teach us to avoid the bad actions and encourage us to aim for the good.

Your kids don’t feel bad because of history books. Your kids feel bad because you have taught them that they, and everyone else, is defined by their group rather than their actions. the good news is that is a false belief. You can help your children be better people just by teaching them that what they do is more important than who they are. It’s not a hard lesson, and if you cannot bring yourself to teach t, the problem is with you, not teachers.