Slate Plus members get more Care and Feeding from Jamilah Lemieux every week (now on Fridays).
Dear Care and Feeding,
My husband and I (we’re white) have a 2-year-old daughter and are doing our very best to be anti-racist parents. We’re making sure she has lots of multiracial dolls, only consumes books and TV shows with diverse characters, has no problematic Halloween costumes, and so on. But when we try to discuss issues like structural racism, intersectionality, or White fragility, she doesn’t seem at all interested. She often walks away, asks for a cookie, or even falls asleep! Have we screwed up somehow? Has society’s disdain for the perspectives of marginalized people already infected her? How do we get her to appreciate the urgency of the conversation around deconstructing white supremacy?
—Anti-Racist Mom
Dear ARM,
As the mother of a Black daughter, it terrifies me to know that you are raising a little Klan-member-in-training who cares more about chocolate chip cookies than chocolate-colored people. Clearly, she has already proven that she is problematic beyond repair!
My suggestion to you is that you put this child up for adoption. You’ve done all that you can, and she has shown you who she is. If you don’t get intersectionality by the age of 2, you never will. Use the money and resources that you would have spent to raise this future segregationist to instead care for a child from a marginalized community; the mommy blogs can be very helpful in terms of determining which nationalities are on trend this season, though I warn you that you’ll likely have to shop domestic due to COVID.
Don’t worry too much about your ole daughter—she’ll probably land on her feet. Good riddance to bad rubbish. It was kind of insensitive for you to be raising a white kid during a time like this anyway.
—Jamilah
(I most certainly hope I didn’t accidentally mistake an earnest letter for a lazy troll; if so, whoops, and you might want to relax a bit.)
