Dare To Ask Talk And News About Our Differences
It probably doesn’t make sense to you because you have not had to deal with racist hostility on a near-daily basis, as people who are not white in America have. If a child hears constantly that his or her own group is inferior, you absolutely have to give counter-examples. If someone says blacks, Natives or even Italians are inferior (which many once did), referring to Charles Drew, Sequoyah or Da Vinci shows the child he is not part of an ‘inferior’ group. In fact, his pride in them makes perfect sense and will help keep him from falling into self-hatred. The fact is, non-white kids who grow up without that pride believe the worst about themselves and how their own lives will turn out. They fill our jails and welfare rolls. I know; I grew up with some of these people. I know what a difference pride has made in my own life and my people’s. Without it, I think American Indians would be extinct and blacks would still be riding in the back of the bus.
What doesn’t make sense to me, frankly, is your pretending (yes, you are) that the child will not be treated as part of that group. You, as someone white, have the option of not needing to refer to your ‘lineage,’ as you call it, because you have not had the experience to having to fall back on your heritage as a source of self-defense. That is still not true for the child, no matter how much you might wish it was.