Talking To Teens: Expert Tips for Parenting Teenagers

Andy: You have written quite a book here, and you're diving into some really, really important issues about really the fabric of our culture in this country, and especially these white narratives that we have. What has inspired you to write this book, and what was your process like for creating it?

David: Well, I've been writing both about race in general and my own identity... I'm a third-generation Japanese American... for many years, but then Philando Castile was shot by a policeman on a road not two miles from my home. And it's a road I go down very frequently. I've even got two or three tickets there, because it's a notorious speeding trap. And I realized I was never in danger on that road the way Philando Castile was. He was stopped between 50 and 80 times over a 10-year period. And sometimes when I talk to people about race, I ask, "How many times have you been stopped by the police in the last 10 years?" "10 times," "20 times," "25 times," "40 times," and by the time they get to 20, there's nobody in the audience who's been stopped that often, unless they're Black.

And I knew people who knew him. One of my students said it was quoted in the paper as saying he was Mr. Rogers with dreadlocks, because he worked at a school as a cook, as a chef, and people said he knew all the kids' names. He knew which ones had allergies. One kid paper said to the parent, "Can you tell them our Philando's not like that?" And it was just so heartbreaking. And I began thinking, because it was a time during Black Lives Matter, and all these things were happening with demonstrations, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and I began reading about race even more deeply than I had, about history of race, politics of race, economics of race, psychology of race, the linguistics of race.

And one of the things I discovered, was that after African Americans were freed, supposedly... although they weren't... by the Emancipation Proclamation, the problem was, how do you regard Black people, as they're no longer slaves? And there was a concentrated effort in the social sciences to prove that African Americans were inherently, genetically prone to criminality. And the way they would do that, is take the statistics of Black crime, and say that any Black person who was arrested was evidence of the inherent criminality of Black people. Whereas white people, their crimes were seen as just simply an individual. White individual committed a crime, did not cast a stain.

Andy: That's a bad apple.

David: And then they would look for sociological explanations for the crime, so that they grew up in poverty. So this trope, this idea, this stereotype of the inherent criminality of African Americans, was baked into the culture, and its DNA still lives with us. It still lives in the way that people, and especially white people, think about Black people and other people of color. And so you have a statistic like, Black people and white people smoke marijuana at the exact same rate, but Black people are 4.2 times more likely to be arrested for smoking marijuana. And then they're more likely to go to trial, they're more likely to be convicted, they're more likely to serve sentences rather than probation, and they're more likely to serve longer sentences.

So this inherent discrimination, this prejudice, runs through the whole justice system. And so what I realized, was that our language for talking about race is so simplified, and it's deliberately simplified. Our ideas about what racism is and how it works are deliberately simplified, and they're inherently made so that racism doesn't exist. And what I mean by that, is first of all there's this idea that if you look up the definition, and maybe the definition changed, but when I started writing the book, the definition of racism was always about conscious and overt acts. So one is a racist if one hurls insults, or expresses views which are prejudicial, or commits actions which are deliberately prejudicial, and one avows that, "I did this, because I dislike Black people," or, "I think Black people are more criminal," and an absent any sort of overt statement of racist intent, then there is no racism.

Andy: Then you have bias.

David: So those statistics, like Blacks are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than white people for the same crime, has to be explained by some other magical thinking about how that actually happens. Because nobody in the police department ever says, "Well, we discriminate against Black people. We look for Black people smoking marijuana. We think they smoke more marijuana than white people." Or anybody in the justice system, the judges don't deliberately say, "When a Black defendant comes in, he or she's more likely to be guilty." No, people don't say that, because they know they're not supposed to say that. So we've made a definition in which racism doesn't exist. And the thing is, what we don't understand, is there are racists, and mostly people don't express these views in public. They express them in private. We know that between a quarter and third of white people would say anonymously to a survey, and probably more because they don't talk honestly necessary to surveys, but would say, "We would object if a Black person moved next door to us," or, "A Black person married into our family."

So there's that sort of expressed prejudice, but we also know there's implicit or unconscious bias. So somebody can express their conscious belief in racial equality, and still act with racial bias. And there's a test that people can go on, a Harvard psychology test on the internet, where it's things like, people are quicker to associate positive attributes to white faces than Black faces. And Malcolm Gladwell, who's half Black himself, writes about this and he said, "Even I, even though I'm half Black, I tend to have slower in attributing positive qualities to Black faces, and quicker to attribute negative qualities." And then part of the test sometimes, is if children has an object in their hand, white people are more likely to see that object as a gun in a Black child's hand than a white child's hand. Well, you can easily see how this can affect how police interpret the actions of Black people.

And even in the medical field, Black people in emergency rooms wait longer for pain medication for the exact same condition. They receive less pain medication than white patients for the exact same condition. Black people are 4.3 times more likely to have their limbs amputated than white people. Now, I don't believe that everybody in an emergency room is a member of the KKK, but they have these inherent programming, where they do act with bias. And it's very interesting. I've just been reading Linda Villarosa's book, Under The Skin, which is about healthcare in America, and we have great healthcare disparities between whites and Blacks. And she cites a survey that was done in 2016, about 225, 250 medical students, and half of them showed a conscious belief that Black people feel less pain than white people.

Now what's very revealing about this, and when people say, "Why do we need to teach about John Thomas Jefferson's racism. That was way back then," well, Jefferson was the leading proponent of the ideology of slavery during his time. And one of the views that he had, was that Black people feel less pain. So he put that idea out in the culture and was a proponent of it. And that idea shows up in half of these medical students in 2016. So when people want to say, "It's way long ago," it's not. That DNA, that programming, is still infecting us today. And we have to understand the nature of that infection, and we have to really assess how deeply it's seeded in our psyches, only then can we begin to dismantle it.

Andy: For a lot of families it feels like, "Oh well, let's just not talk about race. We don't make race an issue in our family. We don't want to really go too deep into this." Well, that's not really an option when something is that deep into our psyche as people, that we have these beliefs about how much pain tolerance somebody has." Or like you're pointing out in your book, there's a view that some people are less human that, "Oh, they don't feel as much pain." And I think a lot of that is, well, we're rationalizing away, and trying to rationalize in our head ways to make it seem less bad, this heritage that we have of slavery, and of treating people so, so badly, that if we can tell ourselves on some unconscious level that, "Well, they don't experience as much pain," then that maybe diminishes the pain that we feel emotionally at being attached to something just so terrible.

David: I want to address the first thing you brought up, which is that many people on one level, on a well-meaning level, say, "Well, we shouldn't think about race. Teaching my kids to be colorblind."

Andy: "I want to raise my kids not even to see race, or not even to have it on their radar."

David: There's two problems with that. One is, first of all, that racism exists in every area of our society. These disparities exist in the justice system, in educational outcomes, in medical outcomes, in economic outcomes. Black unemployment has always been twice that of white unemployment throughout our history. So there's a fact of racism, but this idea that the way to deal with racism is you don't talk about it, and you don't acknowledge it, is one of the tools which allows racism to continue to exist. Because the idea is, "Well, there's no racism here, but you began talking about racism, and now there's all this controversy and all this tension, so if we don't talk about race, then there's no tension, then there's no racism." And it's this logical loop. That logical loop has not been created by Black people, or people of color, it's been created by white people. "Let's not talk about it, and if you begin talking about, it's a problem, so don't talk about it, and then there's no problem.

Andy: "We're not the ones bringing it up. Why are you bringing it up? Why you keep bringing that up?"

David: And one of the things I say in the book... Because this is very important for parents now, because there's all the stupid, stupid and really prejudicial controversy over the teaching of critical race theory in schools. First of all, they're not teaching critical race theory in schools. And if they are, I want my kid to go to that school, because it's a complex, complex legal theory that I have to read... and I've been to graduate school, I'm a very learned person... that I have to read carefully to understand. So they're not teaching critical... They're just simply teaching about the history of race in America.

Now, granted there are some places where people have overstep bounds, people who have done things which are not productive. I don't think it's productive to divide the students and say, "Some of you're going to be Black, some of you're going to be white," those sorts of exercise. But what I do think kids should do, is they should learn about the history of our country. The whole truth about our country. And our country began with a great, grand, beautiful idea. "We want equality. We want freedom. We want democracy." But from the very beginning, there was another goal, and that was to establish and maintain white supremacy, and the ability of white people to oppress and take away the rights of Native Americans and Black Americans. So we had these two conflicting goals, and we don't want to deal with the contradictions of those goals in our history, but you cannot understand our history without it.

But it's even more simpler than that. Moms for Liberty in Tennessee, they wanted to ban a book about Ruby Bridges. Now, for those of you don't know, Ruby Bridges was a six-year-old Black girl, who in 1960 desegregated an elementary school in New Orleans. And she walked through a crowd of angry white people, hurling racial insults with signs, some of them spitting. And my kids read a book about Ruby Bridges, and the idea is, "Well, this is going to hurt white kids. It's going to make them feel bad." And there's something inherently racist even about that, because what you're saying is, "My child can't look at Ruby Bridges and identify with her. Can't say, 'I want to be a Ruby Bridges.'" This young girl was so courageous. She stood up for what she believed was right. She stood up for American ideals of equality and freedom. They don't think your white child could be inspired by Ruby Bridges. But beyond that, these white parents don't think, "Well, would a Black parent give their child a story about Ruby Bridges?"

Of course, they would. And that Black parent is not going, "My child is too fragile to hear that." They're going, "This is our history. This is how we as a people survived." But beyond that, these white parents from Moms for Liberty, they're like, "Our white children are so fragile, they can't hear the history of our country." They're not concerned that every Black parent in the country, at a certain age, must tell their child stories of police brutality, of police killings, because they must prepare their children for when they encounter police, and they are terrified that their children will be injured or killed in encounters with police. So every Black parent has to tell those kids those stories, or something, some version of that. And these Moms for Liberty, they don't care at all that these Black parents have to tell their kids these stories, whether they're fragile or not. And they're not fighting that. They're just fighting because they don't want their kids to hear the story of this brave, courageous, six-year-old Black girl, who was part of the movement to desegregate southern schools. It's ridiculous.

Andy: I think that there's also a part of us doesn't want to have to teach that to our kids as white parents. We don't want to have to say, "Hey, this is who we are. This is what we do. This is what we've done. This is what we still do to people of color in our country." And I think there's a deep sense of shame that white people have about this really, really terrible heritage that we have. And by silencing that and saying, "We don't want to talk about this. Let's not talk about race. Let's not tell this story to our kids," then we're able to block that part of ourselves really deep away, so we just don't have to look at it, or don't have to think about it.

David: I want to distinguish between the idea of shame. Now, when one feels shame, one feels that one's self is bad. There's something inherently bad about it. If one feels guilty, one feels guilty about something they've done. And if one feels responsibility for some social condition, that is part of being part of a society, being a member of the community. I don't think shame is productive in dealing with race. And I say this often. I don't want to shame and guilt white people, and certainly white kids. That's not the purpose. What they should learn is knowledge.

They should learn an understanding of how the world works, and then they have to decide for themselves, "Do I have a responsibility to change this? Am I a member of this society? And if I'm a member of this society, and this community, do I believe that everybody here matters? And if I believe everybody here matters, I want to make the world equal for everybody. And that's my responsibility as an American, who believes in the principles, the original goal of freedom, equality, and democracy, and who wants to dismantle the other goal of white supremacy." And I understand that people go through sometimes this process. And I talk about this in the book, The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, about how white people need to go through different psychological stages in order to understand. And at first you may feel the sense of shame. Because what the sense of shame does, is it makes people incredibly defensive, and they can't hear anything.

And I liken the process of understanding race in one of the essays in The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, to Helen Kubler-Ross's, The Five Stages Of Grief. And this was about the process of coming to terms with death. And there's no mistaking this. James Baldwin says, "The question of identity is a question inducing the most profound panic, a terror as primary as a nightmare of the mortal fall. So to begin to question ones own identity, is really as terrifying," he says, "as understanding you're mortal. You're going to die." So the process that Kubler-Ross lays out, is first there's denial. And in the terms of race, that often comes from a sense of shame. Because if I admit there's racism, then I'll feel shame as a white person. So, "There is no racism. You're making too much of it. There was racism in the past. There's not racism in the present."

Then there's anger. The next stage is anger. "Why are you bringing this up? There was no problems in our organization, at our school, in our community, in our police department, until you began to bring it up." And then next stage is bargaining. "Well, racism exists, but it's not that bad, is it? It can't be that bad. It's just a few bad apples." And Chris Rock has said, "Well, would you want to be operated by a surgery department, or fly in an airline that had a few bad apples?" Of course not. But somehow people of color are supposed to accept that the police department has a few bad apples. So you go, "It's not systemic," but you don't explain health disparities, or disparities in the justice system in terms of arrest, trial, conviction, sentencing, simply by saying it's a few bad... It's systemic.

So then there's grief. And white people often go... They grieve for themselves, because they've had this idea that racism is not as bad as it was, and then they project onto people of color a frailty that they feel, like, "How can you deal with this? How do you deal with this? This so terrible?" And it's a psychological process. And then they get through the grief, and then they come, as Kubler-Ross says, to acceptance. And once you accept it, then question, "Okay, racism exists. It exists to the extent that we have said. It is systemic." We're arguing in this country. Ron DeSantis wants to make any statement that racism is systemic outlawed in the schools. He wants to make it so in Florida schools you cannot say racism is systemic.

So this is a defense of the system, because you can't analyze the health disparities, or the educational disparities, or the justice disparities between Blacks and whites, without seeing it as systemic. And it's really a denial of racism. So when you come to the conclusion, "Yes," and you understand racism is systemic in society, its roots go back all the way in our history, which still infect us now, then you go, "What do I do? What do I do?" And what I tell people in The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself, is first you have to know more. You have to admit... I often quote Don Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense, who said, "There are known unknowns, and unknown unknowns." And really, every one of us in this country has unknown unknowns about race. None of us know everything. We may know the history of our own group, but we don't know the history of every single group. We don't understand every single group. And to me, that's one of the wonderful things about our country.