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1/ Woke anti-racism is child abuse.
My family is living the antithesis of @thomaschattwill's Self Portrait in Black and White. And I fear it may damage my children irrevocably.
Let me explain
2/ I'm white, my wife's black. When we met, we "saw each other's race," but we didn't think that was the most interesting thing about us. We foolishly thought our children would be part of a post-racial future, in which all Americans could just be human beings to one another.
3/ Then came Trump. I decided I should try to learn more about my fellow citizens, who I now realized were completely opaque to me. In contrast, my wife decided she was at war with an immutably white supremacist America.
4/ My wife began to read authors like Nikole Hannah Jones and Michael Harriot. She had a "racial awakening," concluding that she'd been "inauthentically black" all her life.
5/ My wife came to think that her mindtrained in exclusive private schools and in two Ivy League institutions for a BA and a PhDhad been "colonized." She's come to think she owes her success to being "the right kind" of black woman...
6/ ...an inauthentic and "white-acting" black woman who is "non-threatening" to "white spaces." Most disturbing, she's reinterpreted her 5 decades of lifein which she only ever had one very mild story of a microaggressionas a history of brutal, grinding racial oppression.
7/ Deep beneath her inauthentic "white" acculturation is an oppressed black woman, struggling for freedom. This is what racial grievance entrepreneurs like NHJ have done to my wife's mind. What she's doing, in turn, to the minds of our small children makes my blood run cold.
8/ My wife is teaching our children that America hates them and wants to kill them b/c they're black. Rather than take the birth of our childrenambiguous, innocent, raceless little creaturesas an opportunity to rethink the oppressive American race ideology...
9/ ...and not hand it down to a new generation, my wife got "woke" after Trump and doubled down on anti-racist racial essentialism. Here are three hair-raising stories.
10/ First story: she regularly explains to our kids that the police want to kill black people. Blacks are people police like to kill, and always have been. They will keep using the pretext that they get "scared" when unarmed black people reach into cars, like Jacob Blake...
11/ ...or steal police tasers, like Rayshard Brooks, as long as using that pretext allows them to keep killing black people w/ impunity. That's what she told our children, who by plantation logic, are among the black population that the police go out hoping to kill every day.
12/ Second story: she told our kids that Kyle Rittenhouse, like so many whites, hates black people and wants to kill black people, so he went to a BLM protest and opened fire. When I asked, in a neutral way, why she thought Rittenhouse had shot those people, she became upset...
13/ ...and stormed out of the house, not to return for 3 hours. The "obvious" answer is that Rittenhouse is a white supremacist (I don't think she even knows that he shot only white people). Any probing beyond this self-evident axiom is too triggering to indulge.
13a/ (BTW I have no defense of Rittenhouse, a confused, stupid kid, whose foolishness and apparent criminal behavior led to his needless killing of two people.)
14/ Third story: We drove by a poster that said "Ahmaud" w/ a pic of Arbery. Daughter: "Who's that?" Wife: "That's a black man who was killed." My 7-yr-old daughter, now trained to think white people hate and want to kill black people like her, went straight to the inference...
15/ "Oh, so they killed him because they hate black people?"
My daughter needed no further information to infer that a black man who had been killed was killed because "they hate black people."
16/ This is bad enough, but what's worse is that my wife is training her to see herself as one of these universally hated black people, whom everyone wants to kill. Let the implications of that for my girl's soul, for the ease with which she will encounter her world, sink in.
17/ My wife wants her to "inherit the wound," as I've heard @thomaschattwill say, when she should inherit nothing but joy, love, and a sense of her own endless potential in a world that will reward her for her beauty and brilliance, not punish her for "hatred" of her blackness.
18/ Why does my wife want our kids to "inherit the wound"? I suspect it's because, due to her parents' successes, who fought the Civil Rights battles of the '60s and became a surgeon & a teacher, she never inherited the wound herself, and has come to feel "inauthentically black."
19/ After all, NHJ and Coates are always telling her how traumatized she should be just because she's black in America. So, she has come to believe that only when she viscerally feels the wound that all black people are supposed to feel, will she herself be "authentic."
20/ My wife's father told me he's glad his daughter, and Obama too, come from the post-Civil Rights generation, because they did not acquire his "black rage." This is why Obama could be elected, he said, and why race was never important to his daughter, my wife ...till now.
21/ Newly desiring to feel the wound, but not able to authentically experience it due to a life of untroubled privilege, she's living vicariously through her kids, trying to inflict the wound upon them. Maybe if she can't be an authentically wounded black person, they can?
22/ Like a father who pushes his son into sports in which he could not excel himself, she's pushing her children into a racial grievance that she has read about in books and in the NYTimes but has never had a chance to experience for herself.
23/ The only viable alternative to this child abuse that I've seen is in the writing of @thomaschattwill. The alternative my 80-year-old father-in-law offered is as bad as my wife's plan. He said he's happy his grandkids will identify as white, so they will never have to feel...
24/...the sense of inherent worthlessness compared to whites that he felt coming of age in the Jim Crow south. His revelation of his own wound saddened me immeasurably. This proud surgeon's scars bears witness to the country America used to be.
25/ But my father-in-law's solutiona binary solution, and the only one this black man from another era could come up withis as bad as my wife's. I don't want my children to identify as white any more than as black.
26/ I want them to be deeply aware of the complex and difficult, but also often beautiful, histories behind their parental lineages. But I pray they identify into neither blackness nor whiteness, for each of these legacies is heavy, the one with pain and the other with guilt.
27/ I want them to be the generation that at last transcends the limiting and soul-destroying American "skin game." I want them not to identify but to empathize deeply with all the complexities of their heritage, without being limited by the trauma and shame it would impose.
28/ To me, that's how we can at last become simply fellow citizens, simply fellow humans, to one another.
So, I'm in this for the long game, a game in which my wife, with her racial-essentialism agenda, has as yet no real idea that she has an opponent.
29/ I'm committed to mitigating the effects of what I see as her child abuse where I can, until our kids are old enough to read for themselves @thomaschattwill, @cvaldary, ...
30/ ...and other thoughtful writers who come from a place of love and healing of our ancient and needless racial wounds.
The Roman author and former slave Terence said 2000 years ago: "I am human: I suppose nothing human to be alien to me."
Words we have yet to live up to.
7nine
