How should we process this experience?

Dear Care and Feeding,

I am a liberal, White, upper-middle-class parent, and we live in a mixed-income, racially integrated urban neighborhood. When it came time to enroll our daughter in high school, we selected a school that was majority Black because it was close by, and we rejected the notion of getting caught up in which magnet school was most prestigious. Our daughter had a horrible time there—she was harassed so much that we had to pull her out, and other non-Black students there were victimized because of their race. I am struggling to make sense of the experience. I think she’s managed it well and hasn’t let it affect her general views on race, and I believe I’m doing the same, but mostly I am just so angry that our daughter had to endure this, and I feel guilty that I put her in this position. I also feel caught between friends who seem to want to say, “I told you so,” and those who seem to think that saying that she was the victim of racial harassment somehow makes me seem racist since it was at the hands of Black students. Maybe I should just chalk it up to bad luck, but how can I let go of the guilt and anger and all the other awful reactions I’m having to this?

—Hoping I’m Not a Karen

Dear HINaK,

You don’t sound like a Karen to me, and I am very sorry that your daughter had a negative experience at her former school. No child deserves to be treated that way, and I think it would be ideal for both you and her to speak to a professional about the feelings you are experiencing as a result. This is a deeply complicated matter. There’s what you seem to know about how racism functions in this country, which is in stark contrast with what seems to be happening at this particular school. How your daughter recovers from this experience and how you recover will mean a lot, in terms of your relationship to Black people going forward and your understanding of these awful racial dynamics that surround us.

I will not defend the actions of any child who went out of their way to mistreat a classmate without provocation. I, like many other Black parents, take seriously the dual responsibility of teaching my child to both understand racism and resist the urge to take out the pain that racism causes her on people who benefit most from it. I also recognize that in an area like the one you live in—one that sounds like it is somewhere in the process of gentrification—an influx of upper-middle-class White folks can be absolutely devastating. So again, bullying, regardless of the bully’s background, is not OK, but you asked about the larger context here, and so that’s what I’ll try to unpack.

After years of being told that your community was unimportant and unworthy of resources, you get to watch it become a “hot spot,” see investment that would have never been made on your behalf. Black folks, who once had “the hood” as a place to be surrounded by their own kind after long days of having to labor for White people, now have to watch Whites become the most affluent, and seemingly most content, residents of our ghettos. If that were not traumatic enough, there is also the matter of our interpersonal interactions with our new neighbors, many of whom have called the police on us, unilaterally organized to reshape our schools, or otherwise come into our sacred places and treated us as we are so often treated by White people: poorly.

Here is another tricky subtext at hand when something like what your daughter experienced happens: Consider the likelihood that a Black person over the age of 16 has had or witnessed least one egregiously racist experience herself and has been made at least somewhat aware of how racism shapes the world around us. For us, this is to be expected. Racism is just part of what this country is and what we are up against, and we basically have to plan to suffer as a result.

One of the ways we attempt to negate that suffering is by forming community with others like us, away from the gaze of those who participate in and benefit from our oppression. Whether this was a school that was a source of pride for Black families in your area, or simply the local Black high school, it was a place where these kids—living lives undoubtably complicated by the gentrification that brought you to this area—connect with peers who are living like they do.

Your daughter might not have done anything deliberately to harm anyone or to invite mistreatment, but her presence disrupts something truly fragile: the feeling of safety Black kids get from being with other Black kids. Those kids see their parents struggling to afford to live in an area that is changing to better reflect people like you. They think of how they and the adults they love have been treated by White folks in positions of authority their entire lives (perhaps including some of the teachers at this Black school). They know the world is kinder to your child than it is to them. The combination of that knowledge, that pain, and their youth can be very volatile.

Here’s something else to consider: The disruption that White students pose in Black schools does not always come at the same cost to White kids that it did to your daughter. Indeed, there have been many instances of Black kids fawning over non-Black peers because they have been convinced that their privilege makes them somehow special. (Nearly every White rapper is an example of this happening on a grand scale.) How you might have reacted to something like that says a lot about just how prepared for this experience you were in the first place.

Imagine if your daughter had been very popular at this school, well-liked and embraced by her peers. What if her Whiteness had made her a celebrity of sorts, accepted and celebrated by students and teachers alike because of the ways that society typically privileges White girlhood? How might you have reacted to that? Would you have been concerned about how this could affect the Black girls in her class? What if she were the valedictorian in that all-Black school? Would that have been a problem to you?

School integration is complicated, and the U.S. has never worked to implement it in any meaningful way. The haphazard integration that has been born of gentrification has and will continue to hurt a lot of kids. I am sorry that your daughter was one of them, and I hope you are able to help her get through this difficult time with the right attitude.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/03/racialized-bullying-school-care-and-feeding.html

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4791265&forum_id=2#42133519)

thought it was made up and not actually in the article

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4791265&forum_id=2#42133556)

lol

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4791265&forum_id=2#42133591)

-----

Don't like what happened to your daughter? Imagine some totally impossible thing that would never happen - that balances it out!

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4791265&forum_id=2#42133882)

Incidentally, I generally agree with the concept that it is the mom's fault. If you're white and you live with black people and send your daughter to a black school then this is entirely foreseeable. I disagree on the "why" but the simple truth that white and black people (and black and pretty much every other racial group) don't like each other and this is pretty well established. She should have known this and sent her daughter to a white school where she would have been safe. To the extent there's diversity, Asians and Hispanics are far better.

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4791265&forum_id=2#42133579)

Why do people still write this shit knowing good and damn well why people won’t “invest” in the ghetto?

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4791265&forum_id=2#42133540)

the black hood is a good thing because it lets black people live away from white people, but it's a bad thing because white people don't invest in it (until they do).

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4791265&forum_id=2#42133546)

Which is also bad because ...

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4791265&forum_id=2#42133581)

It is generally the exact opposite. These people usually live in places like Brooklyn with less land and a shittier kitchen because they want to be surrounded by the same shitlibs that make her problem a reality.

(https://autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4791265&forum_id=2#42133584)