Each time I think I’m done with this series on the intersection of race and parenting, another great topic pops up!
Listener Ann reached out to me after she heard the beginning of the series to let me know about her own journey of learning about her white privilege. Ann and her husband were a ‘normal’ white couple who were vaguely aware of some of the things they could do to help others (Ann works at a nonprofit) and saw politics as an interesting hobby.
Then they adopted a Black daughter and had a (surprise!) biological daughter within a few months, and Ann found that she needed to learn about her privilege – and quickly. She’s had to learn about things like the features of a ‘high quality’ daycare for both of her daughters, how to keep them safe, and we get some feedback from Dr. Renee Engeln about how to help Black girls to see and be confident in their beauty.
Ann is openly not an expert on this topic, and does not speak for adoptive Black children, or even for all white adopting parents. But she finds herself far further along this journey of discovering her privilege than the vast majority of us – myself included, until I began researching this series of episodes.
Read Full TranscriptJen: 01:24 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. When I started this series of episodes on the Intersection of Race and Parenting, I had no idea it was going to go on for so long. I had initially planned to do the episodes on White Privilege and Parenting with Dr. Margaret Hagerman and White Privilege in Schools with Dr. Allison Roda and then How To Talk About Race with Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum. After the conversation with Dr. Tatum, I realized that we hadn't talked a lot about what we should teach about topics like slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, and so we went on to cover that with Dr. John Bickford and then I got to chatting via email with Ann Kane who is a listener and who's our guest today. And so before I tell you about Ann, I just wanted to tell you a snippet about my own journey toward learning about my privilege.
Jen: 02:06 I was actually listening to an episode of The How To Get Away With Parenting podcast, which is published by my now friend, Malaika Dower. And in it Malaika made a comment about how it might not be safe for a black toddler to have a tantrum in a store. And the implication was because the white parents would potentially find this threatening in some way. And if you'd ask me before that moment whether I had white privilege as a parent, I would have said, I really don't think so because I'm really not sure I could have named a single way in which I experienced this. So uncovering my privilege has been a very deliberate exercise for me that’s taken a lot of hard work because the point of privilege is you don't really see it. It's there to protect you from having to see it.
Jen: 02:48 But our guest Ann has been forced to confront her privilege in a completely different way. So Ann who is white, spent 10 years working in the field with Doctors Without Borders and she left to work in Program Finance for a nonprofit in New York City so that she and her white husband could raise a family and she adopted a daughter, Alice from the foster care system. Alice was 8 days old at the time and is now just over two and she is black. And then Ann and her husband had a surprise baby named Audrey who is almost two and is white. So when Ann and I started emailing about this, she told me, “Raising Alice in a society that still has so much structural racism is my biggest parenting worry. I'm so afraid that my white privilege is going to harm her. There's so much I'm unaware of. And as a white person, I don't feel I can prepare her for all she'll face.”
Jen: 03:35 That's when I knew I had to talk with Ann in an episode, because while she isn't and doesn't claim to be an expert on race or racism or raising a black child, she's been forced to confront her own privilege as a white person and as a white...