Hi friends,
First, I have a lot of new readers here! Thanks for subscribing! A few of y’all were stuck in some kind of strange Typeform limbo from this summer that recently seems to have fixed itself, so I’m sorry to be randomly dropping into your mailboxes in December. I blame technology.
I had a few short stories I wanted to share with you about politics in my house over the past few weeks, but first I wanted to pass on this story about Thanksgiving’s radical past, and how the south thought that Lincoln wanted to use the holiday to cancel Christmas and win the Civil War. Gratitude can be radical! I love it. Today’s newsletter is about how to tackle complicated topics with kids who are too young to understand them. I lean heavily into the idea of starting somewhere honest, and then making mental notes on where to circle back later.
Talking race
I hadn’t planned to watch Colin in Black and White with the kids, but Cyrus walked in when I was watching it one day and he was hooked. We finished the mini-series last night. It was excellent, and I highly recommend it. (Also, sports is not my strong suit, but when there’s a politics tie in, I’m there.) It was interesting watching it through his eyes because the entire series is premised on how to interpret microaggressions and racial subtexts. So we stopped and had a long talk about why Colin would want so badly to be a football player instead of a baseball player (which he understood), but then it was harder to explain why most quarterbacks are white in a league that is mostly Black.
He was intrigued by the politics of hair (and awed, rightfully, by Colin Kaepernick’s really impressive Afro), but couldn’t quite get why it was a big deal. I was most uncomfortable during the fifth episode which focused on the reaction of Colin’s parents and friends when he started dating a dark-skinned Black cheerleader. I felt like the irony was subtle enough that it would be easy to internalize the anti-blackness without really understanding the critique. I’m not quite sure what to do here except keep circling back, because these things are complicated, but I do think that the show gave a foundation for identifying microaggressions in the future, and looping back to the miniseries in a few years to help reinforce some of the nuances. And the soundtrack is great.
In the car, Jim was telling me about a sweet project a colleague is working on to map redlining in Omaha, and so the kids wanted to know what redlining was. And again, these ideas are hard to explain! But redlining is so pivotal to understanding the economic, cultural, and built landscape of the United States, and no one ever learns about it (when I teach Race and Politics, I spend a lot of time with The Color of Law, and it blows my students’ minds). So, we gave it a go - we talked about how banks would make policies not to loan to people of color, and they would draw red lines on the map around areas thought to be financially risky. Not only would people in those neighborhoods not get money to buy homes or open businesses, but banks in those areas would close, physically removing wealth from inner cities. How much did they understand? I’m not sure. But again - it’s a first step. Later, when we’re driving through an area of town with rundown buildings, we can circle back to the conversation and have the beginning of an answer to “why.”
Talking language politics
I don’t remember what provoked the conversation, but the other day Cyrus asked me “have people ever fought a war over what language to speak?” !!! what a great question!
Over the next few hours, we circled back around to all kinds of cool stuff about the politics of languages, and it was really fun to talk with him about. We started in the US, and I asked him what he would think if someone told him that everyone in the US should speak English. And so we chatted about how one of the cool things about the US is that there is no official state language. We talked about Ireland and the efforts to revitalize Irish as the first officially recognized language in the country, and how the language was nearly wiped out because of colonial British practices. We also talked about how states try to control their populations through restricting what languages can be used or spoken, like Turkey banning Kurdish. It was such a fun conversation to have, because it let us talk about all of my favorite things – culture, nationalism, and how states try to build nations (for adults, a great book on this is Peasants into Frenchmen, about how France mobilized its rural population to military service, drawing them closer to the state’s center, mandating the teaching of French as the first language, and creating French identity).
We didn’t get around to the war question (any examples of wars fought over language you can think of?) but it was really fun to watch how he started to problematize ideas about language.
PS - abortion
I thought I would write a separate post about how to talk to your kids about abortion and explain to your daughters that an illegitimate court was about to take away all of their bodily autonomy, but I felt like I might need a little distance from this nightmare. But then tonight my dad asked me what I thought would happen with the Supreme Court case, and Cyrus (predictably) had lots of questions. I told him that in the 1970s there was an important case to let women decide whether and when to have babies, and to allow women to be in control of what happened to their bodies, and that this Supreme Court was about to take that right away from women. A little while later, my dad started explaining to Cyrus why it’s important to provide support for clinics that provide all kinds of health care to women, and how taking money away from them would have horrible consequences. Let me tell you, hearing my dad explain and defend Planned Parenthood to my son made me cry tears of joy in a dark political moment.
What we’re reading
I don’t have too many new great books to recommend right now, but my daughters are loving the Yasmin series.
Other news
I have a new website so that people can find my writing on the interwebs! www.kellyaclancy.com - check it out if you’re curious about what I write beyond these pages. I have a new piece I’m VERY excited about that will be published later this month, and I’m going to send it to all of you when it does. Spoiler alert - my favorite holiday movie is a sleeper feminist triumph.