Not all white moms?
Avoiding Twitter and struggling through what the Buffalo shooting means for raising white sons
Hi friends,
I got into a big fight on Twitter yesterday (who would have thought that Elon Musk’s new playground isn’t the place for nuanced conversation and feeling heard about complicated things). Brittany Cooper had posted something asking about what white mom had written a book about antiracist parenting, because white parents need to step up our game to keep our kids from being radicalized.
I agreed, and voiced something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: it’s not enough to raise our kids to be anti-racist, but we also have to figure out how to block the pathways to radicalization and white nationalism that exist on the internet, and this is particularly hard because algorithms for that grooming target white boys, not their moms, so we don’t know what we don’t know. We can screen all the videos we want, but we still aren’t exposed to the entire ecosystem of their online lives because we don’t know what videos are being suggested, what ads are playing between videos, etc.
A few years ago, I was teaching a class where students gave presentations from their own computers. A few of the boys had YouTube videos embedded in their presentations, and when they went to play the video, these wild ads showed up-total white nationalist/misogynist fodder. I began to realize then how much algorithms not only determine what we see, but hide from us what other people see. Like, we’re not just in conversations with people like us, but the whole broader ecosystem of the internet is curated for us and we don’t even know it. And that’s the game - it’s why Democrats don’t understand the electoral landscape, and parents are blissfully unaware of what their kids are exposed to online.
Anyway, back on Twitter, another mom wrote that white moms all across the internet were organizing for Trump, and that it’s no surprise their kids are being radicalized because it’s happening in their houses. And I agreed with her and said there were actively racist moms (the ones in Confederate flag bikinis giving their kids assault rifles under the tree) and passively racist moms (who are the biggest problem, because their privilege protects them from the implication of their niceness). But even parents (like me, and many of you) who are actively trying to raise our kids to be antiracist still need to up our games because we don’t know what we’re up against on the internet. And she accused me of saying “not all white moms.” And I got super frustrated and wrote something about how I was trying to say that even white moms who consider themselves antiracist still have work to do, not excuse us from trying to do work, and then I muted the conversation.
It’s really stuck in my head since then, I think because I wish there were better resources created by white parents for white parents about how to disrupt the indoctrination and grievance machines that are targeting our kids, mostly our sons, in this country. The stakes are high for raising a boy in this country. The stakes are also high for talking to other white parents and trying to create a sense of urgency in addressing this problem. And I wish there was better language for asking for support with things like this without sounding like we’re bragging about being super woke or like we’re asking people of color to do labor for us. We need an ecosystem of antiracism that doesn’t just become an echochamber. It’s hard, and it doesn’t exist right now.
I’m going to stay away from Twitter chats about this so I don’t pull out my hair, but I am trying to be braver in the spaces I occupy. Alma’s school had an NYPD K9 dog come to visit, and I emailed her teacher asking to opt her out of it. I felt surprisingly awkward doing so. Her (amazing) teacher called me to ask why, and I took a deep breath and then explained how I didn’t think police officers belonged in school, and I thought letting them do PR in preschool had long term effects that legitimated their violent presence in middle schools and high schools. And she was like… “I agree with you, actually,” and let Alma be her helper during the K9 visit. I felt like I’d accomplished something small in disrupting the militarization of our schools.
(My kids are brave too! At the playground the other day, Alma made a new friend and they were playing families. The little girl said to Alma, “ok, you’re the dad and I’m the mom,” and Alma said “no, this baby has two moms and no dad.” The little girl said “what?! a baby with two mommies?” And Alma said “yeah a LOT of families have two mommies and this baby does too.” What a kid. And Cyrus’s teacher told me during parent teacher conferences that he is really good at standing up for kids who are being picked on or manipulated. I was really proud, but bragging time is over.)
Anyway, if you have any resources about how to save your kids from the death cult of white nationalism on the internet, I’m all ears. For now, we’re going to disable YouTube on his computer and go with ad-free content only, but we know that’s not a longterm solution.
That’s what I have this week, friends. I’ve been quieter in this space lately, partially because I’ve been really busy editing and trying to work on my book, and partially because I’ve been trying to think through what I want to write about as this space evolves. One thing I might start doing is publishing some of my thoughts about politics that aren’t necessarily connected to parenting. I’ll find some way to mark them that will let you ignore the non-parenting content, but it might also provide some ways to think about parenting for folks with older kids. Stay tuned! And please, if you have any resources that are helping you think through parenting in this moment, leave a comment or send them my way.
It’s a scary world out there - be brave!