083: White privilege in parenting: What it is & what to do about it

Jen: 01:34 Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We are kicking off a series on the intersection of race with parenting and child development today. This actually grew out of the episode we did a while back on intergenerational trauma in which I acknowledged that the trauma that Black parents experience just as a result of being Black and I meant to go back and do another episode on that topic because it was just too big of a topic to slip into a more general episode on trauma, but when I got in touch with a Black friend to discuss how to go about covering this, she said, and I’m going to quote, “Don’t do an episode on that. It smacks of trauma porn.” Instead, she told me to look at what it means to be a White parent in America today and by extension in other colonizing and colonized countries. Jen: 02:16 So, I read a whole lot of books and I thought for a long time and that episode is now in the process of expanding to this series of several episodes. Today, we’re going to talk about White privilege, which I know can be a difficult topic to think about and White people including me, have a tendency to experience what Dr. Robin DiAngelo calls White Fragility, which is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable and triggers our defenses like denial, anger, fear, and guilt. And those caused us to argue or fall silent and leave the stress-inducing situation. So, if you’re feeling any of these emotions right now, after I said the words, White Privilege, and especially if you’re thinking, I don’t have privilege, my family doesn’t have enough money, or my partner just got laid off, or the Black cashier at the grocery store was really weird to me today. Jen: 03:04 Then I’d encourage you not to let your defense mechanisms engage by shutting off this podcast, but instead try to listen with an open mind. This stuff isn’t easy, but it is really important. So, today we’re here with Dr. Margaret Hagerman, who’s the author of the brand new book, White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America. I was really excited to find this book because there are a lot of researchers writing on White privileges today, but not nearly so many who are writing about it specifically as it relates to children. Dr. Hagerman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mississippi State University and as a Faculty Affiliate in both the African American Studies and Gender Studies programs. She received her Ph.D from Emory University. Her qualitative research focuses on the study of racial socialization or how kids learn about race, racism, inequality, and privilege. Her new book is called White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America. And while Dr. Hagerman does study the process of how this occurs, both inside and outside of schools, today we’re going to focus on the outside of school processes because we’ll have another episode very soon that’s entirely devoted to how Whites experienced privilege in the school system. So welcome Dr. Hagerman. Dr. Hagerman: 04:14 Thank you for having me. Jen: 04:15 All right, so let’s start out by something that we don’t normally do on podcast episodes, but when I was doing my Masters in Education, it was really common for professors to ask students at the beginning of a paper, particularly on the topic of diversity to identify their privileges. So, I’m going to start by identifying some of mine and I wonder if you’d be kind enough to then follow by identifying some of yours? Dr. Hagerman: 04:37 Sure. Jen: 04:38 Okay, perfect. So my first obvious one is Whiteness. I am a White person from England now living in America. I think my second one is economic status. I’m currently lucky enough, fortunate enough, well, we say lucky, but I’m upper middle class, although I come from a working class family and I do not deny that, I imagine it is, in some measure at least due to the fact that I am a White person and I do have privilege. Jen: 05:02 So, it’s not entirely luck that has a gender, this fortune. I’m heterosexual. So that meant my sexuality is accepted by society. I never had to come out to anybody. I’m able bodied, I’m pretty much able to do whatever I need to do to get through life using the body that I was born with. And I also have some educational privilege because I have a number of Master’s degrees, a number of years of advanced education and I recognize also that my privilege has intertwined with the education that I’ve received as well. So, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind telling us a bit about your privileges as well. Dr. Hagerman: 05:33 Sure. So I am a White woman. I grew up in a family that I would identify as having upper middle class status and now I’m a college professor and so I think that that status is probably, you know, still depending on how you measure it. I’m a social scientist, but I think that you would say that that was still that status. I am also heterosexual, able bodied and I have a Ph.D. So, certainly that would put me in a status of having educational privilege. Jen: 06:01 Mm-hmm. Yeah. And also just wanting to make the point before we move on that I deliberately sought out White researchers to interview for this series, partly because we’re examining Whiteness rather than Blackness and partly also because I think it can be easier to truly hear and take on these truths when they’re presented by someone who looks like you and sounds like you and is more like you rather than someone who appears to be on the outside than looking in. But I do want to acknowledge that Black researchers and activists have been talking about White privilege for a really long time. And my hope here is that we can build on rather than refute their work. So, let’s get started with a topic that seems really easy, but perhaps it’s not. So what is race? Dr. Hagerman: 06:43 That is a great question. So, I think that often people, at least my students for example, tell me that they think race is a biological concept, but in fact race is not a biological concept, but instead a social concept. And so the way that I like to think about this is that the lines that demarcate different races, these were lines that were drawn by humans and these were lines that were drawn in ways that relates to political projects. And so as philosopher Charles Mills puts it, “The reality of race is a reality that socially created not an intrinsic reality of the human.” And so I think what that really gets at is the ways in which race is a political system and so where you are located within that system or how you’re categorized, shapes, things like where you live, who you marry, how you see the world and so I think a better or maybe an easier way to think about race is to think about race as a political grouping. And as Dorothy Roberts who is a legal scholar puts it, “Race has always served a political function.” And I think that that’s really important in understanding the history of race and the history of racism and where that leaves us today. Jen: 07:52 Mm-hmm. Yeah, and something that I learned as I was researching this, the way that we know this is a political construct and not a biological construct is that the groups change, right? Dr. Hagerman: 08:02 Absolutely. Jen: 08:03 Sometimes the people who were from Chinese origin will be classified as White and sometimes they’ll be classified as Asian and so the people in power able to change the groups to suit their own needs. Dr. Hagerman: 08:14 Absolutely. Jen: 08:15 So, that to me it was a key learning. I always just sort of symbol, if a person looks like a certain thing then they probably are that thing, but it turns out if you actually dig deeper into it, the group that’s in power has shifted what constitutes different groups and what privileges those groups have to suit their own needs at various points in history. Dr. Hagerman: 08:34 Right. Jen: 08:35 So yeah, it’s… that initial point just kind of blew my mind when I, when I started thinking about it. So. Okay. So a second question, and I think that the children that you talked to in your study had some thoughts on this. Is it racist to discuss race? Dr. Hagerman: 08:47 So this is a question that certainly some of the children would debate with one another, like you just alluded to, but my answer to this is no. It’s not racist to discuss race and as many different scholars coming out of legal studies as well as sociology have found in research and in history, you know, we are at a moment right now where many people talk about new forms of racism. So something like color blindness, like saying that you don’t care about race or that you don’t even notice race or that race doesn’t really matter in our society and that to talk about it is just to re, you know, introduce it and to be racist that that’s really just a way of perpetuating the racial status quo and that, you know, the reality is we live in a society in which resources are allocated along these lines of race. Dr. Hagerman: 09:35 And so to not talk about race is not going to get us anywhere. If anything, I think it will perpetuate the problem. Jen: 09:41 Mm-hmm. Dr. Hagerman: 09:42 So no, I do not think it is racist to discuss race. Jen: 09:45 Okay. And we’ll come back to color blindness in a bit because I think that is so important. But I wonder if first you could give us just a little bit of background on your book. What and who did you study? Dr. Hagerman: 09:53 Sure. So White Kids is a book that’s based on two years of ethnographic research with 30 families who identified both as White but also as affluent. And so these are families that have both race and class privilege. Uh, the children in this book are all in middle school, when I did the initial data collection, so the two-year time period. I do go back and re-interview them when they’re in high school, although that’s not the focus of the book. Dr. Hagerman: 10:17 It comes up at the end. And so these were families that were living in a midwestern community and were kind enough to let me into their world and the sort of private sphere of White families. And so I spent this two years interviewing children, interviewing parents, observing them as they go about their everyday business, you know, birthday parties and soccer practice. And gymnastics and so forth and so I spent a lot of time with these families and my research questions were really about the ways that these families communicated about race and this question is informed by the research on this topic of racial socialization, which really comes out of this really important and powerful work by Black scholars in both sociology and psychology who historically were really focused on understanding how Black families communicate about race and particularly how Black parents prepare their children for, you know, potential experiences of racism. Dr. Hagerman: 11:12 And so sort of building on that scholarship and thinking about how White families are not removed from the discussion of race or racism in America, but in fact are, you know, central to it, you know, I wanted to explore what was going on in these families and really try to see how it is that young White people are developing ideas that either reproduce racism or racial inequality or maybe rework it or maybe even challenge it. Jen: 11:39 And you studied two very different communities in the book, right? Dr. Hagerman: 11:43 Right. So the, there’s one metropolitan area and there’s two neighborhoods within that metropolitan area or within the actual city that I look at, but then I also compare that to a nearby suburban area and sort of notice the differences in why people chose to live in these different communities. So some dynamics with the schools, dynamics with extracurricular activities and so forth. And because these families have these economic resources, they can make all kinds of different choices. And so because of that I was really interested in why, you know, they would choose to live where they did. Jen: 12:16 Mm-hmm. Okay. And so what kinds of ideas did the children that you interviewed have about race? Dr. Hagerman: 12:21 Well, I think one of the interesting findings from my work is that not all of these children’s shared the same ideas, and there was more variation I think in some of their thinking than what I had initially anticipated. But I did find some powerful patterns across different groups of children. And you know, I think one of the things that I was really interested in was to what extent do these children believe that racism is still a problem in America? And for some of the kids they told me that they did not think it was, while other children had lots to say on the matter and could give me very specific examples of racism in the United States. And so the book really goes through and has, you know, a lot of the children’s voices told by them like their actual quotations and some incidents that I observed when I was spending time with them. And you’ve really got, I think a rich sense of the, both the range of ideas but also the patterns that exist as well. Jen: 13:14 Mm-hmm. And where there major patterns appearing in each of the two communities that you studied? Dr. Hagerman: 13:19 Yes. So for the families that lived in the suburban...