This was
a really great book that I finished for that reason (and also because it’s just
over 200 pages). Beverly Daniel Tatum is children’s psychologist with a
specialty in the development of racial identity. She discusses a lot of things
in this book that White people tend not to talk about and has a really
effective way of writing that turns the theoretical ideas she talks about into
real situations. She teaches classes on racism and uses conversations from
those classes in her book; I think the main idea of the book is that in America
we nee to have more genuine conversations about race both among and within
different racial groups. The book and everything I’ll say below only applies to
the United States of America.
She
discusses how white children and adults often think of being White as normal
and being anything else as not normal, when, in reality, there are more people
in the world who are not “White” than those who are. She discusses how many
parents are proud of having “colorblind” children, when really their children
were probably seeing and noticing differences in race at three-year-old, but
also noticing that no one liked to talk about it, following the same unwritten,
unspoken rule themselves. She talks about her own son, asking as a child why,
if Black people come from Africa, are they in the United States? She tries to
point out better ways to have these conversations with children, and then later
in the book, with adults. She talks about how within African American families,
people often talk about White features as being better, such as lighter skin
and straighter hair.
She also
covers why Black kids may tend to sit with each other during lunch. It has to
do with a stage in youth development during puberty, when children start to ask,
“Who am I?” and they form their own identities. While White children rarely
think about this in racial terms, Black kids are forced to by the society
around them. It is usually around adolescence that interracial friendships are
strained or end when Black kids need the support of other Black teenagers as
they experience racism. Tatum writes, “We need to understand that in racially
mixed settings, racial grouping is a developmental process in response to an
environmental stressor, racism. Joining with one’s peers for support in the
face of stress is a positive coping strategy. On the White side, many parents have
fears of interracial dating, and discourage their children from doing so. White
teens may not be welcome at a “Black table” because it stifles the ability of
Black teenagers to talk freely about what they feel.
Tatum
also discusses the phenomenon of “acting white,” or “talking white,” which many
Black children can be accused of if they were raised around White people and
adopted certain speech patterns, or just did well in school. Tatum writes, “Historically,
the oppositional identity found among African Americans in the segregated South
included a positive attitude toward education. While Black people may have
publicly deferred to Whites, they actively encouraged their children to pursue
education as a ticket to greater freedom. While black parents still see
education as the key to upward mobility, in today’s desegregated schools the
models of success—the teachers, administrators, and curricular heroes—are almost
always White.” I think this really shows the importance of recruiting Black
teachers in schools, especially those with high Black student populations. It
would also be very good for White students to get a different idea od Black
people than how they are informed by stereotypes and the media.
To end,
this was an excellent book and really good reading for me as a White person. I
would recommend it to anyone who’s genuinely interested in learning how racism
affects all of us on a psychological level and wants to learn about ways to change
it. I think this book really gets to the core of these issues in an accessible
way and it’s a very good read, remaining relevant even today, about 20 years
after it was published.
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