this woman’s work

Morning by Morning

Dec 5, 2005 Homeschooling, Race

That’s the title of the book I’m reading by Paula Penn-Nabrit. (Here is a thorough review of the book.)

The author is a mother who raised her sons here in Columbus and began homeschooling after they were kicked out of a prestigious prep school (she doesn’t name it but if you live here, you know which one she’s talking about) for questionable reasons. (She and her husband began reaching out to other black parents at the school by having a picnic where only the black families were invited. The school kicked them out for not paying the dues on time although this hadn’t been an issue at any other time since they had an unwritten agreement the Nabrit’s could pay the $20,000 annual fee in installments.)

Anyway, I have been trying to work out what I’m going to need to do to give Madison the best, most postive homeschooling experience possible and this includes thinking about how I can find her a black community. I’ve also been readying myself to defend our decision to homeschool instead of sending Madison to a school where she could meet other black kids. Given that all she sees at home are white faces, is it fair to keep her here? Would she be better off in an integrated school setting? My gut tells me no — aside from my personal beliefs about institutional schooling, I feel that if we work hard to give her social opportunities and educational opportunities with black people that home will actually be a better place to be. Penn-Habrit is helping me articulate this. Here she discusses her extended family’s concern that homeschooling will not give her sons the tools they need to overcome institutional racism:

My generation and my children’s generation face a different set of challenges, and while things are certainly easier in terms of access, the potential for damage is still profound. When racism is overt and it adversely affects academic evaluations, the victim, even as a child, knows and can identify the problem.
…
[W]hen racism is covert, when it’s subtle and insiduous, how does a child process that? There’s no yelling, no screaming, no name-calling. Everybody’s being very “nice,” But there’s always some problem — and the problem seems to be you. There’s nothing really wrong with your work — it’s good, in fact — it’s just not quite good enough. No one can tell you why it’s not good enough, or how it can be improved; but really, what’s wrong with a B? How can a child (or even an adult, for that matter) fail to internalize such behavior.

I was discussing our decision to homeschool with a couple of (white) friends awhile back who were struggling to understand why we would keep Madison in the mostly white homeschooling community instead of taking advantage of our integrated school system. I pointed out, in part, that two kids in our old LLL playgroup came home from the first week of kindergarten complaining about “those bad brown-skinned boys” they were meeting. And at least one said, “I don’t like brown-skinned boys.”

I didn’t observe these classrooms so I can’t say if the black boys really were more poorly behaved or if this was a perception brought about by cultural differences or a teacher’s racism coming out by making those boys targets. Penn-Nabrit writes about something similar her son experienced when another black child (they were the only two black boys in the class) began acting up and was targeted by the teacher as a discipline problem. Penn-Nabrit’s son, Evan, tells his mother that the other boy acts “really black,” which she translates as “not an assimilated, middle-class, suburban black kid” and he says the teacher is picking on the boy. “While Evan was too young to articulate why,” writes Penn-Nabrit. “he saw that this boy was treated differently [than white kids with similar behavior issues] and he worried that the same thing could happen to him.

The teacher has trouble understanding why this other boy’s behavior has anything at all to do with Evan. The standard line that Penn-Nabrit heard from teachers about her sons went like this: “But Evan is so adorable, we all love him, we don’t even think of him as black.” At the conference, Penn-Nabrit struggles to make the teacher understand why the teacher’s issues with another child are Evan’s issues, too.

How did the experience of the other black boy have an impact on Evan’s experience at school? I finally asked her if she had ever had been the only white person at a group function. She had not. I then asked her if she could imagine such an occurrence. She could. I then asked her how she would feel if another white person joined the group, but was castigated continually for behavior regularly accepted when displayed by the majority members of the group.

This story reassured me that my gut is right on this.

My two friends who wanted to know why we wouldn’t send Madison to school said (truly, they said this, and they are nice lovely smart people so don’t judge them by this statement) that Madison would get a “free ride” as the black child of white parents. Madison is a bright, excited, energetic child and I think that her exuberance coupled with her skin color could make her a target of discipline that might not come up were she white. So let’s say I’m wrong about this — let’s say Madison would get a “free ride.” Isn’t acknowledging the free ride an acknowledgment of the institutional racism in the school that was the target of our discussion? And if Madison does get that free ride (and I don’t believe she will because I think this assumes that a teacher’s racism is generally a thought-out reaction instead of a knee-jerk one), does this somehow protect her from that racism? Of course not.

I also think it will be easier to find her black educational mentors out of school than it would be in it. The Penn-Nabrit’s make the decision to seek out African and African American male educators for their sons as a supplement to their homeschooling and given that Ohio State University is right here, they have no trouble finding people to work with their boys. (She compares this to the prep school and their uniformly white faculty because the administrators say they are unable to find qualified black teachers.)

Like Penn-Nabrit, I feel that Madison needs to have a strong foundation of self-confidence and self-understanding to effectively deal with the inevitable racism that will be a part of her life. I don’t think she should have to spend her elementary years trying to overcome other people’s racism or that she should have to worry about being evaluated fairly. I believe that she will be better equipped if she’s given time to simply grow and blossom as her own perfect self so that she can truly recognize when she is being evaluated fairly and when she is not.

I feel inspired by this book even though our educational and religious values are very different than those of the Nabrit family. As white parents raising a black daughter, we lack a strong support group who recognizes our struggles. There’s a tendency among well-meaning white people (friends and family) to say, “Don’t make such a big deal about all of this.”

That’s another big issue. Many well-meaning white people so badly want to believe that the only racism is overt (because it’s easy to avoid being an overt racist) that they dismiss the more insidious forms of racism. I think I have this tendency, too, and so I worry about my ability to recognize when race is a factor in Madison’s life. Yet another reason to keep Madison home; can I be an effective advocate for her if so much of instutional racism is invisible to me? Better that we spend the early years at home all of us learning together how to best effectively parent our black daughter in a racist world and building up a community who will mentor us and mentor Madison.

(One more encouragement to interested parties: The book is extremely well written and so is lovely to read. You can get a sense of this in the interview linked to in the first paragraph of this entry.)

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