Children, race, education

My first impulse is to blame the school system. The pressure from No Child Left Behind, the federal legislation that forces schools to devote more and more time to math and reading, has squeezed social studies into a tight little corner of the schedule. The sad result is a lot of ignorance about our time and place in history.

I quickly turn to feeling guilty for not educating my children better myself. We had marched against the Iraq War, and against global warming, and served meals to homeless women. How had I neglected to impart such essential information about the history of race relations? I flashed back ten years to when I used to entertain my young children with a video of Sweet Honey in the Rock performing their annual Martin Luther King Day concert. Then one day, my five-year-old daughter said, "Mama, don't play that tape. It makes me feel bad about being a white person." I decided maybe I had been too zealous in cramming my activist agenda down their throats. Why not let them be innocent children, and perhaps grow into a "post racial" future? Did I need to indoctrinate them with such heavy history?

Barack Obama and I are both 47 years old. For people our age, racial turbulence is not just history, but a vivid memory. When I was a child in Boston, black children were bused to my white public school, and white people threw rocks at the buses. Obama and I share a birth year, but I also like to think that we share membership in the hybridized future. We're both "mutts" as he put it recently, and proud of it too. I have one Jewish parent and one Christian parent. I see the world through both lenses, and have spent my life trying to build bridges between cultures. The very first time I heard Obama speak at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, I could not help seeing in this fellow intercultural child the embodiment of peacemaking, diplomacy, the ability to put yourself in another's shoes. Interracial, interfaith, immigrant children have these gifts thrust on them. The gifts can be a burden, but they can also inspire someone like Obama to break barriers and unite people.

As we make our way through the Civil Rights Institute, my children rapidly shed their innocence. A Klu Klux Klan robe and hood hangs limp and ghastly white inside a plexiglass case. My son is horrified by the photograph of boys his age, wearing those same garments, their hoods pushed back to reveal smiling faces as they stand in front of a burning cross. "But mom, why a cross? Isn't what they're doing against everything Christianity stands for?" Yes, exactly. At least he is benefiting from his education in both Judaism and Christianity.

Then we lean against the bars of an actual cell from the Birmingham jail and stare in at a spare cot as we listen to Dr. King's voice reading the famous letter he wrote while he was held there: "you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people." My children are hushed, struggling to imagine segregation. I think of the two Obama girls, who lost their white great-grandmother only days before the election. If they spend the next eight years in the White House, will they, will all little girls, grow up free of such bitterness?

Inscribed "I ain't afraid of your jail," this sculpture commemorates the 1963 Children's March to protest the arrest of Dr. King in Birmingham.

At the Civil Rights Institute, the grainy television segments and black and white news clippings of lunch counters, firehoses, police dogs, seem like ancient history to my children. I keep exclaiming, "1963, I was born already then! 1968, I remember when that happened..." But they are growing up in such a different time, in such a multicultural place, going to public schools where white children are the minority. A part of me finds it thrilling that they find the "Civil Rights era" so safely distant. A part of me is deeply troubled, because I know it is not so distant at all. As we emerge from the museum, an African-American woman exits just behind us and calls out warmly to me, "Don't be so depressed!" Perhaps she feels Obama's call, uniting us. But there, just across the street from the Institute, stands the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four little girls died in a Ku Klux Klan bombing in 1963. They were 11 and 14 years old, the exact ages of my children. I shudder.

The 16th Street Baptist Church, across the street from the Civil Rights Institute. Four girls died in the bombing of the church in 1963

The next day, we drive into the Alabama countryside. My daughter is reading To Kill a Mockingbird in ninth grade. We stop to take a picture of a small town courthouse with Greek columns that looks very much like the one described in that seminal Alabama novel about race and justice. It feels like we are driving back in time, or through a movie set. We see a field of cotton, and pull over so that the kids can run out and gather souvenirs. They are delighted by the fluffy whiteness. I am uncomfortable as I photograph them bending down to pick the bolls. They are unaware of any irony, oblivious to the strange harmonic vibrations given off by the image of white children picking cotton.

But then, everything feels different after this election, as if we have finally reversed some historical tide. A black, biracial President is heading to the White House. My daughter, 14, is already excited about casting her first vote to reelect Obama in 2012. Her little brother is jealous, because he won't be old enough. He wants to know if we can amend the constitution so that Obama can have a third term, and then he can vote for him too. As consolation, I take him into the voting both with me, and when no one is looking, I let him touch the screen to cast my precious ballot. Driving home from the poll, he says, "Mom, when they look back in history, the era of discrimination will start with slavery and end in 2008." If only it were so. Clearly, we have some more educating to do. I meet his soaring hope with skepticism, and yet I cannot help feeling an involuntary rush, as if I am being lifted into the air.