‘Nobody Wants White Kids to Feel Bad About Their Race’

Read: How to talk to kids about racism and police

She argues that, at the earliest possible age, white kids should be taught to identify whiteness as the root of racial injustice so that they can reject the pervasive racism that they would otherwise embody. I think her account of what causes police killings is too monocausal and that her zeal for uprooting racism sometimes strays into overgeneralization based in racial stereotyping. Regardless, her message that kids can choose to reject racism is laudable, and many school districts find it valuable. What follows is an edited and condensed version of our discussion.

Conor Friedersdorf: Your series of children’s books, Ordinary Terrible Things, tackle divorce, death, and sex before your 2018 title, Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, took on race. What prompted you to choose that subject, and why did you make a police killing the focus of the plot?

Anastasia Higginbotham: My children’s school was hosting workshops for families about how whiteness affects us—what we see, what we miss, and where we can go astray even when we care about undoing racism. Those conversations, led by Black women, shifted my experience. Before, I was mad and sad about racism, but I was alienated from it, as if it were happening over there, to someone else. It became something I understood from the inside out, a body awareness of the racism in me that was not a moral failure but a failure of attention, a failure to notice its presence and root it out, choice by choice. I thought, Kids will understand this. Kids will get that this game is rigged and they will want no part of it. The earlier we tell them, the sooner they can choose how they want to be.

I started with a shooting because videos of police officers killing unarmed Black people were coming out one after the other—same as now. Each time the Black community would gather to say “Stop killing our families!,” police would violently attack them too. It’s our responsibility to help children cope with life exactly as it is and grow in the process, whether it’s divorce, death, sexuality, or violent white supremacy embedded into all of our systems.

Friedersdorf: My awareness of race and policing began at 11, when I saw the videotape of cops beating Rodney King. I felt that I had witnessed a kind of evil, and I wanted no part of it. But an 11-year-old seeing video of Rodney King or George Floyd, feeling That’s just wrong, and being awakened to the fact of racial disparities in policing and bad cops who perpetrate brutality seems rather different than an 11-year-old awakening to any conclusion as sweeping as “violent white supremacy” is “embedded into all of our systems.” That’s a contestable claim, and presenting it as fact to children too young to evaluate a matter so complex seems dogmatic to me.