Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 49
Teaching Kids about Whiteness: A Conversation with Anastasia Higginbotham
Happy Friday!
Today’s Hot Takes section is a conversation with children’s book author Anastasia Higginbotham. I came across her newest book, ‘Not my Idea: A Book About Whiteness,” earlier this year when I first started the newsletter. I talked extensively about her and other white anti-racist authors in Vol.17 of the newsletter (refresher below if needed).
I thought it was only fair that I try and get her perspective on how white authors should be coming into the anti-racism writing space and what it was like to write a book like this (and the ensuing Fox News backlash). I found the conversation to be refreshing and honest. While I’m no parent myself, after our conversation, I dove into the world of anti-racism children’s book authors — and have already developed a list of books that I’d like to read to my future children. ‘Not My Idea’ is on that list, as I think it opens up an avenue for a conversation about whiteness that many parents (of all races) are willing to have.
You can head to the Q&A section to read our convo. In addition, she’s on Twitter, Instagram here, and here’s her website.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
Vox: Did critical race theory really swing the Virginia election?
USA Today: Rage about race: How politicians used 'critical race theory' to ignite voters
LA Times: ‘Beverly Hills while Black’: Race, wealth, policing collide on Rodeo Drive
CNBC: 66% of Black borrowers say they regret taking out student loans
ABC 13: National figures spar over Black reparations in ABC13-UH debate
The Hill: Marxism is the new false flag to plant upon critical race theory
Salon: How Democrats can win the critical race theory war: Call out the Christian right behind the movement
Brookings: What does the Build Back Better Framework mean for BIPOC communities?
NPR: Active-duty police in major U.S. cities appear on purported Oath Keepers rosters
Regional News
The Root: Maryland City Passes Referendum To Create Commission for Reparations Study
International News
Globe and Mail: Canada shows how little it has learned by continuing to fight First Nations kids in court
Hot Takes
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Trevor: Can you talk a little bit about your childhood? When were you first introduced to the concept of whiteness and that racism existed?
Anastasia: That’s a deep question. You really want to dive straight into it. First, I want to say that I am familiar with your newsletter, and I love that you’re focused on reparations, and I’m interested in learning more.
I grew up in Southwestern Pennslyvania in the suburbs. I am one of five children. My family is white and is also ethnic. My mother’s family is Italian and first-generation, and my father’s mother is Syrian. His father was English. I was raised Roman Catholic and went to church every Sunday. We lived in a neighborhood where we had friends who were Black and people who we considered family, people who we would call Aunt and Uncle, both the Black and white friends of our parents. We didn’t know we weren’t related to everybody until we did.
My family didn’t have language around whiteness but were certainly modeling that we are all humans and love each other. That also doesn’t mean that I didn’t grow up absorbing racism into my thought patterns and feeling very separate from the issue. I understood racism was wrong and something to be mad about, but I did get the message that there was nothing that I could do about it — as if it was a problem too big to solve.
I started to become more radicalized as a teenager toward issues of social justice and when I went to college at University of Maryland, I saw there was a class called the history of spirituality in the South or something like that, and I found myself to be the only white person in the class learning about spirituals. So you can imagine how much I learned in that environment and how much of the world got opened up to me. So, in following my own curiosity and gut interest, I took women’s history, Black history, participated in events, and just was learning so much.
Still, it wasn’t until my late 30’s, and my kids were at a democratic pre-school in Brooklyn, who claimed they were about social justice, but I saw a lot of racism within this private school — even though it was a private school run on a shoestring. So, the Black women at this school who were in charge of the impossible task of calling in white families started these workshops about what it meant to be white. This changed a lot for me. Those conversations and what was happening in the world at the time, which was around the time of Ferguson, made a big bang type of thing happen where I understood my responsibility and power and see how whiteness was allowing me to take up space in a room, what I expected from my kids. I was finally able to see it. It was an amazing revelation.
Trevor: How did this new anti-racist lens that you adopted affect how you raised your children? What was the most notable difference from before this revelation?
Anastasia: So pre-awakening, I just had a tunnel vision about my children and position. I saw that we were part of a great web of corruption and started thinking more deeply about how will we counter the narratives our kids are getting about their specialness and deservingness, including how I let them walk down the sidewalk. You live in New York City, so you know that sidewalk behavior is a thing. When white kids are walking down the sidewalk and taking up all the space and oblivious to adults, it’s obnoxious. In my experience, people from a cultural whiteness mindset allow our children to take up all of the space. So I started to pay more attention to how my children interact in the classroom—asking myself if they listen to their Black teachers as much as they listen to their teachers who are white.
Trevor: In the book, you talk about the white cultural mindset that tells us that ‘white is good and innocent, and Black is bad and dangerous,’ can you say a little more about cultural mindsets and how white people should go about changing them? From your perspective, as a children’s book author, what does that mean for how you approach your work in terms of shifting cultural mindsets?
Anastasia: The education that we get about history, a lot is left out, and it’s so dangerous. The stories that we’re telling our children aren’t true, and there is an entire reality, cultures, experiences, treaties, and legal decisions that are just left out. Getting that education is medicine, but you have to be open to it. I get these emails from EJI — and they are horror stories. Part of what we can do to shift our cultural mindset is to train our nervous system and our physical and mental capacity to bear learning about actual history and be affected by it.
Don’t just turn away and say you can’t stomach it. You have to be willing to be heartbroken and broken down. I have had to break down a white cultural mindset, including the idea that it’s distorted. The way people throw around Dr. King’s words, that the arc of history bends towards progress — but no, it doesn’t. Not with me sitting here ignoring stuff and expecting it to work out and just reaping the spoils of low-interest rates if I move into this neighborhood in Crown Heights. I cannot just turn away from that because it holds up a system designed this way. While I might be using negative words, this has been the most liberating and joyful experience of my life. It is clearing away the distortions, lies, and tricks of whiteness that don’t allow me to see what is in front of me and my responsibility. Being able to see that without so much distortion and illusion is a relief. White people have to cultivate that in a similar way that people cultivate sobriety after dealing with alcoholism. It needs to be a constant, daily practice.
Trevor: Can you talk a bit about the reception of your book? Did you receive a lot of pushback?
Anastasia: I didn’t get pushback for a while. The first pushback that I got was in 2018, and I was doing a book tour — most often in small libraries, and I would bring a cardboard Colin Kaepernick that I had painted. I would put him up beside me and kneel while I read the book, and it was a way that allowed me to align myself with Black liberation and to make sure that the people I was talking to who were primarily white families could see this as an act of love and an act of respect. Somebody at a newspaper saw a picture of me kneeling with this cardboard Colin Kaepernick, and it was like a weather pattern at first. Tucker Carlson said something about me, and there were like 14,000 likes on the video and 7,000 comments, but people were focused on Kaepernick. The bulk of the fury was still aimed at the idea of Black liberation — and no one opened the book.
Then, for almost two years, the people who read the book wanted to understand how to talk to their kids about white supremacy and whiteness. But then, during the pandemic, after Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd were murdered, my book was coming up in Google searches and then it got into the hands of more libraries and more schools, by the time school started again in late 2020, my book was being read to children whose families did not want their children to read that book — and so the pushback is very recent.
Trevor: So what do you say when folks call your book critical race theory?
Anastasia: I don’t even engage with the whole argument over whether it’s critical race theory or not. I say my book is rooted in love, and it’s not indoctrination. It’s a book that depicts indoctrination. The child in the book is experiencing the white family members’ indoctrination into whiteness that tells them that the child is the weird one for having reactions to police brutality. So we watch as page after page, that child feels the vibrations of that harm in their own little white body and wants to know what is going on and is getting unsatisfactory answers.
So the book is giving the white child the space to connect to their instinct. They already know the difference between justice and injustice in their gut, and the book names that and urges them to follow that instinct. So you can connect and learn more about the history and follow that impulse to care — that is what the book urges. The Atlantic interview pushed me to get some things into words that needed to be said. I know why people are calling indoctrination, and everyone is focused on that devil page.
Trevor: Yeah, we’re going to get to that page (laughs), but before we do, I did want to offer some general thoughts. In one of my earlier newsletters, I gave some of my thoughts about Robin Diangelo’s new book ‘Nice Racism’ and whether she should be profiting off of it. So, what are your thoughts about white people profiting off of anti-racism work?
Anastasia: So, Not My Idea did not turn a profit until this year. When I got an actual check for this, which was because of the uprisings of 2020, it was so exciting because I said to myself, ‘now I get to do reparations.’ It came in, and it went back out.
Trevor: Right, so the money you did make, you said that you made ‘reparations,’ with that?
Anastasia: Yes, person-to-person reparations. So, there would be someone in my life who had a problem that could be solved with money. Of course, that could not happen without trust, which had to be built. As soon as I saw that money was coming, I was able to have a conversation with a person dear to me and ask them what they thought I should do with it. It was a quiet, slow, delicate, painful, and joyful process.
Trevor: So, I know we’re running out of time, so I do want to touch on the devil thing. And I want to start by saying that I plan to have folks on the newsletter who I don’t agree with everything on, but I hope to foster conversations grounded in radical love. So, this critique is coming from a place of love because I think it is important for white people to engage in these conversations. The devil depiction is what Fox News and other critics centered on, and from a parent’s perspective, I might look at that and see that this caricature is depicting “whiteness,” as the devil, and my kid is going to think that white people are the devil. Then the folks who are creating the backlash, their target is “Black Lives Matter,” or “Critical Race Theory,” They use these terms as dog-whistles, and then Black people actually have to defend something that a white author wrote. So that is where my critique is coming from. So would love to hear your thoughts and what the thought process was behind the caricature with the devil tail.
Anastasia: That’s fair. That is a fair criticism because you’re saying that I, as the white author, am saying something that draws the ire of critics, but that ire isn’t direct toward me, the white author; it’s directed toward Black and brown people.
Trevor: Exactly
Anastasia: That is the only solid critique that I have heard of that page. Thank you. When I told my six-year-old about white supremacy, he said, “so we’re the bad color, but we’re not bad people, right?” And I thought to myself, “oh no, I messed it up.” But, I explained to him that it depends on what we do. I really believe that. White people who get upset about that page don’t understand that the next page says you can be white without signing on to whiteness. The truth is that no one asks a kid to sign a contract. No white person is asked when they come into the word, ‘is this the system you want?’ We just get ushered into it. So, I put that image as an intervention to try and interrupt that flow and ask kids whether they think it’s a good deal. I feel like children are smart, and when you say this is the deal, you walk them through it and ask them if they want to know whose liberation they are fighting for — the answer is their own.
Trevor: Well, I agree in the sense that when it’s the duty of parents to have deeper conversations with their kids on these topics, and not just topics of race, issues of sex, on gender inequality. Parents have to be ready to have conversations after they read the book. I don’t think you can hand anyone, particularly a child, a book and expect for that to be it.