![]() ![]() I'm Dave Davies, in today for Terry Gross. And that means you have to challenge the idea that you're supposed to love these people as this category, as opposed to make assessments in terms of who you encounter and how they treat you and how they see the world.This is FRESH AIR. ![]() you actually have to question it constantly. And I think that's really important because the messages are just so overwhelming from a very young age. And I'm actually going to make decisions based upon whether another person can fully acknowledge me. And the question with each individual is, what are your values? Can you fully respect me? Can you care for me? Can you love me? In some ways it sort of turns the question of colorblindness on its head: OK, we want to be colorblind, and I'm not going to make decisions about who I care for based upon who the society says is more important. It's not to love white people as a category, but individuals. On a controversial line in Breathe that says, "I have taught you not to love white people"įor me, it's to love people as people, but not white people as such. I want them to fly, to feel a sense of expansiveness and possibility. And I also felt that it was really important that I not raise them to move with fear as a dominant emotion because I didn't want to clip their wings. And I felt so often that my parenting was being diminished to racism. They were funny and smart and imaginative and curious, and every day is just kind of a beautiful adventure. ![]() I know that people didn't have bad intentions, but it felt so voyeuristic and it also felt like it diminished the incredible beauty of raising children. On her reaction when people have said, "It must be terrifying to raise a Black boy in America" Obviously there's both Coates' Between the World and Me and Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and the "Letter to My Nephew," but I also wanted to think very specifically about gender in that, too, and what it meant to try to talk about all of these issues from the perspective of a woman and particularly of a feminist, someone who wanted to also raise sons who were free from all of the burdens and the attitudes associated with patriarchy, wanting to raise sons who could be fully expressive of the complexity of who they are and to really feel free even while knowing that things are not completely free in this world. I wanted to raise my children themselves and their possibilities as greater than what the society anticipated for them or how they were seen. The ideas about race, we get them from the way the stage was set in the South from the beginning.Īuthor Interviews Ta-Nehisi Coates On Police Brutality, The Confederate Flag And Forgiveness ![]() That attitude, that belief system about human beings is what allowed for the exploitation of Black labor, the moving out of Indigenous people, all of those sorts of things. that does come from Southern history, but it is American history too. Some of that doesn't exist in quite the same way in Northern cities.īut the attitudes, the idea that people are inferior on the basis of being Black. There's these sort of silent spaces that exist so that people can negotiate around each other and around history. Those moments are not going to be casually passed by anymore. There were a lot of people who gave their lives for it. If someone hurls a slur at me in Birmingham, there's almost certainly going to be violence to follow. I have never in any place in the South had someone call me a racial slur.īut also part of the reason I haven't heard slurs in the South is that something will happen if that moment occurs. That's the place where I experienced racial terror with bottles thrown at our car and having slurs hurled at me. People are astonished when I tell them this, but my fear about race as a kid was ignited in Boston. ![]()
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