Racism on the Playground: Notes From Parenthood

Abstract

“It’s only okay to call a Black person an idiot”—this statement marks the launch point for a personal essay about one family’s negotiation of an act of racism that occurs in an afterschool conversation among 6-year-olds. A work of educational criticism, the essay takes on the school’s passive refusal to acknowledge race and racism, instead preferring empty affirmations of multicultural tolerance and diversity. Centering the experiences of the author, his partner, and his son, who identifies as mixed-race, the essay isolates three points of critique, which focus on how a school’s embedded language practices—often subtle—can foreclose engagements with race and racism, how performative kindness can be wielded by schools toward discriminatory ends, and how anti-racism avoidance among educational leaders can function to construct the existence of school racism as a family’s private burden to bear.