This is the sort of thing that has driven the right on their crusade against "CRT." And this isn't the only item -- if you pay attention you'll a find a healthy trickle of stuff like this.
This is an activist minded woman pushing a book focusing on 'whiteness' issues on Kindergartners. I'm sure the book has some salient points, but comes loaded with a bunch of problematic language and ideas that don't need to be foisted upon little kids.
Nastasia Higginbotham is the author of Ordinary Terrible Things, a widely praised children’s-book series that aims to address difficult subjects head on. In a recent article, I questioned whether her book Not My Idea—which is now being used in public-school curricula for young children—was appropriate for kindergartners. (Readers curious about the book’s content can consult the actor John Jimerson’s reading on YouTube.)
Not My Idea begins with a white child seeing footage of a police officer murdering a Black man on television and the child’s mother trying to shield her from the images. At times, I thought that it crossed the line from education into indoctrination. Higginbotham, to put it mildly, disagreed with my criticism. “I am not saying this is indicative of your character or beliefs in any way—you clearly believe and affirm that Black lives matter,” she declared to me in an email. “I am asserting that indoctrination into whiteness and anti-Blackness is evident in your framing.”
Clearly we had deep disagreements over an issue families and educators all over America are grappling with: What exactly should we teach children about race, police killings, and the relationship between the two? I suggested to Higginbotham that we air our differences through an email exchange, and she agreed.
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.
Courtesy of Dottir Press
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.
What age group did you write your book to reach? Although I agree with your general ethos of speaking frankly to kids about hard topics, teaching about police killings in kindergarten seems too young to me. And what does it mean for a system to have “violent white supremacy” embedded within it? Is violent white supremacy embedded in today’s U.S. Postal Service? The Brooklyn Public Library? I’m not trying to be glib. But you said “all our systems.” Many systems in America are clearly neither violent nor white supremacist.
Read: The problem with police-shooting videos
This is an activist minded woman pushing a book focusing on 'whiteness' issues on Kindergartners. I'm sure the book has some salient points, but comes loaded with a bunch of problematic language and ideas that don't need to be foisted upon little kids.
‘Nobody Wants White Kids to Feel Bad About Their Race’
The children’s-book author Anastasia Higginbotham and I disagree about how to teach young Americans about police killings and racism.
www.theatlantic.com
Nastasia Higginbotham is the author of Ordinary Terrible Things, a widely praised children’s-book series that aims to address difficult subjects head on. In a recent article, I questioned whether her book Not My Idea—which is now being used in public-school curricula for young children—was appropriate for kindergartners. (Readers curious about the book’s content can consult the actor John Jimerson’s reading on YouTube.)
Not My Idea begins with a white child seeing footage of a police officer murdering a Black man on television and the child’s mother trying to shield her from the images. At times, I thought that it crossed the line from education into indoctrination. Higginbotham, to put it mildly, disagreed with my criticism. “I am not saying this is indicative of your character or beliefs in any way—you clearly believe and affirm that Black lives matter,” she declared to me in an email. “I am asserting that indoctrination into whiteness and anti-Blackness is evident in your framing.”
Clearly we had deep disagreements over an issue families and educators all over America are grappling with: What exactly should we teach children about race, police killings, and the relationship between the two? I suggested to Higginbotham that we air our differences through an email exchange, and she agreed.
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.
Courtesy of Dottir Press
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.
What age group did you write your book to reach? Although I agree with your general ethos of speaking frankly to kids about hard topics, teaching about police killings in kindergarten seems too young to me. And what does it mean for a system to have “violent white supremacy” embedded within it? Is violent white supremacy embedded in today’s U.S. Postal Service? The Brooklyn Public Library? I’m not trying to be glib. But you said “all our systems.” Many systems in America are clearly neither violent nor white supremacist.
Read: The problem with police-shooting videos