MLK Day March and Inauguration

We marched in the MLK day parade again, this time with Sunny. He had a great time. I didn't take any video footage this year, or I'd post it.

Today he'll be watching the inauguration at his school.

American Family just had an interesting post about "dumbing down" King's message in school. It makes me think about how I teach these issues to Sunny. It's so hard to think of how to balance everything. I feel like he's very fragile. He's just now learning what being African-American means, and that he himself is African-American. I don't want to push him too hard and tell him what he is or how he has to identify himself. I don't want him to think that being African-American means cutting himself off from his multiracial heritage and his white family. I just drop things now and then, such as telling him how Barack Obama is a lot like Sunny because he is black but his mother is white.

Whiteness is an insanely difficult concept to grasp for an adult, much less a six-year-old.

Since Sunny goes to a very diverse, minority-white school, one that I know doesn't tolerate bullying, I don't have to worry so much about direct attacks with racist abuse. I do have to worry about more subtle but powerful problems, like colorism among the black kids.

I also trust his school to teach history. So far he hasn't come home with anything that sounds wrong to me. He knows, in very general terms, about slavery. We're still working on the Civil War. I recently explained that Atlanta was burned to the ground and that's why we don't have any nice older buildings like some other cities do. He wanted to know who the good guys were and the who the bad guys were and which side we were on. I couldn't really answer to his satisfaction. I said the North was right and the South was wrong, so even though a lot of people died in the war, a great thing came out of it: slavery ended.

I didn't tell him that my ancestors on my mother's side fought for the Confederacy. I did tell him, once, that when my mother was born, it was illegal for her to marry my father. I don't think he could grasp that yet -- he looked so confused -- so this kind of family history is something to put off for another year until he's ready. And talking about race in my maternal family is going to be more pleasant than talking about race in his biological family...

In a way, it's easy to teach this kind of history because we're surrounded by it. Today, waiting for the march to start, we were standing next to a Civil War plaque on the ground that commemorated the first civilian death in 1864. At the end of the march, I pointed out to Sunny the church in which Martin Luther King Jr., and his father before him, preached. I'm trying to keep things factual, and also tied to the present day. King's message is relevant to a huge spectrum of social issues, from local to global, represented at the parade yesterday. Stopping the execution of Troy Davis. Union solidarity and the Employee Free Choice Act. Peace in Palestine.

I don't think Sunny is ready to understand how bad things really were/are. I wouldn't take him to any exhibit on segregation or slavery. In a year's time, he might be, and even if he's not he'll start absorbing it anyway, so I have to be ready.

It's so strange the things he tends to focus on. The fact that Lincoln was shot in a theater seems to haunt him, and he brings it up now and then out of the blue. He's fascinated by violence and shooting, the kind you see in video games and children's cartoons (and I don't think it's an abnormal fascination at all, or else these cartoons wouldn't be full of it) but he really has a very low tolerance for realistic versions. "Hide my eyes, mom! Tell me when it's safe to look!" he'll say. I think that's why he likes Scooby Doo so much... it's a safe way to be scared.

I feel torn about the inauguration today. I want him to understand how important this milestone is. But to understand the real importance, he would have to understand the pain. He doesn't now, but he will soon.