| > I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. My local PBS station recently aired a series on Asian Americans. The first episode was all about how they were ill treated in the past, and their fight for civil liberties. I didn't bother watching the other episodes. Certainly not a show I'll ever let my (Asian) children watch. It was a good episode if the topic was specifically about civil right struggles by Asian Americans, but deciding to start a series about a whole group of people with how they were mistreated is problematic. There's a lot more to Asian Americans than just their treatments by whites. Why not begin with their achievements and cultures, and leave this for a later episode? Is their mistreatment so important to their identity? If I watched a series on African Americans, and it began with all the (real) systemic racism - their low graduation rates, high teen pregnancies, high unemployment, and tied it to the centuries of slavery, it would be equally problematic. Why not begin the series with things like "Every single new genre of American music in the 20th century (rap, rock n roll, etc) was pioneered by African Americans"? How many people know the negatives, and how many know this accomplishment? Ask yourself: Would a documentary series starting with their problematic statistics result in more people knowing the negatives vs the positives? When I talk to people from my home country, you'll see this dissonance: They all sympathize with the "plight of the black man", and they'll all tell me to stay away from them. They watch documentaries like these. I don't want my children growing up believing they are victims of society, even if there is truth to it. I grew up in a third country, and my race was definitely discriminated against in nasty ways. Yet my parents and school did not try to inculcate a sense of victimhood, and I can tell you - it's extremely beneficial not to be weighed down by that belief. And the racism there was more overt than here - often having to deal with it in stores and in school. Of course, there will be conversations with my kids about it. But it will be somewhere in the middle of the list of important discussions to have, not on the top. |