Teaching White Children of Queer Families About Race

• Share This Post
• Pin It
• 0
• 0
• Sparkle (
  0
  )
   

For the purposes of this piece, I am going to sometimes use the word “we” to refer to white parents and white children. I apologize that, in so doing, I am leaving out readers of color. I welcome readers, parents, and children of color to respond to anything in this piece. But I am intentionally writing this piece as a conversation directed towards queer white parents, particularly those with white children.

We have done the research at least twenty times over. We have published the results in the queer press and in Newsweek. CNN has sat down with our researchers and given them airtime. We know that the children of lesbians and gays (and once in a while, we’ve looked at the children of bisexual and transgender parents) are just as fucked up and just as brilliant as the children of their straight counterparts. Some of our studies have even said that “our” kids are a bit more clued in about diversity, sexual freedoms and sexual options. One recent study even said our kids have a higher change of winning the Nobel Prize. So now we know. Our kids are ok or maybe even better than ok. Maybe growing up as the children of LGBT parents has given them an advantage, a kind of leg up on the humanity ladder. Reading this, researching this, helps us to breathe a bit easier. We haven’t hurt them by coming out.

There are a range of LGBT family or parenting support organizations out there. Most focus in some way on the concept: “Making the world safe for our children.” As a parent, this gets me right in the gut. I want the world to be “safe” for my daughter, too. But then something else comes up right away: What does safe mean? What does it mean that our kids are ok? Which kids are we talking about –- and is “ok” the same for each one of our children?

There is something my partner and I have told our daughter since her birth. On the day she was born, there were thousands of other children born at the same time. We tell her that there was nothing magical about her birth. Babies are born every day all over the world. They are only special to the people who love and know them. We tell our daughter that she is no more or less special than any one of those other thousands born at the same time. We don’t tell our daughter this to counter the messages she might get as the child of queer parents. We tell her this to counter the message she gets as a white child growing up with economic stability. We tell her this to try to counter her privilege.

There is no doubt that our daughter, Luca, feels struggle around having two queer parents, particularly one that is gender-nonconforming. She gets tired of explaining that she doesn’t have a father. She has dealt with some kids who have been pretty insensitive in their opinions about queerness. She has seen the stares directed towards her butch mother, the questions about the facial hair and the confusion about maleness versus femaleness. There are times, she admits, that she wished her family just fit in. And there are other times when she revels in the broad queerness of her community.

This is part of who she is. She gets a great deal of support around this, is building an identity around it, and as she gets older will teach us what this means and where we need to back off. Being the child of queer parents is part of who Luca is. And then there is more; she is also a white child. She is being raised by white parents who have the privilege of education, who own their own home and who can leave the house everyday feeling some measure of control over what happens out in the world. We don’t have to protect Luca daily from violence or spend most of our time finding food. We don’t have concerns about how the police are going to interact with our daughter when she is hanging out in the park across the street. Our daughter of a queer family can move through the world largely ignored except when she wants to be seen or except when she is hanging out with that family