It's All Us

"Our son is 5 years old and in kindergarten. It’s bedtime and I am in his room to tuck him in and kiss him goodnight. He has had a rough day at school and as he turns his head toward me, I see tears streaming down his face. I ask him why he’s crying. “I want to die, Mommy. I don’t want to be brown anymore.” I feel like someone has just stabbed me in the heart.

We are white. Our two children, adopted at birth, are Black. We raised them with the loving help of our friends and our community, both Black and white. As for most parents, raising our kids has been the most rewarding journey of our lives. It has also been utterly heartbreaking. Time and again, we found that in spite of our white privilege, money, advanced education, professional positions, plus our long experience in fighting — and beating — the system, and the famously liberal area in which we live, we could not protect our children from devastating racism.

Starting from the day Shawna and Stephen left the warm cocoon of our family home for preschool, our daughter and son consistently ran into a degree of ignorance and cruelty (both subtle and blatant) that we didn’t want to admit existed in our country, let alone in the progressive college town in which we live. We thought our children would be safe here. We thought they’d be safe with us as their parents. They weren’t. Facing this ugly truth again and again was a chronic and recurring wakeup call. Were we failing as parents? Was there really nothing we could do to protect our children from the narrow-mindedness and hatred of others?

Luckily, we had a second wakeup call, one that opened the way to resolving some of the situations our kids were thrust into. We came to realize that we would never make an ounce of progress with all the teachers, parents, and police officers whose behavior was hurting our children until we admitted that we were just as human — and flawed — as they were. We had to acknowledge that we, too, had unconscious beliefs about who was better, who was right, who was more ethical or more spiritual or more sincere. We, too, had hurt people with our beliefs. We, too, were contributing to the prevailing “us vs. them” mentality. We “knew,” for example, that the entire Greek side of our extended family hated Blacks and gays, that a white principal would never stand up for our son against a band of white parents, and that the cops would never be on our side. (Fortunately, we were wrong. Many times.)

As it turned out, whenever we dehumanized other people by labeling them “racists” or “homophobes” and ignoring who they were as individuals, we were demolishing any possibility of improving the situation for our kids. We came to see that admitting our own biases and sharing this uncomfortable, all-too-human common ground was the only workable starting point for talking with people about racism (or any other “ism”). And talking about it was only the starting point for improving things. Whenever we succeeded in changing the way some people looked at and treated our children, it was because we approached them in a spirit of shared humanity and they were willing to change.

This is not to say that we didn’t lose it at times. We did, many times. But as time went on, we got better at not being self-righteously right. We changed, too. “They” changed us — and for the better. We learned how to stand in a place of common humanity long enough to move things forward with people we once called our enemies. Life has dealt all of us far more pain than we ever expected. But as parents and now grandparents, we’ve also experienced far more love and joy than we ever imagined possible in our lives. Most days we’re not bitter, or angry or in despair. We’re in this for the long haul, good and bad, feeling the pain of the racial wound in America and working to help heal it.

We’ve learned there is no “us” and “them.” It’s all us. Together we’ve come a long way in America, and together, we can complete the course."

~ Stacy Cusulos and Barbara Waugh, American Family: Things Racial