Racism still exists in the 21st Century

7 Things I Can Do That My Black Son Can’t

Calvin HennickDecember 28, 2014

The writer with his son. Photo courtesy of Calvin Hennick.

Since Yahoo Parenting launched on Oct. 23, the editors and writers have posted nearly 600 stories on the site. They chose this article – originally published on Oct. 27 – as a highlight of the pieces that offer trusted advice, inspire provocative conversations, and hopefully add a little fun to your life, every day.

In the days after the Michael Brown shooting, I wrote an essay titled “I Hope My Son Stays White,” detailing my fears about what might happen to my biracial three-year-old son if he grows up to have dark skin. The upshot: America, to its shame, is still a place where black males are feared, and I don’t want that fear to turn itself on my son in a way that leads to his arrest or death.

STORY: Dad’s Conversations About Race: ‘Most White Kids Don’t Get This Talk’

I published the piece on Ebony.com, and the reactions from black readers ranged from “sad but true” to allegations that I myself was engaging in the very racism and colorism that I was decrying. But buried among these was a comment from a white reader who accused me of “sucking up to black folk” and then went on to list the supposed advantages of being black in America. (Apparently, according to this reader, my son will have an unearned fast track to a career as an air traffic controller. Um, okay?)

STORY: NFL Star Jason Witten on Life as a Dad and His (Growing) Family

I can’t help but think that, if the essay had been published in an outlet with a larger white readership, many more commenters would have chimed in to deny the continued existence of racism. In my experience, white people (and straight people, and male people, and Christian people — all groups of which I’m a member) tend to dismiss the notion that we’re privileged. It’s an uncomfortable thing to acknowledge that you’re the recipient of unfair benefits, especially when those benefits are often nearly invisible to those who receive them.

But when you’re a parent, those privileges stop being invisible. It’s the reason why male congressmen with daughters are more likely to support women’s issues. It’s the reason why Ohio Sen. Rob Portman suddenly declared his support for same-sex marriage after his son came out as gay. And it’s the reason why, everywhere I look, I see hassles that my son will have to face that I don’t. Here’s a partial list of things I can take for granted, but which will likely be problematic for my son:

1. I Can Walk Through a Store Without Being Followed

To take one high-profile instance, Macy’s and the city of New York recently settled with actor Robert Brown, who was handcuffed, humiliated, and accused of committing credit card fraud after buying an expensive watch at the store.

I never have to worry about this happening to me.

2. I Can Succeed Without It Being Attributed to My Race

When my wife, who is black, received her acceptance letter from Boston College, a peer told her she must have gotten in due to affirmative action, effectively ruining the experience of receiving the letter.

When I succeed, people assume I’ve earned it.

3. I Learned About My Ancestors’ History in School

I can tell you all about Louis XIV, Socrates, and the Magna Carta, but I always wondered when we would finally learn about African history (beyond Pharaohs and pyramids). The subject never came up.

4. I Can Lose My Temper in Traffic

Once, an acquaintance who got into a confrontation while driving told me how scared she was of the other driver, describing him as a “big black guy.” When I get heated, no one attributes it to my race.

5. I Can Loiter in Wealthy Neighborhoods

No one has ever called the cops on me to report a “suspicious person.” My wife can’t say the same.

6. I Can Complain About Racism

When I point out that black people are incarcerated at alarming rates, or largely forced to send their children to underperforming schools, or face systemic discrimination when searching for jobs and housing, no one accuses me of “playing the race card.”

7. I Can Count on Being Met on My Own Terms

If I’m being treated poorly, I don’t stop and think about whether it’s due to my race. But unless we somehow make a giant leap forward, my son will always have to wonder.

Recently, I became a father for the second time. My daughter, only three months old, will grow up to face many of the same challenges as my son, on top of the extra ones that come with being a woman: the struggle for equal pay, the catcalling, the constant threat of sexual assault.

I don’t want to give my children a complex about all of this, but I can’t wish these problems away, either. I can’t eliminate all the unfair hurdles that exist in the world. I can only do my best to raise kids who are able to jump over them.

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Language Acuisition

Several studies have shown that young children from disadvantaged homes are more likely to enter school with a tremendous vocabulary gap when compared to their peers from more advantaged backgrounds.  Some experts estimate that the gap can mean about 30 million fewer words than their more advantaged counterparts.
Writing for Education Week, Sarah D. Sparks supports this finding by summarizing several studies, but she also explains that a little-regarded factor in the poorer language acquisition for these children is the quality of conversation that parents have with their children.  These children tend to enter school far behind their peers and are unlikely to catch up in subsequent school years.  Sparks reports on one part of a significant study, Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experiences of Young Children, that it’s important to do more than just bombard young children with words.  Associate professor in early language and communication and the director of the Children’s Project in Kansas City, Kansas stated, “We don’t want to just distill it down to a numbers game, because … the important message to take away is not the poor versus wealthy families, but the opportunities children have to interact with rich language.”
Jill Gilkerson, director of LENA Research Foundation in Boulder, Colorado explains, “Conversational turns are vastly more important than the number of words a child is exposed to.”  Parents should work to engage their young ones in back and forth exchanges and less “short directives” because this does not create turns in conversation.
View this example of positive parent-child interaction from the article on the Education Week article:



 https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=44&v=VV9pOkmnKCY

The Adolescent Brain By Deborah Williams

 
Adolescence. Just the mere mention of the word brings shudders to most parents.  Some remember going through it with their previously delightful children.  Others have not experienced it yet, but they dread what could be their parenting nightmare!  Writing for the NPR blog Mind Shift, Cory Turner explains things that parents might be surprised to learn.  There’s a “dirty little secret of adolescence:  The cloudy judgment and risky behavior may not last a year or two.  Try a decade.”
As if that was not enough, there’s more to learn.  Because of changes in their brains, teenagers often begin making bad choices earlier than parents may have thought: not at 16 or 17 but beginning at 11 or 12 years of age.  So, they begin to make bad decisions around 11 years of age, and this poor judgment lasts for about 10 ears!
Additionally, an experiment led by Temple University’s psychology professor Laurence Steinberg confirmed what many adults figured out:  Teenagers are more likely to engage in risky behaviors if they are with other teens.  The results of  brain scans of teens during a driving game showed that teens take a similar number of risks as adults  when they are “driving” alone; however, when they are with other teens, they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors.  An immature prefrontal cortex in their brains is the reason.


 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=A9MWpLIT3Mo

Why Children Need To Study Music

A recent article on the Science Daily website reinforces proponents of maintaining arts programs in schools.  Researchers from Northwestern University “found that children who regularly attended music classes and actively participated showed larger improvements in how the brain processes speech and reading scores than their less-involved peers after two years.”  Sitting passively in music classes does not seem to be as beneficial as actively participating.
Researchers found that the type of music classes was important.  “Students who played instruments in class improved more than the children who attended the music appreciation group.”  This type of engagement strengthened students’ neural processing in the brain.  Lead author Nina Kraus, professor of communication sciences in the School of Communication and of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, explained, “Our results support the importance of active experience and meaningful engagement with sound to stimulate changes in the brain.”
Researchers from Northwestern also looked at data from the Harmony Project, which looks for scientific evidence of academic success of some of its students.  Northwestern researchers found that “two years of music training—but not one—improved the brains’ ability to distinguish similar-sounding syllables, a skill linked to literacy.”

Stop Burying Yourself in Debt by Kevin Oleary

I get a lot of questions about how to get rich, and I always give the same answer.
Don’t spend too much. Mostly save. Always invest.
Seems simple enough, right? Yet so many people do the exact opposite—invest poorly, spend way too much, save almost nothing, and remain willfully ignorant about their finances.
Why? Because they don’t understand their relationship to money.
The first step in changing money habits is taking a cold hard look at your financial input and output. Here’s what you need to do: boil your money matters down to one simple number by adding up all your earnings and subtracting all your expenditures over three months. I call this your 90-day number.

Once you write that 90-day number down you’ll be faced with one of two truths.

1. Your number is positive. Congratulations, you’re one of the few people taking in more money than you spend!
2. Your number is in the negatives, and like the majority of men and women, you spend more than you make.

The good news is that no matter what your 90-day number teaches you about your relationship with money, there’s always room to improve. I’m going to help you do exactly that by pointing out 3 money mistakes everybody makes at some point in their lives, and teaching you how to fix them.

Money Mistake #1: You’re drowning in credit debt.
The Fix: READ THE FINE PRINT
Spending too much is a disease, and credit card debt is a cancer. The first time you get a credit card bill and don’t pay off the full balance, you’ve let the first financial cancer cell into your life.
Next time you get a credit card bill in the mail, put your glasses on and take a good, hard look at the fine print.
Credit card companies are required by law to tell you how many years it will take you to pay off your balance if you pay the minimum each month. In most instances, this number is a monstrous thing to behold.
With typical compound interest rates averaging around 16%, this black hole of debt keeps growing, and growing, and growing.
Once you take a look at the fine print, you MUST start dedicating every spare penny you have to paying off your credit. If you want to get rich, you need to eliminate your debt first.

Money Mistake #2: Spending makes you happy
The Fix: GET A HANDLE ON EMOTIONAL SPENDING
Most men and women who spend too much do so because it feels good, temporarily. But as I always say, mixing money with emotions is a toxic combination.
Don’t go shopping to change your mood. It might make you feel better in the short term, but I promise: the long-term fulfillment of saving and growing your money far outweighs the temporary satisfaction of retail therapy.
Recognize when you’re about to spend with your emotions, and go for a walk, cook, or read instead. Do anything; just don’t head for the mall!

Money Mistake #3: Frugality isn’t fun
The Fix: CREATE A “FUN MONEY” FUND
Many people who commit themselves 100% to eliminating debt and saving money find that a certain joylessness creeps in after a while. The same thing happens to dieters who deprive themselves of all their favorite foods for months, and then cave to late-night binges.
That’s not a way to live, and that’s not what I advocate. Austerity, yes; deprivation, no.
The key is to include spending on fun things in your budget. Set aside a manageable percentage every week in a fund that will let you splurge with cash. Go out for lunch, get your hair done, or use your fun money to go on a vacation—do whatever you want, as long as you pay for it outright. This way you can enjoy your splurges without feeling guilty!
Read more about finding financial freedom in the Cold Hard Truth On Men, Women, and Money.

Developing Early Literacy by in Young Children by Deborah Williams

Today’s youth were born into a high technology world; they have always been around electronic screens and had instant access to information.  It is not surprising, then, that many children have been exposed to sophisticated graphics and animations at a very young age, but a recent report on the Science Daily website explains that a new study shows,  “…early writing, preceding any formal education, plays an instrumental role in improving a child’s literacy level, vocabulary, and fine motor skills.”  These findings suggest that parents probably should shift from teaching letters of the alphabet to also helping their children to connect the sounds to the letters on paper.
The study was conducted by Professor Dorit Aram of the Jaime and Joan Constantiner School of Education of Tel Aviv University and with Professor Samantha W. Bindman of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other US colleagues.  Professor Aram studied adult support of young children’s writing.  One type of support, “grapho-phonemic mediation,” involves the adult being “actively involved in helping a child break down a word into segments to connect sounds to corresponding letters.”  Professor Aram studied the levels of parental support for 135 ethnically-diverse, middle-income preschool children during a writing activity at a semi-structured birthday party.
Researchers found that parental support was most useful in developing early literacy skills in young children.   “The thing is to encourage children to write, but to remember that in writing, there is a right and a wrong,” said Prof. Aram. “We have found that scaffolding is a particularly beneficial activity, because the parent guides the child. And, if that parent guides the child and also demands precision in a sensitive and thoughtful way — i.e. ‘what did you mean to write here? Let me help you’ — this definitely develops the child’s literary skill set.”

SAT or ACT

By Deborah Williams

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Adding to the confusion and anxiety of applying to college is the entrance exam.  A recent post on the Edweek College Bound blog reports, “Some students are opting for the SAT over the ACT because they mistakenly believe that the College Board’s exam is favored by colleges.”
A survey of Kaplan SAT students found that one-third thought that colleges accepted the College Board’s SAT exam results more than the American College Test (ACT).  Both tests help colleges to determine an applicant’s readiness for college, but the SAT is more popular in the eastern United States while the ACT is more popular in the western and southern parts of the country.
That probably explains the primary reason for the regional disparity in America: peer influence.  The survey shows that 24 percent of SAT test-prep participants admitted to taking that exam because their friends were taking it.  Paul Weeks, vice president of client relations for ACT, Inc. confirms this in an email:  “Test-taking patterns and behaviors are regional and can be impacted by different influencers ranging from peers to parents. There are still many myths and misrepresentations out there, but we’re glad to see them diminishing.”
The tide is changing because the ACT has surpassed the SAT in recent years and “is now the most popular college-entrance exam.”  The myth has been dispelled:  “…all four-year U.S. colleges equally accept results of an ACT or SAT exam for consideration in the admissions process.