You know what’s funny? All the people who presume to tell me that my kids didn’t get anything out of their day of protest other than a day off school. The same people tend to assert that my kids don’t have thoughts of their own, but that they’re just aping what mommy and daddy say. (There are, by the way, more comments to this effect than are visible here. They’re not all worth being displayed - not in my space, at least.) I’m not always inclined to dialogue with such people, mostly because it’s not really dialogue they’re after. But I’ll tell YOU what I might say to them. Something like this… “I cant speak for all the kids who protested, but I can speak in relation to mine. You dont know my kids. You dont know what our conversations are like, including the one after the protest when they explained to us what the experience was like for them. You dont know what they’ve witnessed in their lives. You dont know a thing about all the experiences theyve had, all the places theyve been, all the perspectives theyve acquired in their young lives by living overseas, by having family and friends around the globe, from here to New Zealand. You don’t know anything specific about the things they have learned and may feel from having an extended mixed race family that includes fair skinned Scots and dark skinned people of African descent and everything along the spectrum in between. Actually, I could fill a book with many more things that have shaped them that you know nothing about, and I wouldn’t even be getting it all because they’re complete beings in their own right, and their minds are their own. For all these reasons, I humbly assert that you don’t know anything about my kids, and that you have zero authority to speak about them.”
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 16:02:23 +0000
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