Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [108]
RACE: CONSTANT WORRIES, INTERMITTENT INTERVENTIONS
As a Black mother who grew up in a town with racially segregated swimming pools, Ms. Marshall knows from personal experience that subtle forms of discrimination are always present. When her own children face difficulty in an institutional setting, the possibility that they are experiencing racial insensitivity or discrimination automatically looms:
It always comes up for me. And part of that has to do with the fact that I grew up in the [South]. I know what it is to have experienced um . . . just, discrimination. Um . . . I know that subtle—subtle discrimination still exists. Any time something happens, with my kids, you know, . . . on a sports team or whatever, in the classroom, I have to kinda grapple with . . . is, well, is race an issue? There’s a part of me that believes that . . . sometimes it comes into play—in terms of labeling or—or categorizing. You know. Um . . . when Stacey came out [from the gym at Wright’s] and she said, “Well, Tina was sayin’ these things.” I had to turn an ear. I had to wonder, you know, “Why’s she sayin’ that?”
Trying to decide whether “turning an ear” is sufficient or whether the situation calls for a more active intervention is not easy. Because the potential for racial discrimination is always present, isolating race as the key factor in a specific situation can be hard. Ms. Marshall’s response to Stacey’s experiences at Wright’s is a complicated mixture of ambivalence, second guessing, and insecurity:
[I thought] . . . that it’s, that it’s a racist attitude. And, um . . . that she’s [Tina] [is saying things to Stacey] because this is a little Black kid. You know, that . . . she’s not gonna do it [become a star performer]. However . . . from what I’ve seen, newspaper clippings, they had minority kids who had risen to the top there. So it’s not an issue of the entire team is white [or that] my kid would never get on it. That’s not true. If my kid was good enough, I—I think they would, I—I’m pretty sure that they’d let her on it. You know, primarily because the goal is to win. You know, and if you’re black, red, yellow, green, they would put their kid on the team. You know, because they want to win.
When Fern feels excluded from the camaraderie at her basketball camp (where she is the only Black child among about a hundred girls), Ms. Marshall again hesitates, pondering what the best response might be.
Fern came home one day and she was talkin’ to Stacey about it. She . . . I said, “How are things?” She said, “Fine,” she said, “except for lunch.” I said, “Who’d you eat with?” “Myself.” (Deep sigh from Ms. Marshall)
Fern sees it as a racial issue:
Fern said, “You know.” I said, “Well, did you talk to ’em?” She said, “Yeah, I talked to them.” . . . Apparently there was dialogue . . . about who scored in the game . . . and they were doing things, but when it came time for lunch—she ended up at a table by herself . . . The staff [members] are other kids—high school kids, girls on the team . . . So to some extent . . . maybe there’s not another adult that’s taking the lead to, like, pull Fern into a lunchtime group. I said to her, “Do you want me to say something?” She said, “No.” And part of it is because it’s just a week. (Fern’s camp lasts one week.)
Ms. Marshall had had only one brief telephone chat with the coach before she enrolled Fern and felt that she did not “have a relationship” with him that would provide a framework “to have a dialogue.” She considered, but ultimately decided against, speaking to him.6
In some cases, though, she does intervene, usually after a period of watchful scrutiny. She described a situation that arose with the girls’ school bus driver:
Fern had shared with me last year. She said, “Art’s racist. He makes all the Black kids sit on the back of the bus and he only yells at us. . . .” And blah-blah-blah. Again, in that, you know, I’m listening to this and I’m thinking, “Well, is this just a child, you know, being overly sensitive, or—or what?”
Unlike Fern, who by the time she was twelve brought up