Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [76]
We’ve never been, uh, parents who drop off their kid anywhere. We’ve always gone with him, and even now we go in . . . to school in the morning and check . . . You know, not every day but, you know, just go and check and see what’s going on.
The Williamses are generally happy with their son’s school experiences, but they objected to the racial balance at the beginning of the school year.10 Mr. Williams reports:
For some reason, this year Alexander was the only Black kid in his class—which was—which was very bad planning, because there were two fifth grades and there were . . . five (laughs lightly) Black kids in the other fifth-grade classroom, one in this classroom. Utterly ridiculous. Something that I raised holy hell about.
The Williamses are well positioned to take prompt action on Alex’s behalf because they are well informed. They may be pleased with the school’s emphasis on cultural diversity, but they continue to keep a watchful eye on both the curriculum and their son’s overall school experience. This monitoring is similar to what Ms. Williams’s mother and father did when she was a child. The elementary school in the mid-sized town in the South where she grew up was all Black. Her parents’ worries centered on academic standards:
They came quite often. They were always there . . . They were very concerned that we were not getting what we needed to get, in terms of education. We had excellent teachers. I just remember that.
In ninth grade, when Ms. Williams entered an integrated school, her parents’ concerns shifted and escalated:
Then, when the schools were integrated, that was a bigger concern. They, they had to come and check to make sure that, that we weren’t being knifed or, you know, hair pulled, you know, which happened quite a bit, you know. A lot of mean things happened.
By contrast, in Alexander’s life, overt racial incidents are unusual, as his mother acknowledges:
Those situations have been few and far between. I mean I can count them on my fingers. I remember . . . when Alexander was in first grade . . . first or second grade . . . there was a little white kid at school who said to Alexander and another little Black kid, “All you guys could be is garbage men when you grow up.” (She laughs.) . . . And Alexander’s standing there saying, “Well, I don’t understand that ’cause my Dad’s a lawyer.” (laughter) So, it didn’t even faze him what the kid was really saying.
Despite Mr. and Ms. Williams’s shared sensitivity to the importance of racial issues, they do not always agree about the best way or proper time to teach their son about cultural diversity. Mr. Williams seems mildly frustrated by what he views as his wife’s “protective” approach. He prefers to talk about race overtly. He strives to “alert” his son, but he does so in a more “superficial” way than he would like. Mr. and Ms. Williams also appear to have different ideas about the possibility for improvement and social change in race relations. Ms. Williams is the more hopeful of the two.
Ms. Williams seems less willing than others to “read” race into a situation.11 As the incident described below shows, she handles a potentially humiliating experience in a small, family-owned hardware store calmly and with no visible signs of distress and in a different fashion than the field-worker, a young African American man, would have:
(The store is crowded; about a dozen people wait in line.) . . . Christina was stooped over the counter. Her checkbook was on the counter top and she had a pen in hand before the [older woman] clerk stopped her. “We no longer accept checks. Do you have a credit card?” There were people behind us in line and others steadily coming through the door. (I thought Christina was going to “go off.” I certainly would have.)
Christina remained calm. . . . She looked the woman in the eye and spoke in a casual voice, “Yes, I do, but last time that I was here, I paid with a check.” The woman also spoke casually, “Well, since it is holiday season,