How to be an Anti-Racist Parent: Real Life Parents Share Real Life Tips

A free e-book on how to be an Anti-Racist Parent by New Demographic is now available on the Anti-Racist Parent blog:

How to Be an Anti-Racist Parent: Real-Life Parents Share Real-Life Tips features advice from many members of the ARP community, including Shawn Fink, Jae Ran Kim, Nina Birnbaum, Cloudscome, Meera Bowman Johnson, Margie Perscheid, Mike Lee, Susan Lyons-Joell, and Cynthia Bostwick.

Here are a couple excerpts:

You can’t protect your children from racism. You need to be able to show them how ugly racism is, or they won’t be able to recognize it for themselves. If your children are kids of color, they’ll need to have survival skills – verbal, intellectual, and physical. And these survival skills aren’t just about driving while Black or confronting skinheads – your kids will need to know how to survive the racism embedded in our educational, economic, judicial and occupational institutions.
–Jae Ran Kim

Parents need to open up their own horizons and start connecting with people. You can offer all the toys and books in the world to them, but if they never see or get to know another person who isn’t like them than what good are you serving? From day one, I have tried to seek out people of other races to interact with my babies. Lifestyle of the parents is really key … you have to do what you preach. Sometimes, for parents, it means leaving our own comfort zones for the sake of our children.
–Shawn Fink

For a downloadable copy of the book, click here.

3 thoughts

Thanks so much for helping me spread the word, Jae Ran! 🙂

Good reading and good points.
I hope your group will extend into the more complex world I live in. Where it is so diverse that the prejudice and other pressures on my children’s sense of belonging come from several directions at once.
While I tend to see this community as a relative advantage, I am often at a loss as to how to help them handle things like “not being Asian enough” (an surprising thing to have come up at 5 years old!) and the pointed and very visible shame that has come from some of our Korean friends. Intrusions from rude white people are relatively easy to deal with and far more rare here.
If anything my comfort level is too high, having grown up in so much diversity that I find that to be the norm.

Thanks Jae Ran, I’ve added it to my sidebar links.

Carmen Van Kerckhove says:

June 20, 2007 at 10:37 am

Thanks so much for helping me spread the word, Jae Ran! 🙂

Ed says:

June 20, 2007 at 12:32 pm

Good reading and good points.
I hope your group will extend into the more complex world I live in. Where it is so diverse that the prejudice and other pressures on my children’s sense of belonging come from several directions at once.
While I tend to see this community as a relative advantage, I am often at a loss as to how to help them handle things like “not being Asian enough” (an surprising thing to have come up at 5 years old!) and the pointed and very visible shame that has come from some of our Korean friends. Intrusions from rude white people are relatively easy to deal with and far more rare here.
If anything my comfort level is too high, having grown up in so much diversity that I find that to be the norm.

sume says:

June 22, 2007 at 2:45 pm

Thanks Jae Ran, I’ve added it to my sidebar links.