![]() And I once got to play one of Coretta Scott King's bridesmaids in an assembly. I wanted to marry him, everything.Īnd my elementary school made such a big deal about Martin Luther King every year. By the third grade, I had already been to the plantation in North Carolina where my ancestors were sold. There was an exhibit behind Sean of a white man helping his runaway slave escape through an oven with a door in the back, allowing him to slip through from one house to another and another.Īs a kid, it wasn't like I was unfamiliar with Black history. Parker, who was a producer at our program- and who also grew up in Baltimore, not far from where I grew up- told me about it. But I'm back in Baltimore regularly to see family, though I had never heard of it, until B.A. I grew up in Baltimore, and OK, this came into existence after I moved away. I have to say, I was surprised to learn it was there. Lee was removed just this week in Richmond.īut for all this commemoration of white experience of life in the South before and during the Civil War, there's actually not that much out there memorializing the Black experience. Of course, many other statues have been taken down in the last few years. Those numbers come from a database run by the Southern Poverty Law Center. So there are over 200 public schools around the country named after Confederate leaders and over 700 monuments memorializing the confederacy in public places. But now, some of y'all walking around like, for shame, word, as I wonder what the murderers of James Byrd thought about the General Lee. ![]() Trouble, be it something candid or this subtle. But sell my L, see it's nothing than this double standard. The closest that I got be seek Haile Selassie. Sure was a brainwashed kid, but never had a fad with rockin' a swastika. But then it's just, like, sporting the pain, you know what I mean? Like, you were sporting my pain, and it's literally a comedy. So now with that, I talked about how I would beg my parents for it. Lock that be wild, generally praise the stuff, crave the stuff, slaves to stuff. See that they're climbing through the windows and go make better time and do the pro hopping, but no stopping. (RAPPING) Disturbable to see what we was murdered to when it coulda, shoulda been a convertible. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. How do you even quantify exactly what that does to a person? Like, for instance, what it means to give little Black kids toys that celebrate the Confederacy, or to drag teenage boys into the desert to watch atomic bombs go off, or to bring your kid to work when your work involves breaking the law. Well, today, on our program, things that kids hear, things they see, things that happen to them that affect them in ways that they only understand later as adults. And the thing that's difficult is that it can be really hard to predict what those things are going to be. Adults don't need to keep them from it.īut then there's other stuff, stuff that does seep into their world that they take to heart and they mull about and they make part of themselves. Like, they just don't want to engage with that stuff. And I think there's a whole category of things that kids protect themselves from. And I think of that story sometimes when there are debates over what is suitable for children. Like, she absorbed nothing.Īnd, sure enough, like, a year passes, and Randi comes back to her- I don't remember why- and asked her again, like, where do babies come from? And it's like the first time never happened. Do you have any questions? And then Randi pauses for a long moment, and she asks, "Can birds really fly?" And my mom realizes, of course, oh, she was not ready. Like, I am such a good mom today.Īnd at the end of it, she asked Randi, OK, so that's everything. And the way my mom always used to tell the story, she said that she felt like, I am doing such a good job here. And she explains the whole thing, right? Where babies come from, what sex is. We can get this out of the way now when she's young, and she's really excited to tell her this stuff. I don't have to sit her down in some awkward birds and bees conversation someday. And she asked my mom, where do babies come from?Īnd my mom just felt like, great. And something came up at school that Randi didn't understand, and she came home. My older sister, Randi, was eight or so when this happened. There's this story my mom used to like to tell.
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