The Talk

Did your parents ever sit you down and give you the Talk?

It's possible that mine did though I don't specifically remember.  I don't remember like Kristin remembers, who can tell the specific moment her parents explained everything to her.  I know for sure that my 11th grade English teacher (who didn't teach me a lot about writing or grammar) was the one to point out some important things that I have thought about often since that 4th period class.

With such an important subject, and one that isn't easy to talk about in our society, in our culture, it's understandable that some people have never been told these things.  But what I want is to figure out a good way to finally broach the subject.

Here's how Kristin remembers it: when she was little, her neighbor showed her an episode of Amos n Andy. Her parents found out and then staged an intervention and explained the "whole thing."  What is there to explain, especially to a little kid?  Maybe that two white men working in the tradition of minstrel shows created the show.  That there is a history of white people dressing up in demeaning, grotesque representations of black people? That there is something called racism, and in our world, it goes from white people showing prejudice and hatred towards nonwhite?

Some people remember the moment when they realized their racial identity.  I don't remember this.  I remember 11th grade, 4th period.  We read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and my teacher was prone to long tangents that often went into his family history going back generations in that part of North Carolina, how his grandfather owned slaves.

He also explained to us about minstrel shows, about racist depictions of black people, and this talk directly led me to realize that the cartoons I watched as a child were racist.  It was the start of critical thinking towards depictions of people in entertainment and media and art.