083: White privilege in parenting: What it is&what to do about it - a podcast by Jen Lumanlan

This episode is part of a series on understanding the intersection of race, privilege, and parenting.  Click here to view all the items in this series.

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This episode launches a series of conversations on the intersection of race and parenting.  I spent a month wading around in the psychological literature on this topic and deciding how best to approach it, and eventually decided to split it into four topics.

Today we’ll dig into White privilege in parenting through a conversation with Dr. Margaret Hagerman on her book White kids: Growing up with privilege in a racially divided America.

For those of us who are White, White privilege can be an incredibly uncomfortable to discuss.  After all, we didn’t ask for this privilege – we were just born into a system where we have it.  But the reality is that we do have it, and many of the actions we take on a daily basis mean that we don’t just benefit from it but we actively take steps to perpetuate that advantage.  So in this episode we’ll learn how we can recognize that privilege in our lives and we’ll start to learn about some steps we can take to address it.

In upcoming episodes we’ll look at White privilege in schools, parents’ responsibility to work on dismantling systems of racial privilege, how to talk with children about race, and what children learn about race in school (and what you can do to supplement this).

I’m really excited to begin this conversation, but at the same time I want to acknowledge that while these episodes are based on a close reading of the literature, this is a massive subject and I’m not the expert here – I’m learning along with you.  If you think I’ve missed the mark, do let me know either in the comments or via the Contact page.  And if you’d like to participate in a series of conversations on this topic with other interested parents, do join us in the free Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group – just search for #Whiteprivilege to find the thread.

You might also be interested to listen back to earlier related episodes:

Wait, is my toddler racist? (Recorded back when I was still learning to distinguish between prejudice and racism!)

How children form social groups, which is critical to understanding how they develop prejudices in the first place.

 

 

 

References

Addo, F.R., Houle, J.N., & Simon, D. (2016). Young, Black, and (still) in the red: Parental wealth, race, and student loan debt. Race and Social Problems 8(1), 64-76.Birkhead, T.R. (2017, April 3). The racialization of juvenile justice and the role of the defense attorney. Boston College Law Review 58(2), 379-461.

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Bonilla-Silva, E. (2018). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America (5th Ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Brantlinger, E., Majd-Jabbari, M., & Guskin, S.L. (1996). Self-interest and liberal educational discourse: How ideology works for middle-class mothers. American Educational Research Journal 33(3), 571-597.

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DiAngelo, R. (2011). White fragility. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy 3(3), 54-70. Full article available at https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116

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Goyal, M.K., Kupperman, N., & Cleary, S.D. (2015). Racial disparities in pain management of children with appendicitis in emergency departments. JAMA Pediatrics 169(11), 996-1002.

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Marrast, L., Himmelstein, D.U., & Woolhandler, D. (2016). Racial and ethnic disparities in...

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