In the car, the day before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Henry asked me about MLK. "Did he die?" Henry asked. Another moment of having to think about how deep to go, how much to say. He's asking about a man and I'm thinking about civil rights.
"Yes, he's dead. He was shot.""Why?"
There have been so many moments in parenting when I have to explain something I don't completely understand. Something he needs to know about, but something I hope he never fully comprehends, because I don't want him to sit in that headspace of the people who are so afraid that they kill.
"People didn't like what he was saying and they didn't like that he was saying it."
"So they shot him so he wouldn't say it ever again?"
"Yes. They were afraid."
"But all he wanted was peace." (I love his teachers)
We talked about the bus boycott and Henry told me he would have punched the bus driver. I told him MLK believed in nonviolence. How he said you don't have to change your laws about the bus, but I also don't have to ride your bus. And we talked about sit ins and the rules of restaurants. And when we got home, we held our arms next to each other and he told me my skin was pinker than his and why do I have freckles and he doesn't.
It was a moment I allowed myself to be proud of how I'd talked with my four-year-old about something important. A conversation he came back to over the next week. But inside that pride, there is the looming and landed structural bullshitness of our world. The honor and fear of raising a kind, critical-thinker in a broken, hurtful, but somehow still magical world that has an overwhelming amount to critically think about it.
In my girls' group, with 7th and 8th graders, they tell me about the hierarchy of their school. There are the scrubs at the bottom and by even associating with them, you run the risk of joining them. And at the top there are the popular people who come from money, followed by the popular people who don't. And in between are the rest of the people who want to be in one group and are terrified of being designated to the other. These girls are mostly in between. They've watched their friends being picked on and felt paralyzed. When they've attempted to intervene, they're told "It's not your business."
In the world of their junior high, they can't imagine this being any different. They believe, for the most part, it's not their business. I ask them, if we could wrap the moment in a bubble, they could do or say anything they want to that Jabroni (the name they've created for the person doing the picking on) and then snap their fingers and not have to face any consequences, what would they do? And before I can finish the question, three girls out of seven say, "I would punch them." One of them is a quiet, thoughtful, happy girl who has mostly remained unscathed from the ranking system. For the first time in our time together, her eyes go hard and serious. The girls who didn't answer out loud are nodding their heads.
For a quick moment, I want to tell them to do it. To punch those Jabronis in the face. Not with the point of inflicting pain, but to show your friend whatever insult was just thrust at them isn't true and they aren't alone. And to break the paralysis of the team of students in the hall watching that interaction and tucking their chin down, embarrassed, but relieved it's not them.
I think of how I'm trying to dilute the violence out of Henry, but am weirdly elated to hear it from these girls. I want Henry to feel the urge to punch a driver of racism. And I want the fists of these girls to ball up when someone enforces a malicious pecking order in their school. I don't want them to get in trouble and I don't actually believe in violence, but it reassures me their embers are still hot. Because the only thing scarier than violence, is resignation.
