{"id":6384,"date":"2013-08-05T10:06:18","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T15:06:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/?p=6384"},"modified":"2013-08-07T11:02:23","modified_gmt":"2013-08-07T16:02:23","slug":"guest-post-black-families-are-not-failing-to-protect-kids-but-our-society-is","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2013\/08\/05\/guest-post-black-families-are-not-failing-to-protect-kids-but-our-society-is\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: Black Families Are Not Failing to Protect Kids, But Our Society Is"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"3-17-12-Trayvon-Martin_full_600\"<\/a>Simone Ispa-Landa<\/a>, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development & Social Policy at Northwestern University, is a new dear friend and fellow mama with a pen.\u00a0 A sociologist who researches adolescence, race and ethnicity, gender, and (most recently) stigma and the effects of criminal record labeling, she teaches courses on qualitative methods. She is fiercely feminist in her intersectional approach, a passionate scholar grounded in the here and now. Below, <\/em>she responds to the current conversation about what Black parents can and should tell their kids about how to stay safe. It’s not Black families that are failing in their efforts to protect their children, she reminds us. And she’s got the analysis to back it up.\u00a0 Here’s Simone.\u00a0 \u2013Deborah Siegel<\/em><\/p>\n

Three weeks after George Zimmerman\u2019s acquittal<\/a>, it\u2019s a good time to reflect on a\u00a0curious conversation that has been unfolding in its wake \u2013 one about what Black parents can and should tell their kids about how to stay safe and survive. Obviously, these are great \u2013 and unfortunately necessary \u2013 conversation for families, and especially Black families, to have.\u00a0 But on a national level, I think we need\u00a0a different conversation. Instead of talking about what parents can do and say to keep \u201cat-risk\u201d kids safe, let\u2019s talk about how race matters for both \u201cat-risk\u201d and privileged kids.<\/p>\n

Feminists working in the intersectionality framework have long noted that representations of Black women as bad mothers and Black men as absent fathers are important cogs in an ideological machine.\u00a0 This is the machine that produces images of Black youth as \u201cbad seeds\u201d \u2013 on the way to becoming high-school dropouts, dangerous criminals, irresponsible parents, or just plain poor.<\/p>\n

The recent events surrounding the shooting of Trayvon Martin only confirm the idea that Black youth \u2013 and especially Black males \u2013 face a world of hazard that most White people cannot even imagine.\u00a0 After all, how many White parents have to worry about their teenage sons being shot and killed when they leave the house to go to the store? Or face a court system that pretends to be \u201crace-blind\u201d and repetitively silences the very issues of race that lie at the heart of its most troubling cases?<\/p>\n

That said, the entirely sad and perhaps utterly predictable unfolding of the Trayvon Martin case, from the moment the 17-year old first attracted the attention of an armed neighborhood watch volunteer as \u201csuspicious\u201d to the defense attorneys\u2019 devious attempts to reconfigure our image of Trayvon Martin from victim to \u201cdangerous Black male thug\u201d \u2013 should force the nation to rethink the spurious notion that Black families \u2013 and especially mothers \u2013 are responsible for the tragedies that disproportionately befall their children.<\/p>\n

Black families are not failing in their efforts to protect their children.\u00a0 Rather, it is the broader society \u2013 including the lingering effects of centuries of race-based exclusion, segregation, and cultural devaluation \u2013 that are making it so difficult for Black families to keep their kids safe.\u00a0 In fact, it\u2019s possible that the whole notion of \u201cat-risk\u201d Black youth would fade into an old-fashioned anachronism if our public institutions were half as committed to the welfare of the next generations of Black youth as their families were.<\/p>\n

Indeed, research by people like\u00a0Signthia Fordham\u00a0<\/a>suggests that many Black parents engage in hyper-vigilant surveillance and monitoring of their children\u2019s whereabouts, all to guard their children against the kinds of danger that more privileged parents don\u2019t even have to consider.\u00a0 Further, while privileged suburban kids might bristle against their parents\u2019 rules about cars, sex, homework, and drinking in bids to show off their autonomy, many Black kids in this country don\u2019t have that luxury.<\/p>\n

In my recent research, I examined how a sample of urban Black youth understood their parents\u2019 rules and monitoring practices.\u00a0 The participants in my sample legitimized even fairly restrictive parental restrictions as reasonable \u2013 as appropriately attuned to the hazards they faced. \u00a0The teens in my sample believed that following parents\u2019 rules was critical for staying safe \u2013 and achieving future economic security.\u00a0\u00a0In fact, the accounts of the urban Black teenagers whom I interviewed strongly diverged from accounts of more privileged American teens, who researchers like\u00a0<\/a>Amy Schalet,<\/span><\/a> author of N<\/em>ot Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex,<\/em><\/a> describe as rebellious and prone to \u201csneaking around\u201d behind their parents\u2019 backs.\u00a0 In my research, I theorized that the adolescents in my sample were different from more privileged (White) kids, in part because they could not afford to go off the straight and narrow. They didn\u2019t have that freedom.<\/p>\n

As many critical race scholars have argued, everyone in society is a racialized subject.\u00a0\u00a0Part of being White means benefiting from the fact that\u00a0whiteness in American society still functions as the universal, high-status, and unstated \u201cnorm,\u201d and non-whiteness as different, low-status, and visible.\u00a0\u00a0 When white kids wander into their own or others\u2019 neighborhoods, they are benefiting from the privileges that come from belonging to this \u201cunmarked group.\u201d\u00a0 And, as Trayvon Martin\u2019s shooting shows, belonging to a group that is marked as different, low-status, and visible can be incredibly dangerous, regardless of how well (or not) your parents prepare you for this reality.<\/p>\n

So, instead of dissecting all the things parents of \u201cat-risk\u201d kids \u2013 and the kids themselves \u2013 should be doing to stay safe, let\u2019s start a new conversation about all the ways that society can shift to make this a place where it\u2019s easier to be a parent, and where being a kid means having the luxury (even if only occasionally) to rebel \u2013 without paying a tragic price.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Simone Ispa-Landa, Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development & Social Policy at Northwestern University, is a new dear friend and fellow mama with a pen.\u00a0 A sociologist who researches adolescence, race and ethnicity, gender, and (most recently) stigma and the effects of criminal record labeling, she teaches courses on qualitative methods. She is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1902,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21107],"tags":[13203,17619,778,22471,22469,14944],"class_list":["post-6384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mama-w-pen","tag-amy-schalet","tag-george-zimmerman","tag-intersectionality","tag-not-under-my-roof","tag-signithia-fordham","tag-trayvon-martin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6384"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6393,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6384\/revisions\/6393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}