Boy, there's nothing quite like trying to explain Trump's conviction to your kids to put the inherent contradictions of the American judicial system into stark perspective
I mean, right?
Parenting is, at its core, an extended exercise in magical thinking. You watch as your kids metabolize clue after clue about the creaky, humanity-denying systems that make up the superstructure of the world around them. And you try to help them make sense of all of that, to be realists, damnit, but you can’t help yourself.
You still hope, perhaps beyond reason and logic, that they will internalize a different way of walking in the world. You toss off little koans about kindness and community and interconnectiveness. In your more intentional moments, you try to model a few choices here and there that aren’t just self-serving and system-reinforcing. You ride bikes and lug them to protests and enroll them at a Title One public school and you try not to be that White middle class dad in the PTA meetings. You hope that your White kids, your White son especially, are watching you more carefully in your moments of restraint than in the moments you absent-mindedly fall back into smart guy filibuster-mode. You put a “War Is Not The Answer” sign in your front yard. You talk about the messes of history and the messes of the present and how it’s all capitalism’s fault, but boy it still is nice to be able to buy things, isn’t it? Perhaps you take all that magical thinking a step further, into the realm of the spiritual. You tote your kids with you to Quaker Meeting every Sunday, where they learn that we believe that violence neither keeps us safe nor brings true liberation, that we believe prisons disappear people but don’t bring us any closer to justice. You’re grateful for your particular faith community for giving you an excuse to believe in the unbelievable.
I struggle talking about this aspect of parenting out loud, which is silly. While some of the details of the values my wife and I hold aren’t universal (we’re members of a weirdo religious sect that is primarily associated with silence, oatmeal and effete White liberal self-righteousness! Not normal!), I trust that the whole “we try to teach our children to be profoundly kind while simultaneously making sense of a world that doesn’t operate like that at all” is true for most parents. I mean, it’s core to the dance of raising kids of color, queer kids, and girls: “you need to understand the specific ways the world doesn’t love you while still loving yourself.” There are so many different ways that we’re plugging our fingers in leaky dams, but the stakes of keeping the flood at bay aren’t borne equally.
I get embarrassed writing about it, though, because it’s hard to relate the kind of questions kids raise when making sense of the world without sounding like a performative, “look at how cute and profound my woke children are” show-off. If you’ve spent enough time with left-leaning White parents, you’ve heard some version of the my-kids’-hearts-are-just-too-pure-for-the-world humblebrag. “My two year-old just saw Ron DeSantis on television (out at a restaurant, mind you, we do NOT allow screen time in the house), and she said ‘mommy, why won’t that man respect the sacrosanct principle of academic freedom in Florida’s higher education system?’”
I shouldn’t be embarrassed, though! Of course our home life is chock full of unanswerable questions, just like yours is. My family lives in a deeply segregated city. Of course my kids are going to ask why all the amenities that make up our version of a perfect life are on one side of town, and a lot of their friends live in neighborhoods we rarely go to. Of course they’re going to ask why it’s possible to believe that other people’s children deserve to be killed in far off wars in order to keep other people’s children safe. Of course they follow up with the counterpoint “what if we made sure everybody’s kids were safe?”
It was both weird and notable that, given all this, our family conversation about yesterday’s Trump verdict was more confounding for our eleven-year-old and seven-year-old than recent discussions about capitalism or White supremacy. In those conversations, at least, we can come back to “we’re trying to build a world that’s so different from the current one, and we’re still so far away from it.”
Weird, right? It’s just the Trump trial. That should be way easier to make sense of than actual wars, than electric cars made possible through cobalt mining, than a world where entire communities are deemed to be expendable.