Whose job is it to explain to my children that their white skin makes them bad?

Is that me?

Or do I leave it to the evening news, the NFL, Nike, the Democratic Party and the college professors?

Who is to teach white children how to deal with and submit to the shame into which they were born? If the sins of the fathers are to be visited upon the heads of the children, how do you get white kids woke to the inescapable burden of lifelong guilt they bear by virtue of their skin color?

How do you keep them from noticing that “Black Lives Matter” doesn’t say anything about their lives? How do you condition them to the ubiquitous antagonism toward their race in the popular culture of politicians, entertainers and corporate ad campaigns?

How do you get them to grasp that questions of concern arising from their skin color are racism, while similar questions of concern arising from the skin color of others are heroism? If it is bold to question the disrespectful treatment of blacks, why is it bigotry to question the disrespectful treatment of whites?

Kids ask questions like that. They believe it is honest inquiry. They can’t make sense of the nonsensical. They haven’t yet learned how to hide in fear for their jobs, or from the social media witch hunts, or the clustered scolds of the progressive workplace.

They still think they can think, and say, whatever they want.

How do we teach them not to do that, to avoid stigma and even violence in school, and ostracism in society?

How do we teach them to be white in a world that doesn’t like white?

That’s the new normal, and will likely be the escalating reality of their lives. Are we to teach them to make peace with that, to submit to it, to accept a cultural subservience in which their heritage, history and color are embarrassments?

Are they the first generation of four centuries of payback? Must they rabidly join in the denunciation of their own heritage to find a place in progressive America?

Are they to live in a world in which America traded one brand of racial bigotry for another? Is the American promise of equality to be paid in an equality of evil and prejudice, instead of an equality of rights and brotherhood?

These are real questions, and they are being asked in millions of households across the country. They are playing out in the psyches of children besmirched by the accident of birth. Certainly their discomfiture may be a faint echo of that known by generations of black children, but are we now of the mind that two wrongs make a right, that you settle old wrongs by committing new ones?

To lift black children up, must you tear white children down?

And do we live in a society where asking that question is cause for conflict, instead of discussion?

Is there not a place to hope and work for a warm and nurturing world for children of every race? A place where neither fear nor guilt attaches to the color of one’s skin? And must the crusade for racial justice be blind to issues that it raises in the lives of children of every color?

What about the white child that turns away from the evening news and asks mom, “Do we hate black people?” What about the white child who plays police and sees on the evening news a narrative that depicts him and his childish dream as racist and evil?

It is wrong to ask any child to do anything other than value himself, to be proud of his family and heritage and to believe in his basic goodness and potential. We want children to believe that the world is a good place, a place where they have opportunity and a future, not a world where they have a centuries-old debt to pay.

No child should be afraid to go to school – or on into life – because of his color.

And no noble cause can advance itself by troubling the minds of the young.

Equality, the prime objective of the American experiment, is achieved by raising all, not lowering any. There is no moral authority in chastisement and rage. And certainly there is a path forward in which a white child and a black child – like all children – can rejoice together in their mutual citizenship and equality.

We haven’t found that path yet.

Bob Lonsberry

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