What I Want My Kids to Learn About American Racism

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. In the wake of the devastating news of the Buffalo shooting this weekend, parents and teachers are talking to their kids anew about racism, including violent white supremacy. For many people, it's a difficult subject to broach with their children, and of course different at different ages, and seems to take place differently in different kinds of households by ethnicity.

One such parent is Eboo Patel. Maybe you saw his guest essay in The New York Times called What I Want My Kids to Learn About American Racism. He's a speaker, an educator, and founder and president of Interfaith America. He's also the author of a new book called We Need To Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy. He joins us to discuss how parents can address the topic of racism with their children, and we're going to take some of your phone calls on this too.

Parents of different backgrounds, parents of kids of different ages, when something like Buffalo happens in the news, what do you say to your younger kids if they're aware of it? What do you say to your older kids? What's the parents' role here if you're Black? What's the parents' role here if you're white? What's the parents' role here if you're anywhere or anyone? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692. Hi, Eboo. Thanks for coming back on WNYC today. Hello.

Eboo: Brian, it's great to be on. I have to say of all the radio shows I've been on, your opening music is the best.

Brian Lehrer: [chuckles] Well, we're off to a head start there. You want to tell us about your own parenting situation, how old is your kid or kids, and have you dealt with this being in the profession that you are?

Eboo: Sure. The last chapter of my book is a letter to my two kids. Part of what I say to them is, "Listen. Racism is a part of American life and you know this. You're 12 and 15, and you've absorbed some of it because it is like poison in the air. I want you to love Islam more than you hate Islamophobia. We're Muslim." What I mean by that is shorthand for your identity is a privilege. Don't just look for the ways that people are marginalizing you. You have to see that it is part of reality, but don't just hate the bad stuff. You have to love the good stuff.

Your identity as Muslims, as Americans, as people of Indian heritage, that set of privileges comes with responsibilities. I want you to principally think of the responsibilities you have to other people.

Brian Lehrer: Then how do you define those responsibilities?

Eboo: In Islam, we are taught in the Holy Quran that God makes us with a lump of clay and his breath. He has us be his abd and khalifa, his steward and representative upon creation. The signature gift that human beings are given, that distinguishes us from the angels, is the ability to name diversity. God makes creation deliberately diverse. We are to be his stewards and this diverse creation. What does

it mean to flow positively with diversity? This is the animating spirit behind the organization I founded, Interfaith America. In this, the most religiously diverse nation in human history, the world's first attempt at religiously diverse democracy, we have to make sure that faith is a bridge of cooperation.

I want my kids to view that Muslim identity and heritage. I want them to view being Indian, I want them to view being American as a great legacy that they inherit, and that they, in the words of T.S. Eliot, have to now work to achieve. A huge part of that, Brian, is looking at the Frederick Douglasses, the Pauli Murrays, the Muhammad Alis, the Martin Luther King Jrs and saying, "You made the situation better for me? I have a responsibility to make the situation better for others."

Brian Lehrer: How do you talk to your kids about something like Buffalo?

Eboo: It's a remnant of white Christian nationalist violent racism. It's just a fact. To ignore that is to look outside and see that it's raining and not talk about it. When something is brutally violently racist you have to say it. In this country we have a history of that, and also in this country we have a history of overcoming that. The notion of Judeo-Christian America is actually a civic response to the violent white Christian nationalism of the KKK in the 1920s. A better paradigm defeated an ugly paradigm. Judeo-Christian was a step forward for the times.

Do we have an opportunity as white Christian nationalism, the violent version, rears its ugly head again? Is this an opportunity to defeat a terrible ideology with a better one? To move from melting pot nation to potluck nation? To move from Judeo-Christian to interfaith America? I just think that we need to look at the ways that other people have improved this nation and think of that as the wind at our backs to continue doing the same for future generations.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, do you as parents of any background have similar conversations with your kids? What have you said to your child of any age, no matter what your ethnic or religious background, national origin background, whatever, about something like the killings in Buffalo and the bigger picture that Eboo Patel is describing? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer. Again, if you're just joining us, Eboo, who has that guest essay in The New York Times called What I Want My Kids to Learn About American Racism. He is the founder and president of Interfaith America, and author of the new book called We Need To Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy.

Let's talk about where schools come into this. You wrote, "I hope my kids' schools teach them that considering the role of race is a question that should frequently be asked, not a conclusion that is already reached." What's the difference that you're drawing there between a question and a conclusion?

Eboo: I think that race often plays a role in a variety of situations. That doesn't mean that racism is the most important or central dynamic of every situation. Let's make inquiries. That's what we do in intellectual life. That's what we do in education. Let's make an inquiry. What role does race play here? Does it play a central role? Let's ask that question. I don't want teachers looking at my kids and seeing their brown

skin and knowing if they're Muslim faith, and thinking that the most important thing to know about them is that they're oppressed or marginalized. I think that that is not a good way to go about education.

I think asking the question how might being Muslim, how might being of Indian heritage play a role here, and I think very often it plays a role as a privilege. My kids have been taught to look at their heritage and their faith as something that great people have nurtured across generations. As endowments that God has given them to help them be strong and generous in the world. There are people who have hurt them because of their race and because of their faith. That is reality. As Susan Sontag once said, "Whatever is happening, there is always something else going on."

Let's look at the complexity of this reality, continually inquire about what the central dynamic might be, and move forward mostly understanding our identities as privileges rather than causes of oppression.

Brian Lehrer: Rehan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hello, Rehan.

Rehan: Hi. Thank you. I just wanted to thank you, the screener, and Mr. Patel. I think the [inaudible 00:08:38]-

Brian Lehrer: Oops.

Rehan: -previous segment that you had. Hello?

Brian Lehrer: Sorry. You're thanking me and the screener and Mr. Patel, but I think we can't thank our cell phone connection right now. Maybe get in one stable place. I think your cell connection is going in and out, but let's give it a shot, Rehan. Go ahead.

Rehan: I wanted to thank you all because I think this is a great conversation, especially with the previous segment that you had where you had a caller saying a lot of anti-Islamic things. I just think this is a great conversation that we're having. It's great that we should discuss this with our children, and especially with other adults who have differing viewpoints than we have.

Brian Lehrer: Great. Thank you very much. I guess you want to leave it there. Let's go to Jason-- Well, go ahead. Did you want to react to that, Eboo?

Eboo: Yes. Let me just comment, okay?

Brian Lehrer: I don't know if you heard the segment earlier. Unfortunately, this kind of thing keeps happening, but we were talking about white Christian nationalism with the Conservative Political Action Conference taking place in Budapest today at the feet of Viktor Orbán, who is an overt white Christian nationalist. That rising on the American right. Buffalo happened, and white supremacist terrorism is the main terrorism in the United States today, as the FBI has repeatedly said. A guy called in and said, "But wait. Orbán is right because we have to stop Muslim immigration to

the West because Muslims don't believe in democracy." Well, while this terrorism is actually happening right now predominantly on the white Christian right.

Eboo: I actually got a text from an old friend from grad school, my friend Scott Wiener who is listening right now, who's like, "Are you hearing this guy make this rant?" and I'm like, "I'm not hearing it but I can guess what he is saying." I've been doing this work for 25 years. Brian, I've been on your show multiple times in the past. Listen. Islamophobia, I'm no stranger to it. Which is why I would really like us to be shifting the frame from constantly looking at the most extreme elements of a community or a demographic, and talking about everybody being a part of that extreme element. Instead, why aren't we looking for the positive things in other traditions?

This is the whole idea of the frame that we want to introduce, which is a potluck nation. We're not a melting pot. We don't want people to melt away their distinctiveness. We want people to bring their unique contribution to the table. We want people to bring what it is from their ethnic, their religious, their racial heritage to the table so that the whole nation can feast. We shouldn't be going into getting to know other people by asking what inspires them. What's great about their tradition? What do we appreciate about their background? Not looking for the worst things.

The small number of violent white Christian nationalists in the country should be-- that is a problem. Consistently going to look for enemies, basing a social change movement on looking for enemies is not the way we should be going. Our social change movement should be articulating ideals, interfaith America, potluck nation, and working towards those ideals and saying, "We want everybody who wants to join this positive movement for pluralism. You're invited. Everybody thrives."

Brian Lehrer: Jason in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jason.

Jason: Hi. Thank you for taking my call. I just want to add to what your guest is saying. I love what I'm hearing. I'm a white Christian raising four kids in Astoria, and my kids and I go break fast with our Muslim neighbors. I love our community. I hate seeing what the Christian right has done to the faith. I'm far left in my Christian beliefs, but I just wanted to say that I love what is being said today. I agree wholeheartedly that we are one country. We all need to work together and appreciate one another better.

I told your screener about talking with kids about like what happened in Buffalo. I have four kids. The oldest is graduating from high school, my youngest is in first grade. Several times a year my youngest does active shooter drills, and so younger kids, they can hear horrible things that are happening in the world and they can be talked to. You just have to talk to them on their level.

Brian Lehrer: Jason, thank you very much. Eboo, he makes an interesting point about even little kids right now who we may want to protect from difficult conversations as much as we can, and preserve their innocence and not have to stress them out anymore than then we do have to. A lot of them in schools are already going through active shooter drills and things like that at very young ages.

Eboo: The first thing I want to say is I appreciate that caller's positivity. I just think that this approach of constantly looking for what is bad in other people has reached its limit. The goal of social change, as I write in my book, is not a more ferocious revolution. The goal is a more beautiful social order, and what we need to be about is defeating the things we do not love by building the things we do. We also need to be about seeing reality. Where there is racism, you have to say it. What are you going to do? Teach the constitution and somehow skip over the three-fifths clause? What are you going to do? Teach US history and somehow skip over slavery and segregation? Of course not.

By and large, the story of America is an inspiring story, and that is because we have had remarkable people over the course of our history who have engaged brutal reality. Frederick Douglass in his famous address, "What to the slave is the 4th of July?" He was like, "You rejoice, I mourn," but he ends by talking about the great principles of America and the genius of our institutions. That's the American tradition. You call out the brutality, but you don't end there. You build the beauty. You build the better social order. This notion of if I just tell other people what they are doing wrong more loudly, that way lays paradise, that's not true. That way lies chaos.

We have to be able to run the institutions of a better order. That's a huge part of what my book is about. What does it look like to be in charge of a more inclusive pluralistic society? What does it look like to be the architect of interfaith America? The host of the potluck nation?

Brian Lehrer: I can tell from our callers you're inspiring a lot of people. We'll continue for a few more minutes with Eboo Patel right after this.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America, author of a new book called We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy, and maybe you saw his New York Times piece called What I Want My Kids to Learn About American Racism.

How different do you think this conversation between parents and kids needs to be for BIPOC kids and their parents versus for white kids and their parents? I mean, it is different. It's inherently different if you're talking about something that your children are inevitably going to be on the negative receiving end of, and white people who might even not have to think about it until long after other people their age have experienced it.

Eboo: Of course it's different. I'm an educated South Asian Muslim, and it's very different for me than it is for a white person and also for a Black person. My kids from the time they were in second and third grade were hearing ugly things about Islam on the playground by parents; like offhand comments. That's just standard operating procedure. We have never had to be afraid of the police in any kind of traffic stop type way. We have to talk to our kids about Islam as a beautiful religion. There are a small number of people who call themselves Muslim who do terrible things, and

there are other people who want to make those folks stand for the entire religion, and that's a lie.

Don't believe either the extremists or the bigots. Believe what the Quran says about the tradition. Believe what the Aga Khan says. We're part of the Ismaili Muslim community. Believe what your parents and your teachers say. We are a part of a beautiful tradition. God is beautiful and loves beauty, and you are responsible for putting beauty into the world. It's a very different conversation than some of my white Christian friends have. By the way, my goal is not to make white Christians uncomfortable at all. My goal is to say Christianity is a beautiful tradition.

I want to see you be as much like Jesus as possible, and I would like my kids to emulate the Prophet Muhammad. May the peace and blessings of God be upon him as much as possible. That's what interfaith America looks like. Interfaith America is an invitation to everybody to be the best of their tradition so that they bring their contribution to the common table and everyone feasts.

Brian Lehrer: In the context of what you just said then, what do you think about the debates that are breaking out in Virginia and Florida and elsewhere about racism and the history of racism being taught in schools, but in ways that make white kids feel too guilty or feel bad about themselves?

Eboo: I write a lot about this in my book We Need to Build. On the one hand, it's honestly simple. If you're going to teach the constitution you have to teach the three-fifths clause. That is racism embedded in the principle governing document of our nation from the jump. It just is there. What are you going to do? Pretend it doesn't exist? If you're going to teach American history, slavery and segregation and other forms of racism, some of which are still with us, and the remnants of much of which is still with us, is just reality. It's just like raining outside. You can't ignore it.

At the same time, we cannot essentialize all people. You can't essentialize a racial group, whether it's white folks or Black folks. You cannot essentialize an entire religion. I just don't believe in what I call the Russian nesting dolls model of identity, which is if you know one thing about the outer doll, then all of a sudden all of the inner dolls. If you know the race of a person then you know that person's experiences and you know that person's aesthetics and you know that person's politics. I just don't think that that's true.

I'm a big believer in the Martin Luther King Jr., Frederick Douglass, Pauli Murray, James Baldwin, Barack Obama approach to American identity, which is that we live in a nation of people from atheist to Zoroastrian. We live in a nation where the European founders of the 76th generation believed that people coming from the four corners of the earth, praying to God in different ways, including not at all, could come to this patch of land and build out of it a country.

We need to achieve our country, as Baldwin said. We need to articulate the set of ideals that we want to achieve and work to instantiate them. We need to stop generating more and more enemies with our language. We need to work towards ideals. That is the mode of social change that I write about and we need to build

Brian Lehrer: Nice comment from Twitter. Listener writes, "Your Interfaith guest aims pluralism on target. Bullseye. That hard conservative from earlier misuses rhetoric for evasion. If the rights astigmatic definitions pose as our foundations, there's no need for change, which they hate." Interesting observation from listener Nicky. Nicole in West Orange, you're on WNYC. Hi, Nicole.

Nicole: Hi. How are you? Thank you so much to both you and your guest. This is such an important conversation right now. I have four children, two boys who are teenagers and two girls who are in fourth grade. We have been talking about racism for pretty much their whole life, so it's not a surprise that there is racism. This event I think hit a little bit more home for us because my husband's family happens to be from the same small hometown that the murderer terrorist white supremacist is from.

Brian Lehrer: Conklin, New York. Right outside Binghamton, right?

Nicole: Yes. Small town, very white. I think just understanding how this can happen, and especially as white parents of especially white boys, talking to them about the video games they play and making sure that if they ever hear anyone say anything of violent racist acts that they're planning or thinking about, they have to report it. Then also just being allies in the world, accomplices to our Black community, being there for them, and then needing to raise children who are not going to be harmful. That's a lot of work, and I think it's a journey we've been on.

Also, there's the public health crisis of racism and a public health crisis of gun violence in our country. Two conversations that we have with our children a lot. This weekend was definitely hard because, as you know, there was a number of mass shootings. That took second fiddle to the conversation of racism, unfortunately. Not that unfortunately, but you know what I mean. The gun violence, the mass shootings just seem to keep happening, but the fact that the gun violence and white supremacy act was so racially motivated made it a very important and priority conversation to have.

Brian Lehrer: What were some of the words that you used?

Nicole: Well, we've just talked a lot about what it means to grow up in a place where maybe you're not surrounded by people who look like you. We live in a very diverse community, so just understanding the differences of the community where this boy is from and the kind of perfect storm that I think occurred with him. That he maybe didn't have conversations about race in his home. That there was somehow access to guns. That somehow things were ignored along the way. These things--

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Nicole: Sorry?

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. Finish the thought. These things--

Nicole: Just the fact that all of these things added up to this event being able to take place, and just how disgusting it is that he was able to search out for this Black

community and that he went there and cased it. All of these just disgusting behaviors, racist white supremacist behaviors, we talked about with the children expressing-- Just even this morning, honestly, on the way to school driving my 14-year-old, on NPR they talked about he'll be arraigned or-- I'm not sure what the language they used, but to see if there's enough evidence for a trial. My 14-year-old's immediate comment was, "How could there not be enough evidence? He live-streamed it."

Brian Lehrer: Out of the mouths.

Nicole: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole, thank you so much for your call and your thoughtfulness. We really appreciate it. One more. Debbie in the Bronx, you're on WNYC. Hi, Debbie.

Debbie: Hi, Brian. Love your show all the time. I have no children. It amazes me that so much of the hate is coming from people who espouse to be Christians, when Christ's basic teaching was to love one another. I have no children but I was blessed to be raised by parents. My sister and I were raised Catholic, but we had a blood-relations and extended family of all religions, and we are a Black family. Including not only Protestants, people who follow the Jewish faith, Black Jews, Black Hebrews, and Muslims, and we were taught to respect everyone and to try and love everyone.

That's what's missing. From all that's going on, people are not being taught to love one another and to respect all religions. Thank you to you and your guests for a wonderful conversation.

Brian Lehrer: Debbie. thank you for a wonderful call. Well, Eboo, as we wrap up, it sounds like you could hold meetings of your group Interfaith America in Debbie's kitchen.

Eboo: Right. Lots of American families are that way. I'm so glad to have heard the positive energy from both previous callers. Brian, if I could just say in my closing, one of the signature initiatives of the organization I lead is a project called Black Interfaith. The idea of the project is that some of the widest and most interesting religious diversity in America happens within the Black experience, and certainly the most inspiring bridging of religious divides has happened within that experience.

We just had a big event at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. An African American Muslim woman, who's part of the Black Interfaith initiative, is from Buffalo. Her name is Nyla Ansari. We met and hugged and approached. Just so much suffering there that she and her community are going through. She talked about the healing that her Black Muslim family-- Her mom runs a Black-oriented mental health center. Her dad is the Imam of an African American mosque, and her response was, "Here is what we are doing to heal the situation."

I just think to myself like, "What? That's the best of the American tradition," and walking through the National Museum of African American History and Culture. In the worst conditions you can imagine, in American slavery, there was all this hope. This hope that was given by people's religions, by Islam, by Christianity, by syncretic

animism, and that's what we need. We need to bring forth that hope and healing. So much of it comes from our religious traditions. We need to make sure that faith is a bridge of cooperation. We need to be articulating cosmic ideals and working towards them.

We need to stop constantly looking for enemies. We need to ask other people what inspires them about their identity and not constantly ask the oppressor or oppressed question. This interfaith America is the chapter that we are in American history. It is a privilege to write that chapter. It's a privilege to be an architect of that, and to accept that responsibility and that privilege, I think that that is worthy of the American tradition.

Brian Lehrer: Eboo Patel, founder and president of Interfaith America and author of a new book called We Need To Build: Field Notes For Diverse Democracy. Thank you so much, Eboo. Great to have you here.

Eboo: Thanks, Brian.

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