Author: Dr. Mama Esq.

Mommy. Wife. Scholar. God's Child.

Chronically Colored

Dr. Mama Esq.12 Comments

I have chronic illnesses. I have bipolar II, fibromyalgia, gastroparesis, and now something wonky is happening with my bladder (sorry if that is TMI). When you have chronic illnesses, you have to be chronically on it – taking care of yourself is not an option, it’s a necessity. Especially when you have other folks depending on you. But especially because you have you depending on you. You were put on the earth to do great things, and you can’t do them if you are always sick.

Sometimes I forget this. I don’t do things that are “bad,” like smoking cigarettes, or doing illicit drugs, but I do things that are “bad” for me, in my personal situation. I might have too much wine. I might not get the 9 (yes 9) hours of sleep that my body demands. I might drive my car to campus instead of riding my bike, removing the little bit of cardiovascular exercise I need to ward off the depression. I might “forget” to eat. I might be on the internet for hours instead of getting my work done. I might overcommit. I might say no and feel guilty. I might not go to church. Things that help me heal, I might not do.

Having chronic illnesses means being constantly on the watch. I have to watch myself, watch my moods, watch my habits, watch my bodily functions, watch my behaviors. Whenever I think things are okay, that I can back off, turn away, something happens and… BAM! I’m sick, on my ass, clawing my way back to the light. I have to be forever vigilant if I am to stay well.

It’s kind of like being a parent of color.

As a parent of color, we are constantly on the watch. I’m constantly listening to my children’s language, making sure no words of self-doubt or self-hate have crawled into their mind space. I’m constantly monitoring their daily interactions, wanting to be sure that the adults around them are affirming of their existence. I’m constantly aware of the children they play with, noting if issues of skin color come up, noting who they naturally veer toward, noting who they avoid and who avoids them. I can’t listen to the radio in the car, or watch BET, cause my own people are conspiring against them. I’m constantly thinking these days about the kindergarten that will happen next year, how my boy might be the only black child in his classroom, and subsequently, his sister left behind to be the only black child left in her preschool classroom.

Being “colored” is like a chronic condition. Just when you think it’s safe to be “normal,” to be a normal mom who sends her kid to school with no worries other than will she finally let go of my leg this morning….BAM!

Be vigilant.

What About Your Friends?

Dr. Mama Esq.15 Comments

I’ve been feeling a little friend-less lately.

My sister-friend and I compared our cellphone’s recent history the other day and realized the only calls we get are from each other.

I have 556 “friends” on Facebook, but when I announced my baby girl’s birthday on my profile page a couple of weeks ago, only six “friends” liked my announcement (3 of them were family) and four different people left a little message.

I participate in twitter, follow 95 people and have 91 followers. But I just tweeted “crying over folks who ain’t crying over me. *deep breath and klonopin*” and got crickets back. I often feel ignored on my timeline. It’s the least satisfying social networking tool ever.

I have friends from friends from high school and college on the East Coast. I go out of my way to keep in touch, to attend special events, to let them know that I care. When they call, and ask, “Are you busy?” Even if I am, I drop it, and attend to what they need. Only one of those friends has come here to visit me in the last three years that I’ve been here in California.

Here, in Palo Alto, I know a lot of people. One group of friends are about 12-20 years older than me, with children slightly older than mine, well-off mothers. Good people, we get together for mass playdates, ladies game nights, movie nights, dinners out and the like. But I don’t know anything about their relationships with their husbands, or what’s going on in their lives that has nothing to do with their kids. They regularly give me advice about my marriage and my childrearing, but not the other way around. It’s like I’m not an equal to them.

I’m having a get together on Saturday, of graduate student women. I’ve invited 31 women that I like, new grad students in the law school, women that I know look up to me. I don’t know what the turn out will be. So far 4 yes, 2 maybe, 1 no.

What about your friends / Will they stand their ground / Will they  let you down again?

What about your friends / Are they gonna be low down / Will they ever be around?

Or will they turn their backs on you?

As a black woman, who suffers from depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety, I’m currently suffering from a lack of connection. I feel like I’m looking at a bunch of backs. I’m currently having a panic attack because on the one hand, I don’t want people to start calling me off he hook. People don’t want to talk to me about my panic attacks and my anxiety because they don’t know what to say. They don’t know what to say about my physical issues for why I need to go to the urologist. They don’t know how to listen, not solve; how to hear my tears without trying to stop them.

But on the other hand, for my sanity, I need more than pills. I need friends. I need to know that my friends love me, care for me, would care if I wasn’t here anymore, enjoy my company, want to hear what I have to say, think I’m interesting. As black women and mothers, we need each other to be for each other. But right now, my lack of connection with any of those I used to call friends has me questioning whether I even know what a friend is anymore. What about you, dear reader? What about your friends?

*I edited this on Sunday, September 19 because I did not want to potentially hurt someone that could be called a friend.

Black to School

Dr. Mama Esq.5 Comments

A new year has began. I look around me in my Civil Procedure class, and of the 60 or so students, I am one of four black people. Not a bad number, you might think. But I know better. Just because they are black, doesn’t mean we’re fighting the same battle. I’m just sayin.’ I don’t know them, so I assume I’m fighting alone until experience tells me otherwise.

The class begins with a discussion of Walker v. City of Birmingham, decided by the Supreme Court in 1967. Already my stomach is sinking. Anything about Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960s is not really something I want to talk about on the first day. Not when I’m surrounded by fresh-out-of-undergrad-white-folks-who-have-never-paid-a-bill-and-really-believe-they-are-here-based-on-their-own-“merit”. Shit.

But in it we go. Short law lesson: The case is about Walker et al, with the et. al. including MLK Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, appealing a decision by a lower Alabama court. The city had an ordinance on the books that gave it broad discretion in who to issue a permit to. Bull Connor refused them a permit to march twice during the Easter weekend in 1963. They started small protests anyway, so the city got a judge to issue an injunction – an order that said they were not allowed to march or protest in any way. Now the ordinance was pretty unconstitutional, and the injunction just mimicked what the ordinance said. But the ordinance is a statute, and the injunction is an order of the court.

The men marched anyway. Bull Connor and his police arrested them and jailed them, of course. Then the city filed a motion for contempt of court, because the men violated the injunction. And that’s the issue that went to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court upheld the contempt order. You cannot violate an injunction, no matter how unconstitutional it is, out of respect for the “rule of law.” You must challenge the injunction, in front of the court who ordered it, before you violate it.

Fine. I love legal analysis. Of course, there are reasons to agree with the court’s ruling, and reasons to disagree. There were dissenting opinions.

What gave me pause in this class was that after we’d discussed the case, the professor decides that we all need to understand the “context” of the case. Generally, I’m all for that. I’m a sociologist; I believe context is paramount all the time. But when you are the 1/4 black contingent, and suddenly huge powerpoint photos of black people, black children being hosed, attacked by dogs, beaten with billy clubs, and inhumanely jailed, you wonder if “context” is really the right word.

The next slide put up is Martin Luther King Jr. sitting in that Birmingham jail, writing his Birmingham letter, and the professor asks the class, what would you have done in this man’s situation, and then adds on quickly, well, of course this is a trick question because these images being projected into living rooms across America is what led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And everyone laughs.

But to me, what made it a trick question was the fact that these people would have never been in MLK’s position, never in his position to put black children on the street because all the black adults were in jail, never in MLK’s position to break the law in homage to justice over order, never in MLK’s position to stare down water hoses and dogs because their skin color would never have been black. It is not a hypothetical they have to truly contend with.

But for me, and the millions of students that go into classrooms this year, the hypothetical feels real. A girlfriend of mine told me a story of her six-year-old who was taught about segregation and MLK in his first grade classroom. This mother is very light-skinned, and her child brown-skinned. After the lesson at school, the child came home and told his mother that if things ever “went back,” he’d have to leave her. He might also have to “fight, like MLK did.” Why? Because the teacher didn’t take any account of the fact that in teaching this “lesson,” the only black child in the classroom might take it literally, and not place it in its historical context.

In other lessons, this teacher, attempting to be “historically correct, not politically correct” had black children act out being slaves on a field trip to a plantation while white children looked on. This teacher bound the hands of two black girls in a lesson about slavery order to make it more lively. Another teacher had black children create fugitive slave posters of themselves.*

While black parents have fought hard to have “our” stories told in schools, something has gone horribly wrong in implementation. Has your child been the recipient of this psychological attack disguised as a history lesson? What is the alternative for teaching all children about the sordid legacy of oppression in this country without making the historically oppressed relive their oppression?

Back In The Day…

Dr. Mama Esq.2 Comments

Back in the day/When I was young/I’m not a kid anymore/But some days/ I sit and wish I was a kid again…

– The Pharcyde

We started this blog back in January, and already it is nominated to be the best parenting and family blog in the black blogosphere! Your support got us nominated, and only you, dear reader, can make us the winner. Please take the next 30 seconds to click on the Black Weblog Award button to the right and vote for CocoaMamas in the best parenting/family category (it’s on page 3 of 6). Don’t forget to go all the way to page 6, and click submit so your vote is counted.

We are so grateful for all of you who read us each week. We are committed to continuing to provide interesting and provocative content that speaks to Cocoa motherhood and Cocoa parenting. In keeping with community spirit we nurtured over the past 8 months, we are soliciting your feedback. Please use the comments below to talk to us. What do you like about CocoaMamas? What topics did you enjoy? What topics would you like to see us cover in the future? What could we be doing better?

We can’t wait to hear from you.

CocoaMama Love,

LaToya

Private Parts

Dr. Mama Esq.20 Comments

“Billy, what are you doing?” She says this to her son as he gets dressed in the morning. His four-year-old body is naked, but instead of putting on the clothes right next to him on the couch, he is instead enthralled with that extra-special body part that it seems all little boys are enthralled with – his penis.

Again she asks, “Billy, what are you doing?” She’s trying to be patient, but this is a daily occurrence, and she’s getting tired of it. She’s trying to bring it to his attention instead of saying something directly to him. “Billy!” He finally lifts his head, looking at her with a questioning, and frankly annoyed, expression. “Yes, mama?”

“What are you doing? Didn’t we talk about only touching your penis when you are alone, in your room? Don’t you remember that your penis is private?” Silence. “Well, do you remember?”

Billy gives a long sigh. “Yes, I remember.” He turns and begins to put on his clothes in his particular way, inspecting each item to make sure the sizes are correct (only 4 or 4T) and the tags are in the back. As he works, he speaks: “But when I’m in my room, I can touch my penis, right mama? I can do it then, right mama?”

“Yes, Billy. Now please finish getting dressed.” She tells his three-year-old sister, Bonnie, who has been dressed for hours, to sit on the potty. As Bonnie does so, she joins in the chorus. “Billy can touch his penis in his room, right mama? And mama? I have a vagina like you, right mama? And I can touch my vagina in my room, right? Mama? MAMA!”

She starts to feel a little dizzy in all this talk of penises and vaginas. She knows it was a good idea to teach them the real names of their parts, to not make the words or their actions negative or taboo, to supplement that talk with the notion of privacy, to let them know that no one was to touch their private parts but themselves, mommy and daddy, and the doctor, and even then, only with permission. But she can’t shake…

“Come on in here and let me see. I’m your auntie, just like your mother. You can show me.” She didn’t want to show Aunt Mo. She didn’t want to show Aunt Mo the breasts that were just beginning to appear, she didn’t understand why she had to. Her auntie made her take off the blouse she was wearing, the training bra too, and her auntie touched her chest, feeling the new growths. Her hand traveled downward. For the second time in her young life, she felt like not just her body was naked, but her soul too.

“Yes, children, you can touch your private parts, your penis and your vagina, when you are in your rooms, by yourselves. But remember, no one else is to touch your penis or your vagina, you understand? Not mommy or daddy or anyone, unless you say it’s okay. And no one should even be asking to touch you unless mommy or daddy is there, like when we go to the doctor, you understand? And if someone does, you yell and say NO as loud as you can, you hear me? And you come and tell mommy or daddy, okay?”

What kind of talks do you have with your children about their penises and vaginas?

It Ain’t My Fault

Dr. Mama Esq.10 Comments
  • Montana Fishburne, aka Chippy D, actor Laurence Fishburne’s daughter, getting into the pornography business.
  • Nicole Richie, singer/songwriter Lionel Richie’s daughter, circa 2003-2007, high on heroin and pain meds, arrested and jailed.
  • Maia Campbell, the late author Bebe Moore Campbell’s daughter, suffering from bipolar disorder, high on meth and allegedly prostituting herself.

We tend to believe that when a child ends up a young adult going down the wrong path, the first place to place the blame is on the parents. Chris Rock made this folk wisdom a funny platitude when he said that as a father, his only job was to “keep my daughter off the pole!” We tend to believe that who people grow up to be as adults is the direct product of the inputs of their parents. Those who turn to drugs, alcohol, prostitution, gambling and any of the other vices of the world are often thought of as children who weren’t loved enough, disciplined enough, paid attention to enough, protected enough, read to enough, sang to enough, just overall parented enough. The general idea is that lousy kids come from lousy parents.

Bullshit.

Let’s face it: some people are going to grow up to be crackheads, meth-smokers, pimps and prostitutes no matter what kind of family they come from. Some people are going to lack self-control and self respect no matter how many times their parents told them they loved them, no matter how many times they were lovingly disciplined, no matter how many books were in their homes, no matter how organic their food was. Nasty adults come from families were the parents were the nicest people on the block, who hugged their kids all the time, limited their television watching, and didn’t allow violent video games in their homes.

The fact that you now are different from your siblings, and you grew up in the same house is evidence that parenting is not the end-all-be-all in how people turn out. There are so many other things going on, things we discuss on this blog all the time. And I’m sorry, this might make me lose cool points among you all, but I’m saying it – I’m not taking all the blame if my kids don’t turn out to be the greatest in the world. I’m doing my best, giving them most of what I’ve got. (Not all, cause we gotta save a bit for ourselves!)

I’m not saying that the Fishburnes and Richies and Campbells did all they could – I have no idea. But you probably don’t either. At the end of the day, if my kids end up as prostitutes, high on drugs, or in porn, it ain’t my fault.

What do you think? Do you blame the parents when you see young adults acting out? If your kids go down the wrong road, will you blame yourself?

In This House

Dr. Mama Esq.5 Comments

I’ve had a lot on my mind recently, so much that figuring out what to write about for my post, which was supposed to have been put up yesterday, has left me without words. I’m in Philly right now, in the house in which I grew up, and every time I come here, so much stuff comes up that many times I am left speechless. In this house, I revert into the child I once was. In this house I am the child that was not actually without words, but the child that felt silenced, the child that had “friends” but no friends, the child that always felt like an adult on the inside but had to play the child on the outside. In this house I am a child that was perpetually confused about other people’s motives, actions, feelings. In this house, I am a child that felt like she needed to protect everyone else, but who never felt protected. In this house, I am all of the frightened children who witnessed and experienced generations of violence and dysfunction. All in this house.

I don’t blame anyone for my feelings or my experience. I know for a fact that my brother does not feel like I do. Our experiences as children are shaped not only by what objectively happened to us, but by how we perceive what happened to us, by where our souls are in our spiritual maturation process. I own my feelings and my experience. All that being said, I hate this house. I wish my parents would move far, far away from it. For  in every corner, behind every sofa, every chair, there is a memory. And while I am working to allow memories be just that – experiences in the past that dwell in the past – when I return to this house, new experiences begin to meld with old memories and the juxtaposition of the two threaten to overwhelm me.

And as my children roll around on the new blue carpet that used to be tattered red for all of the 23 years I lived here, and they make new memories with new bikes parked in the dining room where we used to park our bikes in the garage, I wonder if this house can ever fully redeem itself in my eyes. Can the new coats of paint cover the handprints on the walls that got me in trouble 20 years ago? Can the new carpet contain the negative energy of the lye that was thrown in faces, the punches that were lobbed at eyes, the belts that were swung at butts, the curses that were spat out of mouths that were supposed to love? Can the ceiling fans sweep away the hot air of resentment and bitterness? To me, they cannot. I feel it all over.

On Thursday I leave this house. But until my parents leave it, back to it I will always have to return. I pray that the memories my children have of this house are of sunshine and butterflies, bikes and toys, Nana and Papi, love and happiness.

You Know I’m Bad

Dr. Mama Esq.15 Comments

Wow. It’s been an intense couple of weeks over here at CocoaMamas. And, I’ve been laying it down at other sites too, commenting away.

But one thing that’s got me really drawn in recently is about judging. Judging parenting. When I was younger, before I had my children, I considered myself to be a moral absolutist. I had a line – some things, some people, were on the good side of the line, other things were on the bad side of the line. I had no patience for cultural relativism, no sense that something that was “bad” could be “good” in certain circumstances. I could agree that I knew a “bad” parent when I saw one, based on their actions, their kid, or a combination of the two. I would have probably agreed with a list like this one, that lays out pretty well what most folks consider a ‘bad’ parent:

They cuss around and at their kids in the middle of the cereal aisle.

They fight with their significant others in public, in front of their kids, and slap the little ones when they get out of pocket, especially if there’s an audience to witness their discipline.

They let their kids roam the streets until somebody else’s mother tells the kid to go home.

They ride around in their cars with the windows rolled up, chain smoking while their babies bounce around in the back seat, sans seatbelts and boosters.

When it comes to showing up for parent/teacher conferences, or sending in donations for a teacher gift, or chipping in at the PTA-sponsored events, they’re nowhere to be found.

But then two things happened to me, and made me forever change the way I saw morality, the way I saw right and wrong, the way I saw parenting.

***

First, I became a parent. Twice. Now I do not believe that you have to experience something to understand it. I don’t need to eat a chili pepper to know it’s hot. I don’t need to dive into the deep end of the pool to know I’m going to drown cause I don’t know how to swim. I don’t need to touch the hot burner to know my skin will burn if I do. But there are some things in life that nothing but experience will truly allow you to understand, and parenting is one of them. (I think sex, being drunk, and actually driving a car are others.)

Consider the cussing at the kids in the cereal aisle. I’ve NEVER cussed at my kids, and I never will. (I don’t think I’ve ever cussed AT anyone.) But I can understand why one might want to. Imagine you’re in the supermarket, not in the cereal aisle, but in the produce department. You are inspecting the the peaches, looking for the best ones, and suddenly you hear, “Ummm…” You whip your head around, and your child has just taken a big ole bite out of several peaches right on down the row! You want to say, “What the F@*K!” because you’ve been through this before and she was instructed not to touch anything and especially not to take bites of fruit in the produce section. You were sure that THIS time you’d gotten through to her. But you hold it in as you hurriedly throw all the bitten peaches into your bag, which at $2.99 a lb, just decimated your budget for peaches. Again, I’ve never cussed at my kids and try my hardest not to cuss around them either, but damn, I can understand.

***

The second thing that happened to me was I was diagnosed with a serious mental illness and spent a week in the hospital when my children were 3 years and 18 months. From that day on, I could never find it in me to call another parent a bad parent. When you’ve wanted to do something as horrific as leave your children without a mother, and believed that was the best thing for them…

I don’t think I’ve turned into someone who doesn’t believe in right and wrong anymore, or good and bad. I’ve just come to believe that almost everything “depends.” I do believe that what other people do to and with their kids has an effect on the rest of us, as we are all interconnected and live in this society together. But when it comes to parenting, and knowing the hard choices that I made and continue to make every day, that right and wrong don’t have much meaning to me any more.

I hate to judge. And I hate being judged. Even if a parent does every single thing on that list, I’m not going to call him or her a bad parent. Why? Because I think it’s a waste of time and not very productive. Instead of sending positive vibes and energy about how to help that parent and especially that child, all I’d be doing in pointing out the flaws, gossiping about the defects. I’m sure many people could have did that while I had two babies at home, having a nervous breakdown in the hospital, saying that I was selfish and not taking care of my responsibilities. Or they could of helped me and my kids, which is what a lot of people did. If you see a kid out at all times of night, do send him home. You see a family without car seats, give them yours when your kids outgrow them. You see  mom about to go off on her kid in the cereal aisle, distract her so she doesn’t. You see adults fighting in front of the kids, in public? Take the kids and distract them, bring them to your house to play for a while. Befriend these so-called “bad” parents, bring them into your fold, your group, teach them some things. Don’t just label them and cast them aside.

I have friends now, who, when they see me discipline my children, will tell me a better way they think I could have handled the situation. I absolutely appreciate that. Would you?

The Gift

Dr. Mama Esq.19 Comments

When I was a child, at five years old, I was labelled “gifted.” In kindergarten, I was pulled out of my classroom and transported to another school, a few miles away, to attend a MG (mentally gifted) program once or twice a week. I was the youngest child in the program, too young, in fact, to be able to get on the yellow schoolbus with the other kids from my school. I remember that my pastor from church would come and pick me up and take me.

At my elementary school, I was an academic star. After kindergarten, I skipped the first grade; I remember the day when during an art project the principal came to my first grade classroom during the first week of school, told me to gather my things, and took me to another room. It was a second/third grade split room, but there were only about five second graders and the rest were third graders. During the rest of my years there, through the fifth grade, I did things that the other children weren’t allowed, or didn’t get an opportunity, to do. I participated in science fairs, but I remember doing the project in the vice-principal’s office, making my three panel board on the table in her office. I wrote a poem, that my mother still has, and performed it at a city-wide Blue Ribbon assembly, when I was in the fourth grade, talking about the different things I wanted to be when I grew up, which colleges I would attend. And the kicker was that when I graduated from the fifth grade, the mayor sent a representative to the graduation and I received a citation from the city. My mother still has that too.

For middle school and high school, I went to Masterman, a public magnet school for “gifted” kids. At that time, I believe that admission was based on city-wide test scores, a test that all students in the city took. I consistently scored in the 99th percentile. At Masterman, I wasn’t an academic star anymore, in that I wasn’t the best. For some kids, that leads to this great identity crisis, but honestly that was okay with me; I just kept doing me. Maybe because my parents never made a big deal out of me being “gifted.” I was just encouraged to be me, and gifted was just a part of what that was. I was still really good at what I was really good at. I was a balanced kid – I sang and had lots of friends, I worked and had other demons to face. When it was time for college, the giftedness came out again; my SAT scores were in the 90+ percentiles and they were exactly the same, both math and english. I went to Penn on a full scholarship but again wasn’t an academic star; I didn’t have straight A’s and academics were not on the forefront of my mind. It wasn’t until my last year when I wanted to graduate with honors that I decided that grades were really important, so I buckled down and got straight A’s that last year. But what I was really proud of were all the university wide awards I won that had little to do with grades – I was a leader who everyone knew.

But now I’ve been rethinking this whole gifted thing, now with my own children. Determining who is gifted and who isn’t is like a whole industry now, with three and four year olds taking intelligence tests. I’ve never taken an IQ test, except for those on the internet, so I have no idea how I’d score. But to get into a “gifted” program nowadays, I’d have to subject my children to IQ tests, personality tests, and a whole bunch of other tests. What if their IQ right now (since we know intelligence can grow) is not above a certain cut off? Would I feel differently about them? Would IQ scores even capture giftedness anyway, and not just parent’s education and preparation?

I don’t remember what the impetus was for my mother to push for me to be put in a gifted program. I doubt that I was disruptive in class, indicating that I was bored with what was going on. I think I knew how to read by 4, and Ahmir is starting to read now. If most kids don’t know how to do that, is that a reason to suspect giftedness? Children of color are seriously under identified when it comes to giftedness – is that a reason to have my children evaluated? And is giftedness something more than heightened intelligence, something that cannot be taught or grown, something that really is innate and can be identified? Is giftedness more than just being “smart”?

hebrew charter school? not for my child

Dr. Mama Esq.14 Comments

Did you see this article in the NYTimes last week about the racially diverse Charter School in New York City that has an enrollment of almost 1/3 black children? Where Muslim and Christian children learn not just a love of another language, but a love of another country and another culture? Sounds like a great idea, right?

If only public money wasn’t being spent. If only the curriculum didn’t focus on a religious group. And if only the other country wasn’t Israel.

First, I don’t think public money should be used to finance a quasi-religious institution. The school’s site says it’s social studies curriculum “emphasizes the study of world Jewish communities and Israel.” Is Judaism a religion or a culture? Is Israel a purely democratic state or a religious state? There are no clear answers, and for that reason, the division between church and state should prevail. The article references learning “the pride” of Israel. What does that mean? If the pride of Israel has anything to do with the pride of Judaism, and if Judaism is a religion, then the line has most definitely been crossed. (I also disagree with the pledge of allegiance having “God” in it, BTW.) I would not support a Hebrew school masquarading as a school to learn the original language of the Bible, either Testament. I, even as a Jesus-loving Christian, don’t support ANY public money being spent on ANY religion.

Second, I know I’m going to be accused of being anti-Semitic for saying I wouldn’t send MY child to this school. And I know that had I substituted any other country above, it would sound wrong, most likely even to me. What if I’d said I wouldn’t send my child to a school that celebrated French culture, or Jamaican culture? It would be wrong to single out those countries, those cultures, as if something was wrong with them per se, just because.

But I do think Israel is a special case (although not the only special case), and I don’t think cloaking the school behind the guise of teaching a language makes me more comfortable. I don’t support anything short of a two-state solution, and as long as we aren’t there, I cannot understand supporting the creation of one state without the creation of the other. The recent and not-so-recent human right violations by Israel against the Palestinian people is something I cannot support. Our country’s way of only hand-slapping Israel for physically subjugating another people while we ass-kick (and threaten to do so to) other nations for similar offenses is similarly something I do not support. That being said, I wouldn’t support a China school, an Iran school, a North Korea school, or a Sudan school.

And together, I cannot understand putting public money toward teaching our (black) children to accept or support it. I understand that this might be the “best” education a child can receive. Many parents are excited that their child will be learning a second language. Many parents believe that going to school with Jewish kids will benefit their children because its a community in which “there’s no foolishness when it comes to education.” (I don’t have the space to debate this last assertion, but whatever, elite colleges do have high Jewish enrollments.)

But I hope the day will come that we being to realize that getting an education is also about being a citizen, a responsible person in the world, not just scoring high on the SAT.