Why We Can’t Breathe: Calculating, Locating & Communicating as Parents
By: Lion S Story
Tags: Racism, Race, Diversity, Parenting, Communication

Dr. Howard Stevenson

I once wrote, “Parenting is a life-long acquaintance with helplessness.” (Stevenson, Davis, Abdul-Kabir, 2001). This was especially true for my two boys when I and their mothers taught them how to engage racial politics in healthy ways. My oldest is African American-Filipino and my youngest African American. Everyday I think about them, my joys and my fears spike to a 10 out of 10 on the stress scale. They are my world and yet that phrase reflects the depth of my fears. I feel helpless most days on how to protect them.

I believed their lives might be burdened with the pressures of systemic and face-to-face racism before they were ready to deal with it. I worried that I might not adequately protect them from the daily subtle and blatant racial insults I experienced growing up and as an adult. I struggled with foisting my own life experience on theirs by telling endless stories of how I had to walk through the snow to get to school while dealing with racism every day of every year, with no clothes or shoes.

Well, perhaps I’m exaggerating about the snow part.

And while racism doesn’t show up every day, it lingers in the atmosphere of every room like a chill you can’t see but feel in your bones. But if our research in racial socialization and literacy (or talking to children about managing racial politics) has taught me anything, every racial story can be healing and deserves a hearing, no matter how painful or how subtle.

Still, parenting your child to survive life challenges is differently stressful than parenting them to transcend racism from social interactions around skin color, size, language, mannerisms, and style. Our research has shown that talking to our children about racial politics promotes well-being because it prepares youth to make sense of confusing and hostile racial encounters. Research has shown for over two decades that youth who say their parents talk to them about racial pride and discrimination are youth who score lower on measures of sadness, anger, and stress, but who also score higher on measures of well-being and academic success.

And while racism doesn’t show up every day, it lingers in the atmosphere of every room like a chill you can’t see but feel in your bones.

While those relationships between racial talking and child well-being are important, we now know we have to provide children and youth racial coping skills they can use before, during, and after racially stressful encounters. The key questions in this new direction is “How well do our parental strategies prepare children for not just systemic racism but the racial stress that comes with these daily in-the-moment rejections?

Racial stress has been found to be harmful to one’s focus, motivation to achieve and compete. Since talking about race in this country is difficult, explaining to our children how to cope with racial rejection can be very stressful.

We know now that when parents give “The Racial Talk,” giving it once is not enough. Children and parents need many “Racial Talks” that are funny, sad, nuanced, complicated, creative, explicit, and interactive and can be delivered at any time and place. Messages and slogans about racial pride and racial hostility are not enough. We need to teach our children to appreciate how they feel when confronted with racism. We need to help them take stock of the impact of those painful or subtle racial rejections and assess the toll on their bodies, minds and souls. We need a racial literacy to teach them the emotional strategies and verbal comebacks that will help them beyond resilience and surviving to thriving and transcending racism. Toward finding their voice.

So I’ve proposed that parents use 3 racially healthy coping strategies when telling or listening to stories about racial politics to and with their children. They are Calculate, Locate, and Communicate.

Following each strategy, the parent must remember to breathe and exhale slowly. The first racial coping skill is to calculate on a scale from 1 to 10 how stressed out you feel at the moment you are anticipating, engaging, remembering, or sharing the racially stressful encounter. A “10” means to “I feel very stressed right now,” while “1” means “I’m not stressed at all.” Then breathe and exhale.

The second skill is to locate on your body where you feel the most stressed. Breathe and exhale slowly again. The more specific you can be about the effect of the stress on that body part, the more you will be able to manage it (“I can feel butterflies in my stomach and they are spreading throughout my upper chest area and into my throat so much that I can barely speak”).

The third racially healthy coping skill is to notice your self-communication during the racial encounter. What do you say to yourself during the memory or the event? We call that “Self-Talk.” Then do you see anything during the memory or the event? We call that “Self-Imaging.” What do you notice about yourself (thoughts, emotions, and body reactions) and do you have someone to share that with? Not alone.

Calculating, Locating, and Communicating followed by breathing and exhaling will help you be less overwhelmed, more prepared and more clear when you tell your racial story to your child. Then you can spend most of your energy focusing on your child’s experience of the story and be emotionally available as they have questions or want to practice what you are speaking to them.

So, parental helplessness can be a positive experience if we calculate, locate, and communicate while we speak to our loved ones. So instead of “Talk the Talk,” we encourage parents to “Walk the Talks” with clarity and practice. To “Walk the Talks,” parent or guardian racial storytelling should affirm the behaviors, identities, and culture of their children with clarity (“Make it Plain”). Secondly, remember practice doesn’t make perfect, “perfect practice makes perfect.” Our children need to hear our racial stories of tragedy and triumph so they can be able to tell us their stories of racial rejection and uplift, with humor and confidence.

The African proverb, “The lion’s story will never be known as long as the hunter is the one to tell it” reveals the importance of how we don’t have to remain helpless in the wake of racial confusion by following society’s scripts of racial avoidance, apathy, and colorblindness. If as parents we can learn to write our own scripts of racial coping for our children, “Walk the Talks,” we all will breathe and exhale easier.

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Dr. Howard Stevenson, founder of Lion’s Story, is a nationally recognized clinical psychologist and researcher on negotiating racial conflicts using racial literacy for schools, community mental health centers, teachers, leaders, police and parents. He serves as the Executive Director of the Racial Empowerment Collaborative (REC) at Penn, which is designed to promote racial literacy research, training, and programming in education, health, community and justice institutions. Dr. Stevenson is also the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education, Professor of Africana Studies, in the Human Development & Quantitative Methods Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.