Babysitting

Tonight, despite being utterly exhausted (as always), I agreed to babysit.

It's really not all bad. Sure, it gives me less opportunity for naps, but it's generally enjoyable and I get time for naps.

There's only one kid today, and it's the one I like. When I first babysat him he was a manipulative little bugger and I never trusted anything he said. Since then he's grown up to be a wondrous little nerd.

And he listens (or at least pretends to) when I go on tangents about history.

Today, for example, we were talking about wars, and when he mentioned that most wars seemed to happen in Europe or Asia I gave him a speech on how Eurocentric our history textbooks are and on the diversity of cultures demolished by European colonization and imperialism.

If this seems too much for an eight year old, just trust me when I say he's very smart.

Then I noticed a line in his "Time for Kids" issue that said that "Christopher Columbus and other explorers brought horses to this land" and then went on for two pages about how important and wonderful horses were for Native American culture.

And I was just like... you forgot smallpox. And slavery. And the quota system. And straight-up genocide.

It's little white-washings like this one that add up to an ethnocentric view of world history. The whole principle behind my AP US History class this year so far has basically been trying to dispel these rose-colored views of America and its history. Everybody was aware that Columbus wasn't all that great, but even faced with the cold facts of the damage that he did, they were still reluctant to condemn him. I'm a bit of a radical in my class, but I see him as comparable to Hitler or Stalin. The only difference is that they didn't win, so nobody tries to cast them in a better light or claim that their "historical significance" earns them hero status.

And sure, in elementary school, they teach us about slavery. But they do it by teaching about the heroic, self-sacrificing, white abolitionists who brought (in reality not very many) slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad.

Sure, they teach us about Jim Crow. But they do it by showing us relatively innocuous pictures of segregated water fountains. Our ears are far too delicate to know the pure hatred and violence surrounding that time.

Sure, they mention how many American Indians died. But they always say it in the passive voice, as if they just suddenly expired without cause, all while telling us all these feel-good stories about Squanto and Pocahontas and Sacajawea.

When my history teacher showed us images of black people being slowly tortured and hanged in front of jeering crowds of well-dressed white folk, I think I was the only one who wasn't surprised. My parents didn't coddle me with misinformation. I remember watching a 60 minutes show with them when I was 9 about a young black teenager who was brutally beaten to death for flirting with a white woman. It was gruesome enough to stick with me all these years, such that I still remember his name enough to google a biography for you.

But is that a bad thing? Should injustice be glossed over just for the sake of "preserving innocence"?

I mean, I think you know where I stand on that question. The images of Emmett Till would not let me forget why it's so important to recognize and fight racism. Uncomfortable truths must be learned sometime. It's not doing children or society any favors to hold it off until their worldviews are already set.

Lest you are concerned for the well-being of the boy I babysit, I'm pretty sure he's okay. When I defined genocide for him, he said "Oh, like Turkey with the Armenians?" so he's already more well-informed about the topic than most adults. Love that kid.