"First Class"
...or, "Is it possible to raise rich kids who don't have a sense of entitlement?"
Thought-provoking article in Slate by Debra Dickerson. The focus is on her experience as a woman who is black---now well-to-do but born the daughter of sharecroppers---raising children who appear wholly white, and are afforded the privilege of their upper class.
I recommended her last article on Slate, "Racist Like Me," in a previous blog post.
Excerpts:
I couldn't care less what my kids look like. What I begrudge them is their privilege. Race schmace. The real issue is class.
Listening to my 3-year-old go on the other day about motor boats, preschool, lake houses, Vietnamese food, and skiing at Steamboat Springs, I felt a moment of vertigo followed by panic.... All at once, I could see my babies through a stranger's eyes: My kids are the ones that made poor kids like me embarrassed of our threadbare lives. My kids, God help me, are rich, that birth defect for which I have only begun to forgive a chosen few.
If it's true that our president, as Ann Richards quipped, was born on third base but thinks he hit a triple, you could say that my kids were born on second base. My job is not to teach them that they're black. My job is to teach them that they damn sure didn't hit a double. I will not allow them to coast on that which they didn't earn; they have to prove their worth to the world. And, frankly, to their mother.
Thought-provoking article in Slate by Debra Dickerson. The focus is on her experience as a woman who is black---now well-to-do but born the daughter of sharecroppers---raising children who appear wholly white, and are afforded the privilege of their upper class.
I recommended her last article on Slate, "Racist Like Me," in a previous blog post.
Excerpts:
I couldn't care less what my kids look like. What I begrudge them is their privilege. Race schmace. The real issue is class.
Listening to my 3-year-old go on the other day about motor boats, preschool, lake houses, Vietnamese food, and skiing at Steamboat Springs, I felt a moment of vertigo followed by panic.... All at once, I could see my babies through a stranger's eyes: My kids are the ones that made poor kids like me embarrassed of our threadbare lives. My kids, God help me, are rich, that birth defect for which I have only begun to forgive a chosen few.
If it's true that our president, as Ann Richards quipped, was born on third base but thinks he hit a triple, you could say that my kids were born on second base. My job is not to teach them that they're black. My job is to teach them that they damn sure didn't hit a double. I will not allow them to coast on that which they didn't earn; they have to prove their worth to the world. And, frankly, to their mother.
// 9/05/2004 
