Real American: A conversation with Julie Lythcott Haims

Nov 25, 2020

More about Julie Lythcott-Haims:

Julie Lythcott-Haims is a seventh generation real American. Her American ancestors were kidnapped from Africa, sold at auction like common animals and enslaved. As slaves, they were tortured and raped repeatedly by their white masters to produce children for slave labor. Their labor built America and made thousands of white Americans, as well as our entire country wealthy. When they were finally emancipated, they were freed, but not free. Not only were they never compensated for the theft of their labor, dignity, or lives, but federal, State, and local governments, under color of law, intentionally reinforced old and created new structures to subjugate them. These structures still plague the lives of all their descendants today.

Julie is also the author of the New York Times bestselling anti-helicopter parenting manifesto, How To Raise An Adult.

Petal's key takeaways:

Children as young as five to seven, if you talk to them explicitly about interracial friendships, in as little as one week, there will be a dramatic improvement in the way that they act towards race. - Julie Lythcott Haims

 

You have to actively do the work to be an anti-racist. And that work for us parents is not just to buy books for your kids and watch different videos. It's to do the internal work to undo the implicit bias within you.  None of us is above this. Okay. Do the work! - Julie Lythcott Haims

 

Do see black and Brown people as fully human? If so, how do you know? How does it show? Where's the evidence in your life that you could point to or parents better yet, that your kids could point to? - Julie Lythcott Haims

If somebody came by and knocked on the door and said, "Do your parents treat black and brown people as fully equal to everyone else?" What evidence would your children point to in answering either yes or no? - Julie Lythcott Haims

What are you doing to make your world by which I mean your family, community, neighborhood, your city, your America, kinder and safer for black and brown people? Because action is required. Whiteness has been used as a weapon against the rest of us for centuries and we now seem to know enough about it. Historians have studied it. Scientists, social scientists can tell us what's happening in our heads around whiteness. We now have the information. We just have to take a deep breath and say, "You know what? Yep. I'm going to do what Dolly Chugh recommends which is move from being just a believer to being a builder. Build a new reality. Take part in that. - Julie Lythcott Haims

My very, very favorite story in this book is when you were 15 and you're in France on a trip, and you run into this little white girl who was playing in a park and you're walking by and she asks: "Why are you black?" And you respond, "because I am lucky." And to me, this is the essence of not only what I took away from Real American, it is what I think all parents of black children need to teach their children, that they are actually more than lucky. Because despite centuries of, to quote you, "the systemic dismemberment of black agency, the debasement of black men, the rape of black woman, the destruction of the black family, the ringing of energy and life out of our black forebears, despite all of that, these children are here. And what that means is that black people endured. And in that endurance is unparalleled strength, intelligence and a power that we ourselves are just beginning to understand.  So black children have nothing to be ashamed of. They don't have anything to loathe in themselves. They are not the ones with something to be ashamed of. I personally hope that I live to see the day when every black child owns their own power. - Petal Modeste