the 65 year old journalist

(Note: This post is probably longer than some readers have time for. If you’d rather listen to it, you can find it on my podcast, Nailing It Down, button above)

If the term “child abuse” seems a little strong, let me explain. My argument begins the moment a child is born. The moment they enter the world, a child possesses inalienable human rights that cannot be taken away. A short list would include: the right to nourishment, housing, health care, education, work, and freedom—freedom to live their lives without fear and freedom to be the person they understand themselves to be. Children raised in a society that values human rights become mature, educated, capable, empathetic human beings, able to embrace their neighbors and their world.

Unfortunately, adults in many cultures deny children their full human rights. That has been happening in the United States for centuries, and it’s happening right now, as some parents, pastors, and politicians battle to prevent children from learning the full story of the Black experience in this country and the facts about human sexuality. Denying children a proper understanding of their developing sexuality may leave them confused and disturbed about who they really are. Refusing to tell them the truth about  African American history will produce yet another generation of morally stunted adults, trained to perpetuate the bigotry and discrimination practiced by earlier generations of Americans. Preventing children from realizing their full potential as a human being is nothing less than child abuse.  

Responsibility for “educating” a child falls first, of course, on parents, but in time, all of us—teachers, pastors, community leaders, neighbors—will touch that child’s life and influence the sort of person that child becomes. With some parents, pastors and politicians across the country hell-bent on banning books, educational curricula, and essential facts about Black history and human sexuality to prevent children from learning the truth (and in the process stunt child development), the community’s responsibility to meet children’s true educational need is greater and more urgent than ever. I don’t mean to step on anyone’s religious toes, but here are some thoughts, observations, and facts that I’d share with our kids, if I could.

Let’s start at square one—the moment of birth. Children should know that they are born good, not guilty of original sin that makes getting saved from banishment to hell an urgent need. Some Christians have drilled the concept of original sin into their children for many years. It’s based on the story of Adam and Eve disobeying God in Genesis (Genesis 3, in the Hebrew Bible). It’s regrettable that some Christians have terrified their children with that concept. The people whose ancestors wrote the book of Genesis don’t haunt their kids with Original Sin. Etz Hayim, a 1985, English translation of the Torah, offers this comment on Genesis Chapter 3: “…we note that neither here nor anywhere else in the Hebrew Bible is their [Adam and Eve’s] act characterized as sin, let alone the Original Sin.” (p.18)

There is evolutionary evidence that human beings are, in fact, born good. Anthropologist Richard Leakey reported that sixty thousand years ago, human relationships were regulated by sympathy and gratitude, fairly modern sounding emotions, and that those feelings had merged to create a highly successful survival strategy he called “reciprocal altruism.”Reciprocal altruism simply means that our ancestors were willing to act for the benefit of others without expecting something in return. Leakey argued vigorously against aggression and killing as the marks of our innate human nature. For him, wars and violence are political acts that arose as agriculture led us into a materialistic culture that did not exist in our cooperative, altruistic, hunter-gatherer days. Surely, teaching a child their innate human nature is good should be a more positive contribution to their development as a person than threatening them with the fires of hell.

          There are a number of facts about human sexuality that, if shared with children, would help them grow into the person they’re meant to be. For instance, every child should know that they are free to discover their own gender identity. Unfortunately, much of American society, especially conservative Christians, have long believed that gender identity can be assigned to a child based on the body parts they arrive with. As these people see it, you are either a boy or a girl, any other gender identities are perversions condemned by society with the blessing of the Almighty. That’s what I grew up with. My mother, and most of the adults in my world, detested homosexuality, and taught me to do the same. My mother was so frightened by homosexuality that she stopped hugging me when I was seven or eight years old (because a prominent pediatrician at the time said overbearing mothers made their sons gay.) I was in college before I learned that gender identity can fall all along the line between boy and girl. It saddens me to think how many jokes I made and laughed out at the expense of LGBTQ people in my little home town, good people who remained closeted their entire lives, fearing abuse if they dared to publicly claim who they really were.

          Much of the book and curriculum banning going on today targets the LGBTQ community. What must that feel like to a child who arrives with male or female external parts, but gradually comes to know their true gender identity lies elsewhere. Parents, pastors, and politicians who persecute LGBTQ children with ignorant bathroom and locker room restrictions and bans on transgender medical care are, in my opinion, engaging in child abuse. I wish I could tell them and their children what medical science today knows about finding our gender identity and sexual orientation (who we’re physically attracted to). What a difference it must make for a child to grow into adulthood in an understanding home. What torment it must be for children to work on establishing their gender identity in a home where parents find the answers to questions about sexuality in the Bible, a book that, in part, promotes empathy and justice, but was written by men who knew less than a fraction of what we know today about human development.

          Speaking of ignorance, there are lots of things our children should be taught about the experience people of African ancestry have had since they were first enslaved in American more than four centuries ago. Parents, pastors, and politicians, especially those professing religious faith, who oppose teaching Black history because it might make little white children feel ashamed should be ashamed themselves. Children born with an empathetic human nature should know that what we call “racism” today first reared its ugly head among white men in ancient Greece and Rome, long before Jesus was born. These men, including Hippocrates, the patron saint of medicine, were the respected thinkers of their day. Yet they decided, without evidence, that white men were superior to people of color, especially Africans. They convinced themselves that Africans were suited only for servitude (enslavement). By the Fifteenth Century (1400s), their ideas had spread to the rest of Europe. That’s when white men, with the blessing of both the Catholic Church (Pope Nicholas V) and Protestant church (Cotton Mather), dragged African people from their homes and hauled them onto the shores of the “New World,” where they built a nation based on laws that reduced people of color to property and denied their humanity and their inalienable rights entirely. Of course, North America wasn’t new at all. Indigenous peoples, who would be abused by white men nearly to the point of extinction, had flourished on this land for thousands of years before white men “found” it. It took a bloody civil war to legally end enslavement, but that didn’t abolish the insidious white supremacy on which it was based.

          Parents, pastors and politicians who don’t want children to know the suffering and abuse African Americans have endured on these shores for nearly half a millennium are guilty of abusing all of our children, Black and white alike. Where these book and curriculum bans succeed, they strike a blow for the same bigotry and hatred of people of color that I grew up with. The dominant racial message communicated to me in my virtually all-white community was that Black people are lazy and threatening. Adults in my world used the N-word. My father joked about the Black man who lasted less than a week at the farm implement plant in my home town because he refused to work as hard as the white men around him. I remember when, on a visit to Washington, D.C., we took a wrong turn, and ended up in a predominantly Black neighborhood. What was a seven-year-old white boy to do when his mother took one look at the people of color outside the car and immediately told her children to roll up their windows and lock their doors. I was out of high school before I realized the harm those attitudes had done to me as I strove to become a mature, empathetic human being. I am still working at it. Of course, any pain I experienced trying to shed those deeply embedded racist attitudes pales by comparison to the harm those attitudes have inflicted on children of color in every generation of American children to this day.

          If we teach our children that they, and every other person on this planet, inherited human rights—the right to live their lives and pursue their dreams without fear—the moment they’re born, if we tell them they are born good, that they are evolutionarily equipped to empathize with all of their sisters and brothers on the planet, and equally equipped to engage in reciprocal altruism with those around them, if we give them room to realize their own gender identity and sexual orientation, and teach them that we are all equal and deserving of justice, they will, I believe, be better able to realize their full potential as a human being.

          If we stay close to these children—at home, at school, as they enter the adult world—we can shield them from the abusive bigotry and dehumanizing attitudes our culture has poured into their developing, impressionable minds for so very long. If we accomplish that, if we manage to raise a generation of young people who fully embrace—for themselves and everyone else—the human rights they were born with, the rights granted them by the universe, we can break the vicious hold of prejudice and ignorance that has inflicted so much abuse on our children. I used to think the path to a better society, a better nation, a better world, lay through the graveyard, as we buried all the bigots of past generations. But I eventually realized that wouldn’t fix things as long as the racists and homophobes and sexists were still cramming their fetid attitudes into the minds of their own young. As a people, as a species, we must commit ourselves to telling our children the truth about everything: Black history, human sexuality, and human nature. If we do that, I firmly believe, the truth will set them free to be.