"Santa Claus Van Damme"

Early today, a former classmate of mine sent this to me. Kids can really be both mirrors and sponges at the same time, reflecting all the beauty and all the ugliness in the world with a clarity too honest for adults. On Super Bowl Sunday I called my parents and, after assuring them I was eating healthy and getting enough sleep, was passed around to the rest of the crew assembled to watch the game. My niece (who recently sent me a colored drawing of hearts and rainbows, inscribed “You are the coolest! Go D!”) excitedly told me that they were learning about the different states in school and that all of her friends thought Mississippi had the coolest flag.

. . .

No, her teacher didn’t explain what the flag represented. She had no idea; most fourth graders probably don’t. I tried my best to give a brief synopsis of slavery, the civil war and the current state of affairs while a rain-soaked Peyton scored another TD in the background and her little sister whined to have her turn on the phone.

At what point does this innocence become ignorance, and intolerable? I recently heard a story from a friend who was sorting laundry with her young son a few days after he learned all about MLK in preparation for the holiday and, you know, the inequality he’s sure to encounter first or second hand as he grows older. The conversation went something like this;

Mother: “Put the whites in one pile and all the darks or coloreds in the other.”
Son: “I know Mom, we learned about that in school today with Martin Luther King Jr.”
Mother (taken aback): “What do you mean? This is just what we have to do with laundry, not people.”
Son: “Why?”
Mother (assuming he meant, ‘Why separate the laundry?’): “When you wash clothes, if you mix colors in with whites you will ruin the whites.”

. . . she immediately realized what she had just said, and put down the laundry to clarify for him.

Hopefully he understood.