{"id":16581,"date":"2020-05-29T23:59:53","date_gmt":"2020-05-30T03:59:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=16581"},"modified":"2020-05-30T09:56:06","modified_gmt":"2020-05-30T13:56:06","slug":"wee-the-people-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2020\/05\/29\/wee-the-people-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Wee The People\u2019s \u2018Family Day Of Action\u2019 5\/31 In Solidarity With Black Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe unmattering of Black lives starts in childhood,\u201d Wee The People<\/a> co-founder Francie Latour writes. \u201c\u2026When we intervene in a way that tells kids the truth, that taps into their innate sense of fairness, and that gives them the agency to create, it can be a powerful step forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

So in protest of the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd; the way coronavirus has ravaged Black and Brown communities; and \u201cthe ongoing profiling and harassment of people of color,” the Boston-based social justice project for kids, which Latour and\u00a0Tanya Nixon-Silberg founded in 2015, and their partners\u2014the Philly Children\u2019s Movement and MassArt’s Center for Art and Community Partnership\u2014are planning \u201cWee Chalk the Walk, a Family Day of Action\u201d<\/a> for Sunday, May 31.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor health and safety, this Day of Action will happen on our own blocks, with simple kid-friendly activities Wee hope will spark urgently needed conversations with kids about racial injustice and the choice we can make to speak out,\u201d organizers say on the facebook event page.<\/p>\n

Participants are invited to share photos and videos of themselves:
\n\u2022 Making sidewalk art: \u201cWhat kind of change do you want to see in the world?\u201d
\n\u2022 Making and posting signs.
\n\u2022 Staging a \u201cmini-protest\u201d with your \u201cstuffies, action figures, and dolls.\u201d
\n\u2022 Lighting candles \u201cfor the Black and Brown lives impacted and lost to the pandemic, to racism, and to White supremacist ideology.\u201d
\n\u2022 Sharing a playlist of protest songs in honor of Black and Brown lives.
\n\u2022 Writing the names of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd \u201cin chalk, in a notebook, on a T-shirt, with a paintbrush. Let the world know that their lives mattered.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Tanya<\/a>
Tanya Nixon-Silberg of Wee The People. (Courtesy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I asked Latour some questions about the project and she responded via email:<\/p>\n

Can you talk about the incidents and events that are prompting you to organize this event?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We organized \u201cWee Chalk the Walk\u201d as a response to the savage killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd at the hands of police and ordinary American people.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re organizing because Black people are in pain, because the pain we feel is an acute trauma punctuating the ongoing trauma of disproportionate Black lives lost from COVID19, and because this public health trauma compounds four centuries of generational trauma from the relentless assault on Black lives, going all the way back to slavery.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re organizing because this trauma and death will continue unless White and non-Black people of color begin to act, resist, and do the necessary work to confront how their individual lives\u2014their wealth, their safety, their freedoms\u2014are directly linked to racist, oppressive systems. To confront the fact that these benefits and protections, which Whiteness grants, comes at a cost. That cost is the destruction of Black bodies, the \u201cun-mattering of Black lives,\u201d as activist-scholar Kimberle Crenshaw recently wrote. In this necessary work, we absolutely include White parents of young children.<\/p>\n

Why is it important for children to engage these issues? And in these ways? What is the power for children in learning and responding in these ways?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The unmattering of Black lives starts in childhood. Black people have always known this and said this. But now that exhaustive scientific research also says it, new doors have opened to mainstream audiences hearing and understanding the impact of White silence with kids. In the absence of clear, normalized anti-racist interventions by the adults in White children\u2019s lives, the default unmattering of Black lives will grow and grow and grow. Fully grown, another generation of adults will go on to participate in systems of racism and the injustice and trauma those systems cause.<\/p>\n

When we intervene in a way that tells kids the truth, that taps into their innate sense of fairness, and that gives them the agency to create, it can be a powerful step forward. They\u2019re creating something that sends a message; that means they\u2019re not only thinking about what that message actually means in their heads, they\u2019re finding their own way to express that meaning expressing it through their bodies. They\u2019re putting on training wheels as agents of change. And they\u2019re learning that any change that will make the world more fair can\u2019t happen without an active choice to do\/make\/say something and put it out in the world.<\/p>\n

What are ways you encourage parents to speak about and address racist violence, harassment, systemic oppression? And to speak about the murders?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I feel like there are a few things every parent, and actually every American, needs to help kids understand about what\u2019s going on right now:<\/p>\n

One: The lives of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd were sacred, and they were stolen.<\/p>\n

Two: Their lives were stolen by police, the people we are taught to believe are supposed to protect us.<\/p>\n

Three: Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd were not killed because they were Black. Blackness is not the problem. James Baldwin has written it, Beyonc\u00e9 has sung it, Maya Angelou has versed it, Kehinde Wiley has crowned it: There is everything to love about being Black\u2014our style, our traditions, our genius, our roots, our resilience.<\/p>\n

What killed Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor and George Floyd is White America\u2019s insatiable need to demonize Blackness. That\u2019s not an easy conversation to start with kids. But it is absolutely possible.<\/p>\n

Toni Morrison once said of race, \u201cCan\u2019t you see? It\u2019s all a distortion. It\u2019s all made.\u201d You couldn\u2019t build a bunch of lamps or chairs, plant them in the ground, and convince a kid that they grew naturally from the earth with a shape, size, weight, or color. But that is what the lie of race would have us believe: that some people are White, some people are Black, and they sprang from nature with different intelligence, beauty, morality, and so on. Part of what we have to challenge White kids to do is to become \u201cseers,\u201d to notice the lies and distortions and endless, tortured acrobatics of racism (for example: the U.S. and Europe have looted continents, but Black protesters are the ones who are branded looters). For White parents to do that, they also need to learn to see. And that is the work.<\/p>\n

(Photo at top by Philly Children’s Movement.)<\/em><\/p>\n

Previously:<\/strong>
\nJan. 29, 2020: From The Co-Founder Of Wee The People, A Puppet Show For Kids About Standing Up To Strongmen<\/a>
\nDec. 17, 2017: Wee The People: Talking With Kids About Why There Aren\u2019t More Black And Brown People In Museums<\/a>
\nJuly 8, 2017: Tearing Down The Wall At Wee The People\u2019s \u2018Protestival\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, weekly newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n

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\u201cThe unmattering of Black lives starts in childhood,\u201d Wee The People co-founder Francie Latour writes. \u201c\u2026When we intervene in a way that tells kids the truth, that taps into their innate sense of fairness, and that gives them the agency to create, it can be a powerful step forward.\u201d So in protest of the killings […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16591,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,100,192],"tags":[685,697,87,684,161],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16581"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16581"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16611,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16581\/revisions\/16611"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}