Raising White Kids

This is an amazing book that offers a lot of great advice for how to lay the groundwork for teaching my 3 year old how to be an effective ally toward Black people and other people of color. I am extremely thankful for this book's having helped me become aware of more areas in which I must challenge myself. I highly recommend this book to any white person who will ever interact with a white child.

Short Review: This is a very helpful book full of practical examples of real kids and real situations that come up as parents. This is a challenging book as a parent because no only do you need to help your own children learn how to be White in a racially unjust world, you can't really do that unless you also deal with your own issues around race. And there is a level of difficulty in helping someone else process something, even if you have come to a basic understanding of racial issues yourself.

The basic principles of the books are also true for many other issues. So reading this can help give ideas about how to parent boys in a sexist world, how to parent abled kids in a world that is not equal for differently abled kids, etc.

The part that I think this book really does better than some other books around whiteness I have read is the discussion about exposure to diversity, without giving White kids a place to see their identity can actually backfire. This is published by a Christian publishers, but it is not an explicitly Christian book. I think especially the section about giving place for white kids could be better if explicitly discussed as Christian. But that is not a negative to the book as a whole.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/raising-white-kids/