Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

The turtles don’t cut it anymore

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My favorite story about kids and their confounded questions is the one about the little girl who's asking her distracted dad, "Daddy, what keeps the earth from falling?"

"The earth rests on the back of a turtle," he says, grinning behind his newspaper.

The little girl thinks for a moment and then asks, "What keeps that turtle from falling?"

"The turtle sits on another turtle," Dad says.

"And what keeps that turtle from falling?"

"Another turtle."

"And what about that turtle?"

And the old man loses his patience, whips the paper down and shouts, "It's turtles all the way down!"

But how was I supposed to respond when a black-history-soaked Scout asked whether, had I lived during slavery times, I would have thought slavery was "nice, or not nice"?

After stalling her with a lot of commentary about what a good question she'd asked (she already knew that), I said that it is always very difficult to know how one would feel and act at another time in history. I said I hoped I would have opposed slavery, and noisily.

She thought for a minute, and said, "I think you would have thought slavery was not nice. Because you're pretty nice."

How did you tell YOUR six-year-old about Hitler’s theory of the Master Race?

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This weekend, home-schooling occurred to me for the first time.

I’m not going to do it, of course, for the high-minded reason that Scout needs to be exposed to people other than me, and for the real reason: I’m far too lazy.

But here's what caused me to relate to people who don't want their kids learning about Darwin:

Because February is Black History Month in the United States, all public school teachers are expected to do a unit on it. In Scout's class, the Family Project this month is profiles of famous black figures—Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton. Well, maybe not Fred Hampton. ("And then one morning, the Chicago Police ventilated Hampton while he slept.")

Our family's famous black figure is Jesse Owens.

So Cristie and I get to explain to Scout—so she can in-turn formally present to her six-year-old colleagues—who “Raydolph Hitler” was, and how he thought white people were better than … other people. You know, people like Jesse Owens. But the story has a happy ending, we’re supposed to feel: Owens won and Hitler got a lesson in anger management.

(I reckon we’ll wait until next Black History Month to tell Scout that after Jesse Owens won, Hitler privately shrugged off the victory as a shoe-in for someone whose ancestors “came from the jungle." And maybe the February after that, we’ll tell her that Owens actually thought Hitler was mistreated by the press; he felt snubbed by President Roosevelt, who “didn’t even send me a telegram.” Third grade? That’ll be the time we talk about how Owens was unfairly stripped of his amateur status and had to scrap together a living hustling for black exploitation films, racing against horses and running from IRS agents.)

Look. We could hold a long, boring million-man beer summit in this country on when and how it’s appropriate to introduce race and racism to our innocents, thereby inducing the lifelong intellectual and emotional epilepsy that will make them truly American.

But what are the chances that the exact best way to bring them into this deeply complex realm is all at once, Lincoln to Hitler to X, in February of their kindergarten year, because it happens to be Black History Month?

And then to have them learn the stuff from one another's imbecile presentations?

Is this stupid, or what?