Occasional Paper Series #46
Raising a Co-Conspirator: A Letter to My Daughter
by Abby Emerson
A letter for 10 years from now, when Melody turns 13.
July 18, 2020
Dear Melody,
You are turning 3 tomorrow. Just like the week you were born, there is a heat wave surging through New York City. This summer has brought about an immense increase in mainstream attention to racial justice. The movement for Black lives is seen on the nightly news and streaming through social media. There are reminders everywhere that, as much as we long for aspects of our pre-COVID lives, we cannot accept a return to them without change. As you start your next trip around the sun, this is the perfect moment to envision what parenting oriented towards racial justice can look like for you and for me.
Since you and I are white, we are in a privileged position where attending to race is seen as a choice. If I chose to, I could parent you from the shallow waters of race-evasiveness or let racial injustice lap at our ankles, but I seek to mother you with more intention and attention than that. Whether you call it critical race parenting (Delgado Bernal, 2018), ParentCrit (DePouw, 2018; Matias; 2016), or raising a co-conspirator (Love et al., unrecorded webinar, August 27, 2020), a central goal of my mothering is to disrupt racism.
Reading this letter, you are 13 now. As you transition from childhood into adolescence, I know that you will have a deeper awareness of race than I did at your age. As I envision what the next 10 years of your life will look like, I anticipate the important conversations we will have. While typically journey maps are for the past (Annamma, 2016), the one here is for the future. This is not to say that I am mapping your life before you have an opportunity to live it, but I am mapping some of the parenting decisions I will make so that you are better positioned in this world as a young, white anti-racist.
Abby Emerson is a doctoral candidate researching antiracist teacher education. In addition to educating teachers, she also facilitates workshops with White parents on antiracist parenting. Her current research explores whiteness, White supremacy, and their manifestations in formal and informal spaces where children are educated. She is the mom to Melody, Felix, and Wallace. Previously, she was an elementary school teacher for 10 years in NYC public schools. During that time she was named the 2018 National Association for Multicultural Education’s Critical Teacher of the Year.