If I'm talking to one of the adults who was around when I was a kid and I mention one of my racism-related shortcomings, such as the fact that I was blithely ignorant of the racist tropes contained in the media I was consuming, their response is invariably "But you were just a kid!"
Yes, I was just a kid.
And now I'm not. Now I'm a middle-aged adult. A middle-aged adult who's woefully inadequate at even spotting racism, to say nothing of countering racism.
And, as a middle-aged adult who's established in my profession and my community, I have (or am perceived to have) a certain amount of influence. I have no actual authority, but I can sometimes set the tone. If I say "This is a problem we should do something about," I tend to get listened to, insofar as even if they opt not to address the problem, they take seriously the fact that I see a problem.
Unfortunately, when it comes to racism, I am currently too ignorant to reliably see the problems. Even though I'm trying to do the work and learn about problems that exist and what I can do about them, I haven't yet developed the ability to extrapolate from what I've learned and identify other problems that I haven't specifically read about or been told about.
If my antiracism education had led me to start thinking along these lines, maybe I'd be better at it. Maybe by the time I'd aged into the privilege and influence that comes with being an established middle-aged adult, I'd have been thinking about it for longer and have come up with some clue about how to actually make use of that privilege and influence.
My other posts in this series have been entitled "flaws in my education". This one is entitled "flaws in my antiracism education", because the other aspects of my education did in fact assume that I personally and my peers in general would eventually be in positions of authority or influence.
"Leadership" was a buzzword when I was in high school. Our teachers would compliment us or respond to others' compliments of us by saying "They're leaders!" If you'd asked any of the adults involved in our upbringing and education, they would absolutely have agreed that we would eventually be in positions of authority or influence, hiring people, training people, making decisions that affect people's lives and affect broader policy, righting the wrongs of the past.
Except, apparently, when it came to racism. Then we were just a bunch of kids who couldn't possibly be expected to know better.
Which is an obstacle on the path to becoming adults who can do better.
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