But here’s one thing I do know: Black hair is not other-than. It is not different-from². It is definitely not less-than.

Everything in the culture I am raising the Boychick in says otherwise. When Black men and women are to be taken seriously, their hair must look, as much as possible, like White hair. When it is natural, it is reviled or exoticized. My job therefore, in part, is to counter those messages: to normalize it, to center it.

Thus this exchange with the Boychick today, driving past the community college in the less disturbingly monochromatic part of town³:

Slowing to let a pedestrian cross, I spy a light-skinned young apparently-Black man with a 4″ rather floppy afro, comb riding in the back. The Boychick says: “That’s bad hair.”

“Which? The guy with the tall hair?”

“Yeah. That’s bad hair.”

“Why do you think it’s bad hair?”

“Because it’s bad.” (What can I say, he’s three.)

“That style of hair is called a fro, or an afro. See, people have different kinds of hair. Some people’s hair, mostly Black people’s, is sort of kinky, or really curly, and soft and light, and if they grow it long, they can sometimes get it to poof out like that. My hair can’t do that. My hair just hangs down. I think his hair was kind of cool.”

“…Oh. Yeah, it’s cool.” (Three is a very suggestible age, when they’re not practicing obstinacy.)

A few minutes later, I look back, and he’s playing with his hair.

“My hair falls in my face. That’s silly!”

Three.

***

Maybe I contributed to exotification. Maybe I used words that will offend should he repeat them. I am terrified — always, when talking of race — of saying a wrong thing.⁴

Terrified, yes, but not petrified, because the only thing worse than saying something wrong is saying nothing at all, and letting kyriarchy’s messages colonize him unexamined, unprotested, undisputed. And so I try.

Sojourner Truth’s Step-Stomp Stride

The Story

Step-Stomp Stride is longer and more involved than most books we read with the Boychick. It starts off with an introduction of Sojourner Truth (“She was big. She was black. She was so beautiful.” is the line that opens the story, and that sold me immediately on the book.) The first half or so of the book goes back to tell her story all the way from her birth as a slave with the name Belle, being sold away from her family (“This was the ugly way of slavery.”), her betrayal by her “master” John Dumont, running waay and gaining her freedom with the help of Quaker Abolitionists, working on her own in New York City, and finally changing her name and setting off to tell her truth.

The next half is a story of her life as a speaker and activist, working against slavery and “the unfair treatment of black people and women.” It bogs down in the middle, particularly the page talking about learning the Bible and dictating her story to Olive Gilbert. The last 10 pages are about the 1851 women’s rights convention where she delivered the extemporaneous speech famously known as “Ain’t I a woman?”.

Intended Audience

This is a very American story. I think it might stand up in other cultures, but relies on a certain fluency in the cultural history of slavery, the underground railroad, North/South dynamics, and, as I go into below, cultural and Biblical Christianity.

Changes in the telling

My only qualm about this book is it — reflecting Sojourner herself and the culture she lived in — assumes one is fluent in and familiar with Christianity and the Bible. The antagonists’ (the male ministers at the meeting in Akron arguing against women’s rights) speeches and Sojourner’s rousing refutation alike reference Adam and Eve, Mary and Jesus, the Bible, and of course God. For a Christian family, no explanations need be made; for a non-Christian family like mine, it works as a starting point for conversations about (the dominant) religion and its role, for good and ill, in culture and politics.

Right on!

I love this book. Like, seriously. How can I not love a book that tells the story of a woman who was “Big. Black. Beautiful True.”?

I love that big and black and beautiful are three words being used together. I love that it talks honestly and simply about “the ugly way of slavery”. I love that equal time and weight are given to her work for women’s rights and abolition, and that they are portrayed as two sides of one important goal: freedom. And I love the words. They bounce, and flow, and stomp, and stride, and as I read them aloud my voice slides into a Southern cadence. I love that the heroine triumphs with words; that truth — and telling it boldly — is so esteemed and celebrated.

But does it appeal? The Boychick’s take

The Boychick likes this book, though it isn’t his favorite. He loses interest a bit in places, and he’s young enough that I feel compelled to point out and name each of the arguments that the ministers give as the offensive fallacies they are, because he doesn’t quite have the ability yet to process that what I am saying now will be refuted (and well) in another two minutes. In another year (he’s three years old), maybe two, I think he’ll “get” a lot more of the book, though he does enjoy it, especially the cadence of the prose, right now. Summary: He approves, but with a recommendation for slightly older children (maybe 4 or 5 and up).

Buy it, Consider it, Skip it, or Compost it?

Buy it, especially if you or your family live in or come from the USA. Read it to your 4 or 5 year old, have your grade-schooler read it to you, or buy it now and save it for when your little one gets older.

Your Take

Have you read Sojourner Truth’s Step-Stomp Stride? What do you think, and what do your kids think? Would you consider acquiring it now? Are there other books that address historical slavery and women’s rights you prefer? Do you know of any other children’s books about Sojourner Truth or her contemporaries, or similar figures from your culture?

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Purchases made through the Amazon links offered here support this blog and compensate — quite minimally — my time and work as a blogger. I encourage you to support local, independent booksellers whenever possible, but if you’re to order online anyway, why not support an independent blogger?

But — stop me if you’re surprised — I think it’s deeper than that.

What we have here is a number of highly paid mostly-white women (and mostly-white women hoping to be highly paid) coming up in the world and trying to get a piece of the pie so long hoarded by rich white men (like the owners and editors of the New York Times), and getting pissed about the misogyny used against them when it becomes apparent that they’re succeeding.

Which is completely understandable — there’s every reason and right to be righteously angry, and to mobilize against the mainstream media for their continued marginalization of moms-who-blog. This is certainly not an indictment of the women who have “made it” in blogging, nor those who are trying to get there, who are so rightfully angered by the contempt displayed toward them by the New York Times.

But let’s talk about who’s getting belittled here — and who’s getting ignored entirely.

The “mommy blogger” as described in the NYT is solidly middle class (with debt, perhaps, but also minivans and lattes and money to burn on an “expensive hobby”). She is understood to be straight, by way of being married. She is assumed to be white, by being both middle class and married. (And look at the pictures on the NYT article, and the graphic which originally accompanied the post in large, found at the bottom of Mom101’s post — which is a whole ‘nother blob of misogynistic turditry.)

And to be fair, the women-with-children-who-blog (especially about parenting) who get attention and marketing sponsorships and book deals and offers of swag and all-expenses-paid trips are overwhelmingly white and married and middle class.

But in addition to portraying that group offensively, as vapid and concerned more with appearance than parenting, more with parenting-as-competition than politics and cultural change, this leaves out vast numbers of bloggers who are women with children. It leaves out those of us who are not white. It leaves out those of us who are more concerned with getting food on the table than getting it all organically grown. It leaves out those of us who are not straight, not married, not male partnered, not partnered all all, or partnered with more than one other. And it leaves out those of us who are trying to build a revolution instead of, or along with (as though that were such a sin?), a brand.

It is a problem that the work of successful women — who have learned to play the SEO game, who have stood up and demanded fair pay from major companies and PR firms, who have worked long days and late nights to build a business powerful enough even the likes of Nestle have to pay attention — is dismissed as so much vanity indulgence, that new thing that those silly mommies are doing.

But it is no less of a problem that who is successful, who is getting smeared, is a very specific, privileged sort of woman. Those of us who are in this gig to tell our long-suppressed stories (which don’t show up in the papers, not even in the “Fashion” and “Living” section where newspaper editors deign to give privileged women a nod on occasion), to save our sanity in a society that damages us daily, to join together and oppose the multitude of oppressions we and our children face unceasingly — as well as, as Mom101 pointed out, to share our knowledge in the field of our passion or our profession, to influence politics and government proceedings, to contribute to the human conversation, to do the 100s of other things women-with-children who blog do — why, they don’t even bother smearing us, because we’re not even worthy of acknowledgment.

Whether she is out to make a living, or eschews monitization in favor of revolution, or tries to balance both, the “mommy blogger” who is not white and straight and living that suburban life does not even have the dubious “honor” of being derided by the old guard media — to them, she does not exist at all.

Now that’s a story worth investigating.

But here is what I am worried about when The Man and I contemplate school options²:

I am worried that my child will stop saying his favorite color is pink (or sometimes purple). I am worried that he will be teased for — or, in the interest of not being teased, “politely discouraged from” — wearing blouses and ponytails and black mary janes. I am worried he will learn to say “I can’t do that, only girls do that” — and that he won’t be corrected by the adults who watch him. I am worried he will learn that “boys have penises and girls have vaginas” and that vulvas and clitorises and people whose gender are not accurately assessed by the shape of their genitals at birth will be invisible, unspeakable.

I am worried that our first, so-tentative steps to teach him to speak race will be erased in the name of the racism that masquerades as “color-blindness”. I am worried that he will learn to mistake cultural appropriation for “diversity appreciation”. I am worried he will learn a Thanksgiving tale with polite Puritans and benevolent natives and no sequelae of genocide and war and nation theft and debts still owed. (He may be too young to learn of the hundred thousand greater and lesser evils perpetrated — past and present — against America’s first peoples, but don’t teach him a pleasant lie whose eventual revelation will indicate betrayal by those he trusted to speak truth.)

I am worried he will learn to fear for his environment before he learns to love it. I am worried he will learn about vanishing habitats and diminishing resources, instead of worms and bugs and the ecosystem of his backyard and the abundance all around him. (Let his passion be sparked first, before anxieties are ignited.) I am worried that he will be taught to be “green” out of guilt and shame, rather than to reuse and conserve as an act of creativity and consideration.

I am worried he will be taught to be schooled, not allowed to live and thus to learn. I am worried he will start to believe that “learning” is done only at school, that “knowledge” is handed down only by teachers, that his own drive to experiment and experience and question and create will be squashed to fit in the box of “education”. I am worried he will learn to hate “math” instead of discovering the joy (yes, I said joy) of playing (yes, I said playing) with numbers. I am worried that reading will become A Thing, which he Does or Does Not Do, with a time line and judgments and comparisons with others, rather than something fun and functional he’ll pick up when he’s ready, something we share together in the meantime.

I am worried that he will be inducted into a binary world of bullies and victims and will learn that is he one or the other, when I know he is neither. I am worried he will learn that words wound, that conflict is resolved through scuffles when  no one is looking, that no one likes a tattle-tale, that adults are judges and juries not mediators or guides, that hurting others is bad only because it engenders punishment or “consequences”. I am worried no one will help him find better words to create more loving connections, that forced apologies will take the place of heartfelt amends, that he will learn that relationships are to be tallied, not nurtured.

In short, I’m afraid that his brainwashing by kyriarchy (already begun, because we can never escape it completely) will rapidly accelerate.

In the forthcoming Part Two: How I offer questions which I consider important in making this decision, seeking to mitigate and minimize kyriarchy’s influence on my still-so-young child.

I don’t mean the inevitable science-hashing of all scifi (although, really, six minutes in deep space without a helmet before the cold gets to you? how about when your body explodes instantly from the relative pressure differentials??) — I mean the race fails, the “jungle primitives”/”noble savages” played by white folk in bronzer (or green body paint, depending). I mean the gender fails, with the screaming, “hysterical” woman, and the oh-so-calm and stoic men. I mean the disability fails, when physical “disfigurement” leads to “mental instability” leads to murdering everyone in sight. I could go on.

And sometimes, someone asks me why I care about the failures of a 30 year old show. Or says we’ve made such progress, eh? Or explains it away as “different times”.

My answer is: it may be easier to spot the failures from 30 years ago, and perhaps, yes, some few improvements have been made. But do you really think we’re so much better now? Really?

When was the last time you saw a trans woman on the screen, big or little, NOT played by a a cis woman (if the character is supposed to be “good”, but “deceptive”), or a highly masculine cis man (if the character is supposed to be “bad”, or “funny”)?

When was the last time you saw a person in a wheelchair who was not a one-line, one-dimensional character (or caricature)? …who was not played by a physically able-bodied person? (How about all those fancy CGI techniques to portray people with amputations? What, are there really no one-armed actors out there? Somehow, I find that hard to believe.) Or the Innocent Angel(TM), especially a person with Down’s syndrome or the like, whom a TAB must sweep in to rescue, there for the moralizing only.

And we’re still doing it on race, too. How many shows headline American Indians, or Aborigines? How many times do we figure “Japanese, Filipino, [or any other Asian or Asian-ish ethnicity] close enough”? How many women in hijab have you seen outside of the odd episode where they were used to make some Point about “religious oppression” or “cultural tolerance” — used for our ends, rather than fully realized persons/characters with their own reasons for covering, and concerns aside from that one choice?

We might pretend improvements have been made, we might pat ourselves on the back — but everything wrong with my favorite 30-year-old cheap-looking scifi show is still getting done wrong today. Fundamentally, the system that values certain bodies, and ignores others except when useful for its own purposes, still remains. There are no perfect, unproblematical shows: all of us who consume media in any form are complicit to some extent.

This is why I tweet about the failures of old pop media: because all the same problems are here and now, too. If we’re going to watch, we damn well should recognize the inherent flaws, the oppressive, damaging tropes as well. We must hold our entertainment accountable, and be responsible, or we are responsible for supporting the oppression and pain not just of made up characters, but of real people.

The Boychick (who, yes, watches Who with us) may be too young to have deep, nuanced conversations about this yet. (When he asked me “Why are those people green?”, I first, exasperated with the show, said that it was a highly ham-fisted and racist attempt at making a moralistic anti-racist statement, but then, upon his continued perplexion, said “green body paint”. I do give some nod to age-appropriate answers.) But I comment on the failures while watching, and The Man and I discuss the problematical plots, and as he grows, this is what I hope he’ll learn: that media can be enjoyed, loved even, but also can be, and must be, examined critically.

For a basic explanation of EC, please see the glossary entry on EC /elimination communication. There are many advantages to this practice (communication, reduced crying, reduced diaper rash, earlier toilet independence, reduced waste or waste water, etc), as well as disadvantages and challenges (especially in this universal-diapering culture), but what I want to talk about is its role in kyriarchy. For to be sure, it does have (a highly complicated) one: while it’s not true that only “stay at home moms” can practice EC — even part time EC at home and conventionally diapered in child-care is beneficial for infants –, there are several factors of privilege that play into the ability to choose this parenting method.

First, it is much easier when one is able to be at home (or otherwise) with one’s child full-time: for ease of pottying, to meet the child’s expectation of being pottied, and in order to be “in tune” or entwined with the infant — and when one’s home has flush toilets, and running water, and a clothes washing machine. It’s also easier when one can wear little, or things that won’t get ruined (or ruin one’s day) for getting baby urine on them: it’s not necessary, but having baby naked or wearing just a thin layer of absorbency does increase the “success” rate, even as it exposes the family to the consequences of any misses. That’s a lot easier when one can stick close at home, or otherwise not need to be “presentable”.

Secondly, a hell of a lot easier when one is white, and middle-class, and physically-able, and cis, and has apparent straight privilege. Here’s the thing: practicing EC draws a lot of negative attention in a culture that expects — demands — universal diapering for at least the first two years of a child’s life (such expectation growing ever longer as we, thankfully!, abandon the punitive, shaming, stressful “potty training” methods of yesteryear, and, not so thankfully, diaper manufacturers grow ever more successful at selling bigger and later stages of diapers). Weathering that attention is a thousand times easier when one exists in a place of privilege — that is, when one is not already under excessive and unreasonable scrutiny, due to one’s ethnicity, race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and so on. Existing in a body privileged by kyriarchy also makes much of the attention neutral-to-positive, where someone without that privilege would receive more judgment and more negativity.

There’s also a uniquely racist aspect to much of EC advocacy — inadvertent, perhaps, but no less damaging therefore. The cultures perceived in the white Western world-view to have not yet universally adopted full-time diapering (rightly or not) are the poorer areas of the globe — “brown” areas. Thus when white, middle-class, privileged parents look for modern examples of this age-old practice, we look to, and glorify and exotify, people of color. It becomes about “those brown people”, who are so “natural”, so “unspoiled by modernity”, so “primitive”, and it becomes about using them (or rather, our white idealized vision of them) for our own ends (instruction, objectification), rather than recognizing and honoring their own personhood, their own culture, their own struggles and oppressions, their own dignity.

(Of course, opposition to EC often takes racist forms as well: “It’s all well and good for those people, who don’t mind getting pissed on, who are too poor for carpet, who already live in dirt and filth and poverty. Really, they’re just jumping at the chance to get disposable diapers!” — once again Othering people of color, as well as ignoring the roles kyriarchy, internalized racism and colonialism play in that poverty, and in that desire for “modernity”.)

Yet I do not believe that these problems, as serious as they are, are inherent in the practice: rather, they arise from the placement of the practice in a kyriarchal culture. Like breastfeeding, elimination communication is the biological expectation: it cannot be racist itself, because it is universal to our species. But like breastfeeding, the current kyriarchal culture — with its racism, its power imbalances, its dearth of examples of each in modern white cultures –, combined with the distorting lenses it shoves on the eyes of those of us with privilege, creates an environment in which said racism (and classism, cissexism, ageism, etc)  is nearly inevitable.

And as a further complication, elimination communication also works to subvert the kyriarchy: we reduce our reliance on capitalistic consumption of products; we reduce the amount of waste designed to be shat on and thrown away in landfills; we raise our children more in touch with and aware of their bodies and their needs; we teach them by modeling to listen to and honor the needs of those with less privilege. EC is obviously not necessary for many of these things: one can, of course, reduce consumption, respect one’s child’s autonomy, have a loving relationship, and so on, without practicing EC. Nor is EC a guarantee of any of that. Like so many other things, it is but a tool — one which can be used by the kyriarchy to maintain hierarchies of oppression as well as by activists to reject the strictures kyriarchy has placed on us.

In this way, EC is much like breastfeeding, like many aspects of biologically appropriate parenting, like many choices which are possible due to and often prop up privilege — for this is a pattern recognizable across an array of stuff white people do; this is a function of kyriarchy: privilege allows people more choices, more autonomy (yet still a highly imperfect, highly constrained simulacrum of autonomy) than those without, and so we are freer, comparatively, to choose those options which the kyriarchy opposes; and when we do, our privilege practically guarantees we enact those choices in ways which contribute to the oppression of those who, by lack of privilege, are unable to.

Would I recommend EC, regardless of this catch-22? Oh yes, absolutely. But do I pretend it is a choice devoid of consequence, unconnected to our assigned and enforced role in the world? Do I pretend its pursuit is uncomplicated, as simple for everyone as it was for me? No. I maintain that anyone who can care for an infant can do it; I maintain, all things equal (which they never are), it is the right choice for babies; I do not maintain that therefore everyone must. Like with so much else, I will continue to advocate for it, and to educate about it, but I will not engage in the prescriptivism, the arrogance that would be so easy for me to slip into as a person with so much privilege, that alienates so many.

So them’s my thoughts on EC. I did tell you it wouldn’t be what you expect: mine is not a how-to parenting site. There are lots of great sites out there that will help teach you about how to practice elimination communication. And when I was pregnant, I ate those up with a spoon, fast as I could; having come out the other side, though, this is what I was left with: EC was absolutely the right choice for our family, and especially now, in the third year of life, when I see so many struggling with the transition from diaper dependence to toilet use, I am so glad we put in the early effort to listen to and honor the Boychick’s communications. But I also see, from this vantage, just how privileged we were that it was an option for us at all, and a relatively easily chosen one. It’s not an entirely comfortable realization, but then, awareness of privilege shouldn’t be.