“What you help a child to love can be more important than what you help him to learn.”
~ African Proverb
My son was predicted to enter the world the day of Barack Obama’s first presidential inauguration. For me, it was an electrifying time to be alive. The magnetic senator from Chicago had done what many thought we would never bear witness to in this country. Obama won the historic election on my 30th birthday, my son kicking away, probably celebrating, in my substantial belly. I remember wobbling my way to the voting booth earlier that brisk, sunny morning with an excitement in the air I still can’t find the words to describe. Obama’s charge of hope was now much more, as I watched the voting lines wrap around an entire neighborhood. When I walked into that booth, I was pulling that lever for my life, and the life inside of me. It was a two-second motion of the arm that would have lifetimes of consequences.
My son missed the inauguration birthdate by two days, but the significance of his coming into the world merely hours after we had sworn in our nation’s first black president was no less incredible. I thought about what it would mean for my child . . . five, six, and seven years down the line. When he would be old enough to have that indelible image in his subconscious. I thought about the long-term meaning for all of the Obama-era babies to correlate the most powerful leader with a black man.
I never drank from the “post-racial” fountain of delusion. And I knew that Obama’s presidency was never a solution to the racial problem in America. At the same time, there is nothing that could have prepared me for the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Having a black son as these murders both wrenched hearts and divided the country of my son’s citizenship was deeply wounding. The beauty of his being an Obama-era baby was always simultaneously leveled by countless injustices and human violations in a most sobering way.
By the time my son was able to babble, he was showing signs of being a serious music lover. By two years old, he was demonstrating perfect pitch and deeply soulful, complex drum patterns. He loved art, and was creating portraits and sketches that were far beyond the scribbling I was probably doing at his age. His love of music and art bonded us even further, as if that were possible. Like my son, I grew up in a “jazz household” where an eclectic array of music was being played, musicians were popping by, and creativity was king.
“I know what to do with this!” I thought to myself.
I dedicated myself to exposing him to these things in every way I could imagine, and he was happily soaking all of it in, like a sea sponge. I didn’t realize it at the very beginning, but what was happening was an exercise in self-love. My son began to subconsciously fall in love with himself, as he discovered Stevie Wonder, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Michael Jackson, and Maya Angelou. It was also the most gratifying and organic segue into discussions about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Through arts culture, he saw a genius in everyone he learned about — and they each looked like him.
When I became more consciously aware of what was happening, I sensed on a deeper level how essential it is for him to know as early as possible that he comes from greatness. After all, America is a nation hell-bent on convincing him otherwise, using its education system as the first round of psychological manipulation. And if my son has to be exposed to the blazing hot flames of racism under the guise of patriotism and heroism, I’m going to make sure there’s enough sustenance there to be able to take the heat without getting burned. It’s when I understood the value of guiding and encouraging his self-love that I became inspired to develop this blog.
Kultured Child is where I deal with how events around the world are affecting us all, and how we — as parents and our children’s earliest and most consistent educators — are affecting change, large and small, individually and globally. I explore the challenges of navigating these realities in the hopes of creating positive and enduring shifts in people’s perceptions of self and others in order to build compassion and generate dialogue, to create new paradigms of how we interact with the world-at-large. Kultured Child is where we can collectively celebrate our greatness and discuss our unique ways of armoring our children with love through educating them, carefully and purposefully guiding their self-discovery.
Welcome!
All artist portraits by RKG ©2017