Responding to the U.S. Capitol Siege
In this ad hoc episode, I outline a response to the U.S. Capitol siege. I provide some suggestions for ways to talk with your child about the events, but also ask that you take two more steps: (1) examine your own role in these events, even if you condemn them yourself (as I do); (2) take action based on your own position and role in the world to work toward equality. You can find my resources on the intersection of parenting and race here. There's a specific blog post suggesting a script for talking with children about the Black Lives Matter movement (which could be adapted for this situation) here. Showing Up for Racial Justice's Action Hours are here [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan 00:01 Hello, everybody! I am recording live in our Facebook group. And I'm also recording this separately on the camera and on audio only as a way to share this information more broadly across a variety of platforms. I thought it was actually sharing in the group a minute ago, and I am not sure that it was working so I'm just trying to give this another go around. And I think actually, I just got the same message pop up saying that I was not sharing and now I am sharing, so hopefully this is going through to everywhere that it's supposed to be going. So the content of what I want to talk about today is about what has happened at the US Capitol. And it's been a couple of days, it's Friday, today, January 8, and two days after the events happened at the Capitol. And I wasn't really sure what to say and so I didn't want to say anything, I didn't want to say the wrong thing. And I went out for a bike ride this morning and it sort of clarified for me what it was that I wanted to say. And so that's why if you're watching this on video, you're probably seeing a bit of a stripe across my forehead and I'm freshly showered because I kind of came back and was on fire about what it was that I wanted to say. And so you're sort of hearing my relatively raw unedited thoughts. And I'm a little nervous about sharing those with you which is why you probably hear this in my voice. So I want to start with talking with our children about the events that have happened at the Capitol, because I'm hearing questions in Facebook groups and other places online if parents want to have these kinds of conversations with their children, but they don't know how to do it or they're thinking, okay, maybe my children are too young to understand what's going on and I don't want to scare them, and I'm not sure if I'm going to have a conversation with them at all. Jen Lumanlan 01:57 And so, I have published resources on this before I actually have a post on how to talk with your child about Black Lives Matter. And I think that a lot of the principles that are discussed in there are very similar. And we want to do it in an age-appropriate way, we want to lead with their questions, and so I think ideally, this will come from them being out in the world, and they'll see things that they're curious about, and they'll ask about them, and that will lead into a conversation on these topics. But if we are not out so much lately, as many of us are not and maybe we don't have the news on all the time, and so their exposure to it may be much less than it otherwise would have been. And so well, what can we do when that's the case? And we're not sure how to bring the conversation up? Well, I would say the first thing we can do is to talk about it with a spouse or significant other or another adult over dinner, or over some other period of time where it's natural for you to have a conversation. And to just talk...