During my first semester in graduate school, I took a class on religion and politics. My professor practiced the Muslim faith. The morning after the 2016 presidential elections, he shared with the class that his six-year-old daughter had asked him over breakfast, “Daddy, today at school, should I tell people I’m not Muslim if they ask me?”
During a discussion on Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness as part of a new social and racial justice program at The Temple in Atlanta, a woman described what she taught her children about “the protocol for being pulled over as a black person by the police.”
I am not a parent, and I do not judge any of these mothers and fathers for the way they answered their children’s questions or instructed them on how to behave in specific instances.
