Dear 5-year old,

On Halloween this year, you had your costume picked out weeks in advance – Super Girl. 

The latest 1 Second Everyday Video:

What you’re doing these days:

A la Star Wars, when I leave you off at day care and let you know that, “I love you,” you reply with, “I know.” 

You have Hip Hop Dance Class every Friday – teacher Abby is expanding your repertoire of moves, music, and exposing you to movements like carioke and kartwheels. 

In swimming lessons, you went off the diving board without teacher or vest, then swam to the shallow end using your crawl technique.

You ask if the shoe is on the right foot, though you ask for help with zippers sometime and you’ve given up on me (and Mommy, too, for the most part) with wiping your bum. 

I can’t remember why you got interested in this….maybe we read a book about catching shrimp…..but you wanted to know how a shrimping boat worked, so we watched a video of how a shrimp boat works on YouTube

How Was Toy Story?  “It was Humiliating.”

A recording

This is another one of us going up Phinney Ridge on the bike with you cheering for me. This time, though, you get a little snarky and giggly. 

In my life these days:

In mid October,  two swastikas and “I support the KKK,” were written on desks and in the auditorium stage of my school. Then, the week later, three Jewish member of the faculty received handwritten “kike” notes in their mailboxes. It has not been a very fun October – the Halloween assembly was canceled, there have been several all-school assemblies, and many people are feeling scared and at risk at school. The author of the KKK remark was identified, and it wasn’t a student, but the creator of the notes is still at large. I am sad and concerned for the nation with the subverted racist and xenophobic rhetoric that has been issued from the current administration. It provides more of an open door for bigots and fearful people to lash out at others with hate speech and hate crimes. 

I performed a Bollywood dance with another group of teachers for my school’s Culture Night. Since Mommy was gone, you had to come with me. This is us, backstage, before the dance. You were shy at first, but at the end you wanted to watch up close next to the stage. 

Here are some dreams I’ve had in the last weeks. 

Racism dream: had a car but the tags expired and I let my black friend use it. He was pulled over. I felt guilty.

An Unprepared Dream: I was in a Rubik’s Cube competition that was happening in a car, but the cubes were knockoffs and I not 3 x 3 cubes, so I couldn’t solve them the way I was used to. I did what I could. 

Unprepared Dream: I was heading in to a Walmart, feeling confident and important. People were lifting their heads and staring at me in admiration and awe. I passed through the doors as the greeters and checkers turned their heads as well. It was only after I was in the store that I realized I was completely naked!  I found a backpack that had shorts and a shirt inside that I quickly put on, but the damage was already done. 

In the news:

The Kavanaugh hearings. I really don’t want to type any more on this, it is so depressing. 

A caravan of Honduran refugees reached the border in late 2018. 

The mid-term elections saw a record 34 new women elected to the US House of Representatives (previous was 24 in 1992) – 33 of them Democratic. There were some exciting changes, and depressing results that showed how polarized of a nation we are right now. 

A summary of a book or podcast I liked:

I Will Not Fear by Melba Pattilo Beals is a personal account of one of the Little Rock Nine, the students chosen to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, AR in 1957 after Brown vs. Board of Education was decided. I was saddened and inspired by Melba’s faith and persistence, enduring physical and verbal abuse every day she and the other black students tried to attend their classes. Melba goes on to share how, when the Governor of Arkansas sent the National Guard to bar the students from entering yet allowing the white students to enter, President Dwight Eisenhower sent an Army Division to bend the will of the governor. That show of force worked to get the nine to school, but it didn’t protect them from the death threats and constant hate from students and the community. I sent Dr. Beals a thank you e-mail after reading her book, grateful for what she endured for the advancement of race relations in our recovering slavery-stained country. Here’s a video of Melba in 2018 talking about her experience.  

Red Brain, Blue Brain from Hidden Brain Podcast, discusses the biology of the tendency to lean more liberal or conservative. Could it be that the political divide that exists in our country has always been there, and is the result of the dice-roll of biology more than the inheritance from our parents?

Can’t Stop There – here is a National Geographic Special Issue about race that basically displays how it is an entirely made up human construct. I’ve been carrying this issue around for several months until I summarize it in one of these posts. I read this issue entirely because it displays clearly how humans make things much tougher on themselves than they really need to be. Here are some of the quotes I highlighted.

“Race is not a biological construct. Instead, race is a social one with devastating effects.”
“The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”
“All people alive today are Africans.”
“There’s more diversity in Africa than all the other continents combined.” (34)
“The visible differences between peoples are accidents of history. They reflect how our ancestors dealt with sun exposure and not much else.” (40)

This NG issue explains how the first humans came from Africa about 200,000 years ago. Due to climate conditions and normal mutations in our genetics, we look, react to foods, handle sun exposure and elevation differently, though. Somewhere along the line, our competitive natures drove us to categorize peoples into “races.” This divvying up brought along inherited feelings of superiority, which has had dire consequences over generations.

Just saying “race is made up” is no consolation to the scores of people who have been the victims of racism, and this issue is hardly new news. Yet racism, feelings or superiority, and violence toward the Others persists. I’ve heard my whole life that we’re basically all the same, but it is clear there are differences, and because we also seemed hard-wired to label and categorize, using the visible signs we see as race and ancestry is easy to do.

The NG issue goes on to outline how these human-made divisions have played out in cities, genocides such as Rwanda, and fighting between Israeli-Palestinian and Rohingya-Burmese. The last sections display the changing demographic of “interracial” marriage, the disproportionate interaction with blacks and police, and how historically black colleges are experiencing an upsurge in enrollment and activism.

The only differences between humans is .5% of the genetic material between us. When will we eliminate our idea of race?

This hidden brain episode revisits the issue of gender and the fluidity of it. A quote that I remember from it was, “Nature has no edges.” 

I’m still carrying you on my shoulders, and I love it. You still reach out and hold my hand when we’re walking Boo or after I pick you up. 

Love, 

Daddy