Our children will hear our silence.

When parents don’t talk about race and racism, we end up raising the Amy Coopers of the next generation. When parents remain quiet, Our silence teaches our kids the best response to racism is to avert one’s eyes and avoid conflict at all costs. If we want to raise antiracist children, we must engage, even when we don’t know how it’s going to turn out. And talking about how it went down with our children can itself be a form of antiracist learning.

Silence is a message and has many forms. Sometimes it sounds like “everybody’s equal.” Sometimes we parents tell our kids, “be colorblind.” Sometimes we even say, “celebrate diversity!” (We say this while failing to notice we’re expecting children to be magically immune from the same racism-induced tensions that get in the way of adults successfully navigating diversity and sustaining interracial relationships).

As parents, we have two choices: We either go along with the racism-enabling flow of silence or we decide to stand up against it.