ABSTRACT
I remember the Sunday morning my 6-year-old White daughter, Ella, asked a question that I dismissed as evidence of what I initially saw as a young child’s inability to understand a complex social issue. We were on our way to a small, rural African American church—Two Mile Creek Baptist (pseudonym)—in South Carolina. I attended the church periodically throughout the semester in order to complete an assignment in a course in my doctoral studies that required that I spend time in homes and communities other than my own in order to learn more about rich literacies that exist in cultures beyond my own (López-Robertson, Long, & Turner-Nash, 2010). I took Ella with me because I was interested in her perceptions of learning about differences, and I felt that, in general, it was a good thing to help my daughter build relationships outside of our mostly White social world. It was February. Ella had learned superficial versions of African American history in the public school she attended in Columbia, South Carolina. This typically occurred during the school’s effort to honor African American History Month. While I tried to supplement her romanticized understandings by portraying a more historically accurate version of African American history, including the impact of knowledge from ancient African civilizations on Western thought, language, and cultural tradition and the brutal connection between Africa and the colonialism that defines American history, my daughter’s question that Sunday morning was the beginning of my realization that I had not done an effective job of teaching her about America’s widespread oppressive past. This realization began a multi-year investigation of learning about myself and my children as raced beings, including the research described in this chapter.
