The Difficulty of Explaining Enslavement to Your Children

What Some Parents Said

Photo by Bailey Torres at Unsplash

In these times when Critical Race Theory is a bogeyman and an excuse to teach nothing about America’s History of enslavement. More and more, it falls to the parents of children of all colors to explain what enslavement was and how it differed from other forms of enslavement around the world.

Nobody starts out knowing anything about slavery in America or anywhere else, and you can’t pick it up by osmosis. You have to be taught it, be told about it, or conduct your research. I have learned much more about enslaved people in the past five years than in all my living beforehand. It came through reading, research, and looking for the answers to questions spawned by what I’d learned. I realized how little I’d learned from my parents and how little I’d passed along to my children. Slavery was something to be learned in school and hardly ever discussed in my family. I recently posed the question on Facebook, “What do parents tell their children about slavery?”…