Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
Is indoctrinating kids with pro-police propaganda more racist or more fascist? Hm. Either way, there is no Paw Patrol in our house although I’ve yet to figure out what to teach Tiny about the police beyond “it’s complicated.”
Anyway, I think there’s a distinction between something written in direct response to antiracist argument and something that merely passively upholds existing systems, so don’t much care how we label the children’s book as long as we’re thinking about its message and what other messages need to be included to put it in context.
Tiny went through a Richard Scarry phase. I cringed every time through the section on the police (even though the officer eventually winds up making a bottle for his kid in the night, which seems fairly progressive for the time) and we actively tried to skip the section on the work moms do.
It’s complicated. Tiny loves Lupita Nwongo’s Sulwe, about a little girl uncomfortable with her dark skin, but I’m not sure she’s getting the right messages from it yet. She likes that it’s about sisters but prefers Day to Night.
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My kid's seen everything. All the National Lampoon comedies from the 70s, all the Apatow stuff from the last 15 years. All the raunch comedies from
Old School to
Wedding Crashers. And all the high end stuff, from Kubrick's catalog to Wes Anderson, to Paul Thomas Anderson and Terry Gilliam.
Books read are Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, McCarthy, Jane Austen, and a bunch of biographies.
Nothing's held back. All the jokes deemed too insensitive are offered. The child has also seen Carlin, Chapelle, Rock, Murphy (
Delirious even), Lewis Black, etc.
All in baby... No effort to shield or massage views in the least.
And like me, the kid is incredibly open minded and intolerant of the intolerant. We've had discussions about racism, police, justice system, gay marriage, you name it.
It isn't fucking hard to raise a tolerant kid. Elevate reason to the highest virtue and explain that bigots are simply not the sharpest tools in the box.
But with that comes another admonition about the dim that must be offered to children by parents like me (moderates who smarter than most of the people around them): "Some crazy people are going to tell you how to think, or say this or that is shameful. These people are nuts. Ignore them."
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