The murders targeting Asian women in Atlanta are racist, appalling and vile. I'm furious and sending love to all API friends who're dealing with grief and fear in the aftermath. But I also want to talk to fellow white people, especially those who, like me, are parents of boys.
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My kid is 8 and watches gaming streamers on YouTube. His dad and I are like fucking HAWKS keeping track of which accounts and videos he watches; have explained the dangers of just clicking on whichever video pops up next and following that chain out.
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Does he fully understand the extent to which YouTube's algorithm, especially when you watch gaming videos, is a radicalisation pipeline? Of course not: he's 8. But that's not too young to *start* the conversation: to begin explaining that not everything online is good or true.
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He's old enough to understand that some people are treated differently because of their skin colour or where they come from, and that this isn't okay. Old enough to learn why I get cross when his virtual school history texts talk benignly about "settlers" instead of "colonisers."
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Does he always understand everything right away? No. But that's the point: these aren't one-and-done conversations that you save up for when your kid is eighteen and already potentially a decade plus into being exposed to shitty views on the internet without your intervention.
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You talk about the hard stuff early in large part so that *talking about it at all* is as normal as discussing math homework: so that you can *keep* talking about it, in more and more detail, the older your kid gets. THAT is how you combat radicalisation.
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The point being, fellow white people: way too many of us grew up in social cultures where race wasn't discussed, or where we were taught colour-blindness, or given pat speeches about "the melting pot," and it's other groups that suffer when our own bigoted chickens come roosting.
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It's a cycle that WE need to break, and that starts with talking to our kids about race, gender, culture - about all the stuff we've been raised to think is Too Hard and shouldn't they be older first, it doesn't really apply to nice folk like us anyway - while they're still kids.
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Because otherwise, this is the result: Dylan Roof, Brock Turner, Kyle Rittenhouse and now this murderous racist asshole. All young white men barely into adulthood; all radicalised before then. Culturally, this is our issue. Let's fucking fix it already.
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End of conversation
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