ShinyObjects, that does sound great. And Becky, my mind definitely went to martial arts. I’d love for my (hypothetical) kids to take an interest.

@Spark: Yeah, I think teaching a child of either gender to hit someone who’s bothering him/her is problematic. That said, girls and boys should absolutely know how and when to fight back–girls, especially. Martial arts training is good for this.

“R.A.D. For Men” basic self-defense program for MEN.”

(the allcaps made me skeptical, but I read on):

“The class is open to men 14 years of age and older. DADS: what a great opportunity to attend with your son(s)
This program is designed to: “Provide responsible information and tactical options of self defense for men who find themselves in confrontational situations”
The program’s primary focus is the realistic development of basic self defense options for men, before and during situations of imminent or actual assault.

Resisting Aggression with Defense.
Resisting Aggression is a choice. You are responsible for how you respond to any event in your life. Your decisions contribute to your past, present and future. Only you can make the choice to transform your life by committing to resist aggression. By investing your time and effort into this program, you will be presented with options to resist aggression. You will be asked to raise your awareness of aggressive behavior, to recognize how aggressive behavior impacts your life, to take steps to avoid aggressive behavior, and to look at how you can be part of reducing aggression and violence. Unfortunately, in a small number of incidents, physical confrontation may be unavoidable. Our program also provides participants with realistic strategies for men forced into physical confrontation. Resisting Aggression with Defense is designed to empower men to make different decisions when confronted with aggressive behavior. This is the first step towards reducing aggression and violence for ourselves and the ones we love.”

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Haven’t seen an offering framed this way before. The campus has a pretty awesome women’s studies/DV awareness program, so that may have some influence here. I’ll be really curious and hopeful to see if this is a regular offering.

In the case of feminism, this means that boys need to understand that girls have autonomy and agency just as they do. Learning that from the beginning would prevent boys from seeing females as not-boys or as adjuncts or property of boys. I don’t know that it would require anything else of them-they would be free to go about their butched-up lives if they want to; they would just go about them with more respect for female gender.

Does this make sense? I hope I don’t sound like I’m lecturing-the ‘net does have that deficit. But I just want to say that teaching feminism to your kids is no different than teaching contempt for bigotry of any other kind. Yeah, if you belong to the privileged group, it may work against your immediate self-interest, but really, what decent person wants that kind of benefit?

No one is claiming that it isn’t a different thing to raise white boys than it is to raise black boys. However, there are points of commonality, and this seems to be one of them. We can either acknowledge those points of commonality, or we can try and distinguish them in the abstract like you have here without regard to what Lorde is actually saying in this passage. (If someone has an actual experience to speak to, that would be great, but I don’t like the idea either of a bunch of white women sitting around pontificating on the issue of raising black children. It’s about as ridiculous as my pontificating on raising male children at all.) She does happen, in this essay, to be talking more about gender roles generally, and in this passage specifically omitted the mentions herself. It strikes me as appropriation for my own agenda were I to reframe the passage as being about race.

I also think we think very differently about appropriation. It is not, in my view, appropriation to introduce a Black woman’s work into a conversation. I tend to feel like we need to centralize Black women’s writing as tools for dismantling all power hierarchies, and that so long as we do not claim authorship for ourselves of those ideas, it isn’t appropriation. It may be misunderstanding, sure.

Perhaps I’m a bit more of a believer in universalism than you are; I don’t know. But I do think we will be better off in a world where we all focus on what we can learn from each other rather than list off caveats in every discussion. Everyone is limited by the contours of their experience; this is a given. But I tire of only being told by other white feminists that I am to be interested in these caveats only in the writing of Black women.

Skin-color privilege is absolutely a significant factor when it comes to teaching boys about power. Parents of white boys I’ve spoken with about this have a different task finding the right tone to strike with their sons than parents of black boys. Because the roles that society is trying to train little white boys into are very different than the roles that society is trying to train little black boys into.

The messages that society gives to the future fair-haired scions of the patriarchy are way simpler than the ones everybody else gets.

I don’t have a copy of Sister Outsider on-hand, but I don’t believe that race is completely absent from the piece. It is, however, completely absent from the bits you excerpted. Women of color have been complaining about having their words whitewashed for a long time, and they’re rightfully angry.