Today's NYTimes features an article by Topher Sanders, a Black dad who, while watching his four year old son play in the playground, overheard a little girl tell his son "only white people can play" where he was playing. As his son happily ignores the girl and continues to play, the father struggles with balancing his instinctive angry reaction [...]
"Tell us about your first relative to come to the United States. Where did he or she come from?" A third grader had this question for homework the other day. His dad called me in a panic: "We haven't told him about slavery yet--he's too young. How is he supposed to answer this?" After commiserating with the dad about [...]
Here's disturbing news from researchers at Yale University: Teachers may be more inclined to expect bad behavior from black preschoolers--especially black boys--than from white preschoolers. As reported recently in a Washington Post article found here, in a recent study over 130 preschool teachers were asked to view video clips of young children in classrooms and were told to look [...]
Our hearts break for the families of Alton Sterling, Philando Castle, the slain and injured Dallas policemen and their families. I used to take solace in thinking that no matter how tough/scary it may seem to parent a black child these days, it can't compare to the unsettling times of 60's and 70's when I was young, with the [...]
Hello GCP Parents! Long time. Been working quite a bit on an exciting project that continues where this blog began (think a comprehensive collection of GCPblog posts and lots more--stay tuned) so there has not been much posting this year. Hope you have been combing through the archives for interesting and relevant articles. But today I came across this [...]
It is Black History Month! We all know what this means: Lots of tributes to and images of President Obama, Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and a host of Black "paving the way" entertainers and athletes will be floating around our children at school this month. While we at GCP believe our sons and daughters and [...]
Over the years that GCP has been around, we have had to write an alarming number of posts with the same basic message: how do we talk to our sons about unimaginably horrible and senseless killings that they can see footage of over and over on CNN? This time it is Paris. It has been Lebanon, it has been [...]
Hope all of your sons are settling well into the new school year. Here is a GCP Checklist of things to do/keep your eyes on as the year begins: Meet the teachers: There will certainly be an open school night or some other formal opportunity to meet teachers, and you shouldn't miss that. But you should try to meet [...]
Few of us will ever forget where we were and what we were doing when we heard about the Twin Towers collapsing on September 11, 2001. Those of us who were in New York City on that day can surely remember all the events of that day fourteen years ago like it was yesterday. But many of our younger [...]
This morning's New York Times reported yet another innocent young Black man being gunned down on the street. NeShawn Plummer, 16, was killed in Far Rockaway, Queens, caught in a spray of bullets aimed at a crowd of teens on a street corner. Police suspect it was a gang related attack and are seeking two suspects. Incredibly, his brother [...]