Jennifer Harvey > Quotes

“Children can’t learn antiracism if they don’t have the practice of observing, naming, and discussing race in their tool kit.”
― Jennifer Harvey, Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America

“So let’s be specific. When we talk about Doc McStuffins, let’s talk about her brilliance, her kindness, her being a girl, her imagination, her being Black, her healing gifts with toys and stuffed animals, the fact her mom is a doctor, and on and on.”
― Jennifer Harvey, Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America

“Race is real. Race is powerful. But race is also a social construct. This understanding of race begins to shed light on the conundrums of whiteness. In the United States constructions of race have never been morally neutral. Racial construction processes have always meant and continue to mean today that persons with phenotypes marking them as “white” receive better treatment, greater social access, and more institutional benefits than those with phenotypes that mark them “of color.”
― Jennifer Harvey, Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation (Prophetic Christianity Series

“I am committed to justice because first I believed that truly God so loved this broken, aching world.”
― Jennifer Harvey, Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation (Prophetic Christianity Series

“I’d been troubled throughout high school that in my robustly multiracial school my advanced placement classes were almost exclusively white. I knew something was wrong.”
― Jennifer Harvey, Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America

“We violate God’s intention for the human family by creating false categories of value and identity, based on identifiable characteristics such as culture, place of origin, and skin color.”10 Seeing such identifiable differences as a source for celebration, rather than as a cause for differently valuing one another, is essential for putting us on the path away from division and toward racial reconciliation”
― Jennifer Harvey, Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation (Prophetic Christianity Series

“is difficult for many white adults to begin to speak about race openly and explicitly. We only learn to do it and get better at it through practice. There’s no way around those awkward, challenging feelings. ​There’s no special age at which point kids are ready to hear and understand the difficult truths about race and racism. They begin to work out their racial concepts and ideas long before they can articulate them. ​We start with our children’s deepest assumptions about the world: a notion of race as visible and normal, an awareness of racial injustice, and a working presumption that people can and do take actions against racism. ​ Young children should be engaged with lots of talk about difference: skin tone and bodies, and the ways different communities of color identify. Making a commitment to normalize talk about difference preempts the pressures kids experience to treat difference as a taboo. ​Be aware that using the language of race—especially with young children—always runs the risk of reducing people to labels or implying everyone who shares that identity label is the same in some significant way (stereotyping). Be specific and nuanced. ​Race-conscious parenting for a healthy white identity development must include teaching about racial injustice and inequity as much as it does racial difference. Consider experiential learning, such as protests, for this.”
― Jennifer Harvey, Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America

“they are left exposed to internalize views of the United States as a nation innately and exceptionally good, and a pure beacon of equality and justice. The less critical our children are of such a narrative, the more difficult it will be for them to really stand up for justice.”
― Jennifer Harvey, Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America