As a child of the 80’s, my memories are painted by the music and film of the era.  Naturally, among those movies was a little film called Footloose.  There were a number of elements that drove this film’s popularity for those in my age group.  For us, the driving factors were the music and the dance.  While I won’t deny that I found them interesting, the music or dance didn’t persist in my mind.  Neither drove me to watch the movie subsequent times.  However, two scenes kept me coming back.

In recent years, we have learned a new word, allyship.  It’s when a member of a group with higher privilege assists a member of a group with lesser privilege.  Prototypical examples fall along race or gender lines.  For instance, if you watch the movie right around the 1:17 mark, you’ll get right to the scene at the council.  As Ren McCormick, a white male teen, tries to address the council, and a woman, Eleanor interrupts him.  Then the preacher’s wife, played by Dianne Weist, interjects:

Eleanor, sit down.

I think Mr. McCormick has a right to be heard.

And just like that, they allow him to speak.  However, his speech did not ultimately change the council’s vote but nonetheless impressed the audience, so much that they started to burn books.  That was a great example of allyship.

Trusting our children

The other scene that keeps me coming back to watch the film is the final sermon scene.  The pastor finally relents and allows the teens to have their high school dance.  On that podium, he spoke eloquently.  He’s vulnerable and conflicted, and simply asks:

If we don’t start trusting our children, how will they ever become trustworthy?

Those words resonated with me.  I grew up straddled among different cultures, never really finding a ‘home’, a cultural orphan.  I needed to develop my own identity and moral compass.

While my mom was one of the most courageous people I know, she did not have the tools to help me navigate it all.  She barely understood English, and she could not possibly understand the schoolyard bullying and racism I faced.  However, looking back on it all, she trusted me.  Somehow, she knew that my moral compass and perseverance would allow me to survive and even thrive.  She had faith in me, more so than I did.

How much do you trust your children?  Are you ready to give them the figurative keys to your car and allow them to drive out into the world alone?

Protecting our children

I often reflect back on those tumultuous days.  While I do not criticize my mom for not knowing how I may be bullied for being Chinese, I do wish she might’ve warned me that racism exists.  Some people simply will not like me, and it has nothing to do with anything I’ve done.

We can’t bubble-wrap our children to protect them from every conceivable event, we simply need to prepare them for that situation.  For instance, your child will inevitably get a flat tire sometime in their life; teach them how to deal with a flat tire.  We simply need to empower them with the wherewithal to navigate them.

However, we should guarantee everyone (even our kids) access to safe, clean water.  We should take every precaution to minimize train derailments to protect our communities.  The interesting question, where is that line that delineates what we should implicitly expect as protection, and what we should learn to navigate?

To reflect back on Footloose, do we protect our children from the dangers of music and dancing?  From books?

Legislating that protection

This is a portion of the legal arguments that defended the use of existing legislation that aimed to protect our children:

The prohibition against gay marriage was a valid exercise of state power to protect children from damage that would result from marriage between two men or two women.

You may agree with that, of course.  You may believe that there’s something implicitly wrong with gay marriage; it is your right.  Furthermore, you may believe that your kids should not be subjected to seeing such marriages.  The question is whether you have the right to deny others marriage based on your beliefs?

I lied of course; I changed the text in red.  Here’s the original text.  The ‘protection of children’ point was raised by Lovings vs. Virginia, in the landmark case that abolished laws against mixed (black and white) marriages, in 1967.

If you honestly believed that interracial marriages posed a danger to children in the 1960’s, and it has been permissible now for over fifty years… then logic dictates that we have accumulated decades of damaged children.  By all means, show me the damaged children who are now adults.  Seriously, show me the numbers and quantify the damage from mixed white and black marriages.  Let’s line them up and interview them.

However, I suspect that you can’t.  Specifically, I suspect that the degree to which the children were damaged (or that they were damaged at all) was overblown.  In other words, there was no problem.  The ‘protection of children’ angle was simply a thinly veiled attempt to perpetuate the racism.

Legislating bias as ‘protecting our children’

If we concede that mixed race couples did not damage our children in the way that we anticipated decades ago, then is it not also plausible that many of the new legislation centered around ‘protecting our children’ is similarly flawed?  The premise that the mere mention of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which occurred in the 1860’s, will overwhelm your white children with racial guilt is absolutely nonsense.  No one alive is responsible for the Chinese Exclusion Act (or slavery, etc.).

We acknowledge left-handed and dyslexic exist among us without controversy.  Why is understanding that gay and transgender people exist and that they deserve empathy and compassion magically morph to indoctrination?  What are we really ‘protecting’ our children from?  Is it natural curiosity, tolerance, and empathy?  Is it diversity and inclusivity that which we fear?

What does ‘damage’ from such indoctrination look like?  That they may have friends who are gay or trans?  So?  That they’ll come out or start gender transitioning a few years earlier than they otherwise would have?  Will we next ban the mention of other religions like Islam to keep them pristine in their bubble, like collectible action figures?

In other words, are we using ‘protecting our children’ as a way to perpetuate our own racism, homophobia, and transphobia?  Is what we truly fear the idea that our children will grow up without our biases?  …that the apple will fall far from the bigoted tree?