Rebekah Gienapp

I often say that antiracist parenting is a journey that is never finished. If you stay committed to learning and reflecting, you’ll continue to change. One of the shifts that I’ve seen happen again and again in my own social justice journey is adapting new antiracist language. Sometimes this means abandoning language I used that contributed to or hid oppression. Other times it means adapting new phrases or ideas as I talk with others, including my kids.

In this post, I share six antiracist language shifts I’ve made. Four are phrases I’ve stopped saying, and two are phrases I’m trying to use more often.

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Four things I’ve stopped saying because of my commitment to using antiracist language:

1. “The mainstream culture”

Lots of times when I’m talking to both kids and adults, I want to explain how cultural expectations shape our behavior. Other times, I want to show how culture values some groups of people more than others.

I used to start sentences with “the mainstream culture” or just “our culture.” Thanks to the work of antibias educator Tiffany Jewell, I’ve now replaced this with a much more accurate term: “the dominant culture.”

(Side note, Jewell has a great book for kids ages 8 – 12 called The Antiracist Kid, and another for ages 13+ titled This Book Is Anti-Racist. They both hold prized spots on my shelf.)

The phrase dominant culture makes clear that power over others is at stake. When I said “mainstream culture” or “our culture” instead, I was inadvertently giving the dominant culture more power. That’s because I was making it seem “normal” for white, cisgender, non-disabled, heterosexual people to be the focus.

Jewell explains dominant culture to kids this way in The Antiracist Kid:

DOMINANT means having power and being controlling. The DOMINANT CULTURE is one that is shared by the people who have the most power in a country. People who are in the dominant culture have a lot of power.

Adding dominant culture to my antiracist vocabulary helps me think about the ways that I am given power and privilege and the ways that I am not. Kids can start thinking about this too when adults help them describe the many parts of their identities, and which fit with the dominant culture, and which do not.

2. “It’s a really good school.”

On the surface, calling a school (or neighborhood) “good” might sound like an innocent enough word choice.

But calling one school good implies that other schools are bad. And when white parents use the phrase “good school” or “safe neighborhood,” we’re often using coded language about a place’s racial demographics.

When my brother and I were kids, we attended majority Black public schools. I remember some of my father’s co-workers, who lived in the suburbs, being shocked when they learned where we went to school. They were sure these schools must be dangerous and not offer a quality education.

Even though I laughed at his co-workers at the time, I still categorized many schools in my community as “bad.” There’s no question that race and class played a huge role in my judgements.

The language of “good schools” is not harmless. As I discuss in Raising Antiracist Kids: An age-by-age guide for parents of white children, research shows white parents rely more on word of mouth recommendations from fellow white parents than data as they select schools for their children.

And if you’ve listened to any of the episodes of the Nice White Parents podcast (highly recommended!), you’ll know that resources flow most to the schools that white families choose to attend.

3. “We’re a nation of immigrants.”

For many years, I used this phrase to show my support for immigrant communities and to advocate for just immigration reform.

Justice for immigrants is something I continue to be passionate about, but I learned from Black and Indigenous activists that this is a harmful phrase.

That’s because it erases the reality of enslavement for African Americans, and the continued existence of Native American nations today. The “nation of immigrants” narrative also whitewashes the truth that Europeans who arrived in the Americas in the 1600s and 1700s were colonizers.

My antiracist parenting includes talking often about the importance of immigrants to our country and why our laws must change. But I don’t tell my child “we’re a nation of immigrants.”

4. “I don’t know why they did those racist things.”

When my youngest child was around four years old, we started to read books about Jim Crow and other racist systems.

He would often ask me “but why did they do that Mommy? It’s so mean.”

At the time, I wasn’t sure I could do a good job explaining the reasons to him. I wasn’t even sure I could articulate them to other adults who didn’t know much about American history.

So I said things like “I don’t know why they did those racist things. It was wrong.”

Now that he’s a tween, he doesn’t ask me “why” as often about racism. But when he does, I try to talk about power, and how racism is a form of power for white people.

Even though I don’t always do the best job explaining, and I’m not sure how much he can understand at this point, it’s important to attempt the conversation. Because it we act like racism is inexplicable, then we won’t be able to see it – and challenge it – in its less obvious forms.

Two phrases I’m trying to add to my antiracist language

1. White supremacy

I’m not going to lie: using the phrase “white supremacy” still feels a bit uncomfortable for me. Like other white people, I was taught to think of white supremacy as only applying to the KKK or people who used racial slurs.

But the more time I’ve spent re-learning American history, it’s become impossible to deny that white supremacy has been, and continues to be, at the heart of our country.

Its effects live inside me, and my children are subject to its subtle and overt messages.

Through learning about white supremacy culture, I’ve even come to see how it influences activist groups who want to challenge racism. (In Raising Antiracist Kids, I also talk about how white supremacy culture has impacted my parenting, and how I’m trying to unlearn this culture.)

As I’ve been trying to get more comfortable using the phrase white supremacy, I also tried explaining it to my son when he was about 8 years old.

I told him, “white supremacy is the idea that white people are better than Black people  and other people of color. Sometimes white supremacy is really obvious, like a white person saying they don’t want people of color to live in their neighborhood. But it’s also things that seem ordinary to lots of white people, like always being able to find people who look like us in charge at school, at work, or in our government.”

2. White dominance

Sometimes antiracist language is about adding in a phrase without removing a synonym that you’ve also used. Antiracist educator Britt Hawthorne introduced me to the idea of referring to white supremacy as “white dominance.”

Hawthorne prefers the phrase white dominance because it gets to the idea of power, rather than one group being better than another. Her point that when we use the phrase “white supremacy” often, it can unintentionally contribute to the false idea that white people are better.

Especially since most white people are hestitant to even use the phrase white supremacy except to point to the most extreme acts of racism, I’m not going to let go of the phrase “white supremacy” just yet.

But I definitely plan to use “white dominance” more often. Most importantly, as Hawthorne explains in the Instagram video linked above, whichever phrase we use, we need to explain to kids that “it’s not a person or one hate group but an ideology that’s baked into every institution.”

Did you find this post helpful? Share it with other parents and educators who want to embrace antiracist langauge!