Are We There Yet?

Every day my 13-year daughter proves to me she’s smarter than more or less everyone on social media.

International women’s day was this week and while we were chatting at dinner, she asked me why people make such a big deal when, in sports for example, a woman does something better than a man. This was brought on by a conversation she was having online with some friends about some video where a female baseball player out-throws every male she goes up against.

In her view, doing something better is doing something better, and she couldn’t understand why society makes such a big deal out of magnifying accomplishments from non-white males.

Now before you twitter-cancel me, or her, listen (well, read) because I have two main points:

First, does this mean we have finally made a shift? Has outrage culture and magnifying success stories from people who’ve been discriminated against in the past shown my kids’ generation that no one has limits anymore because we’re having public conversations about this stuff?

Side note: yes, I understand people are still discriminated against, and people will always be discriminated against because after all, humans are idiots. Park that thought for a moment if that’s what you were thinking.

After she made that comment, we talked about the various human rights movements over time. Examples included when women were given the right to vote, or the civil rights movements throughout the 50’s and 60’s. In her eyes, she can’t understand why they would have been excluded from that in the first place — much like how Chris Rock says that ‘making progress in the black community’ is (in his words) a retarded thing to say because it presumes black people did something to deserve to be treated that way.

I told her that as a child, I had no presumed limits as a white male. There was no construct in my brain that set a limit on what I could do. Counter to that, women who were part of my parent’s generation, possibly mine too, had implied limits that a women’s place was in the home because that’s how things were back then until great women started smashing the idea that the way things are, are the way they need to be.

I told her about the all-women hockey panel TSN showcased this week that featured Angela James who shattered the illusion that women, and more-so women of colour, could excel at what was known as a man’s sport. (short note: at 8 years old, she played with 12–13 year old boys because she was that good). Angela said growing up she never saw someone that looked like her doing what she wanted to do and now today’s kids can look at her and think, “hey, she looks like me…I can do that too”

Here’s the interesting point about that, I never saw anyone excelling at sports, or business that didn’t look like me so the only seeds planted in my head were seeds of possibilities, not limits.

The point of this conversation was, I told her that as a little white girl growing up in the suburbs, she (and I) will never understand what having limits on our abilities and desires feel like, but when young non-white girls see people who look like them kicking ass in sports, as a CEO, or any other role, they’ll start believing that they can do that too.

Second, we switched our conversation to outrage culture, why it’s the most idiotic thing created by humans, but why it’s necessary…for now.

She and I both think outrage culture and cancel culture is the stupidest thing the world has ever seen. Taking a video from someone from 1983 and canceling their life because they said something racist 40 years ago is idiotic.

But it serves a purpose. It forces us into conversations. It forces us to analyze the past, understand it, wipe the slate and start over. Look at the utterly ridiculousness of the Dr Seuss outrage. C’mon, find anything printed pre-1960 that isn’t racist. That’s just the way things were. It‘s wrong, but pretending it didn’t exist by wiping out history isn’t the right thing to do either. It’s important we magnify these stories because it’s important to show the world that we are learning and getting better.

I’ll admit, I rolled my eyes when I saw the Dr Seuss thing and thought it was stupid, but my voice doesn’t matter. I’m allowed to feel this way, but I absolutely must understand and talk about the higher-level reason behind why, we as a society, do stuff like this with my kids.

A few years ago my daughter was playing a drawing game on Roblox. It’s a game where bunch of kids aged 6 to 16 jump into a blank canvas world and draw memes and other stupid stuff. Someone drew #blacklivesmatter and my daughter wanted to talk about why we can’t do anything without bringing society’s issues into everything. Why can’t we just play and enjoy things?

She was labeled a racist and was harassed until she left the game.

She was 12 fucking years old at the time.

She couldn’t understand why people in the game didn’t want to talk about it, they just wanted to latch onto her question and label her. She asked me why it’s not ok to say ‘all lives matter’, because again, in her eyes, we are all equal. We talked about why all lives do matter, but for now, we need to focus our attention on people who’ve been unjustly targeted because of their race, gender or sexual orientation.

Finally, this conversation gave me hope for the future. Hope that the more we educate ourselves, and our kids the better we’ll make the world for generations to come. We’ll never be perfect but we should never stop trying.