Teach Out/Reflection

 Hannah Laurianno 

June 19th, 2023

Teach Out

For this, the two things I was keeping top of mind were patience and thoughtfulness. I decided to do this teach out with my father. I knew I wanted to do this teach out on “Black Lives Matter” and I knew I wanted it to be meaningful. This conversation would be meaningful because my father does not fully understand “black lives matter” and has used the phrase “all lives matter '' before but also because I felt like he was ready to have the conversation. 

The first thing I had to think about was where I wanted this conversation to take place. I wanted to make sure we were somewhere my father would feel comfortable to speak freely. I decided we would do it at my apartment but I also wanted to make sure it was just us so I asked my partner to be somewhere else while this conversation was happening. Next I thought about when. Fathers day weekend was coming up and I knew I didn't want to do it on that weekend so I decided to do it Thursday night. My father doesn't work so he didn't have to worry about being up too late. We had the conversation over dinner. I felt like thi would keep things more casual and not feel so ridge. I know that my father can take things personally and i didnt want to make him feel cornered. Finally I had to figure out how I was going to document this conversation. I knew I wanted to make this conversation as comfortable as possible so I didn't feel like recording was the best option. I decided I was going to take notes. I let my father know i was doing this for class and that i was just going to be jotting down some notes as we talked, my father was actually very happy to hear i was doing this for class as he is very proud i am in grad school so he was happy to see me taking notes.so on Thursday June 16th, my father came over my apartment, I made dinner and we sat at the table ready for this conversation.

Thankfully my father started off the conversation by saying “how is school going?”. This allowed me to start this conversion in a more organic way. I responded by telling him I'm loving class, and that my favorite class we have had so far was the conversations we had around the idea of black lives matter and why all lives matter is a problem. Then my after asked something that was very unexpected. He asked “why is all lives matter a problem?” He asked this question with curiosity and a little worry. I explained to him that we read this really great and kind of funny article in class. I asked him if he wanted to read the summary I wrote about it. He said he didn't want to but agreed to letting me read the summary to him. After I finished the summary I exaggerated the point that many times people who say all lives matter place this invisible “only” in front of “black lives matter”. Again, to my surprise, my father said “that makes sense”. My father was a correctional officer for 15 years. He explained that he always had a hard time understanding that people of color are treated differently because HE never treated them differently. He explained “all the inmates respected me because they knew I didn't care who they were or what they looked like or where they came from. I treated everyone the same”. I explained to him that I heard what he was saying and that it makes sense why it's hard to understand but I also told him that that's not the case for everyone and that many people do mistreat people of color just because of what they look like. He went on to say “oh I know, I worked with some f*cked up dudes, they never hide their racism, it took me awhile to get used to it when i first started working but when you hear it everyday you don't really think about it anymore”. 

I decided to circle back to what my father said about treating everyone the same no matter who they were or what they looked like or where they came from. I asked my father if he had ever heard of the word colorblindness. He of course cracked a joke about “of course i know about color blindness why do you think i never match”. I then clarified that I was talking about color blindness when it came to race, not actual colors. I then told him that there was another great article I read for class about color blindness and he said I could read it to him. So I read him the article and then explained color blindness in my own way. I explained to him that sometimes, a lot of the time, not seeing someone's race is having the opposite effect of what you think you are doing. I brought up the idea of intent versus impact. That while his intent was great; he didn't want to treat anyone different based on race because he believed that was what racism was. The impact of that was missing out on equity. I told him that many times treating people with equality doesn't allow for equity. My dad was then very brave and admitted that he did not know the difference between equity and equality. I then showed him this visual on my phone. 

I then explained to him a connection between equity and “Black Lives Matter”. I explained that we needed to lift the idea that black lives matter because white lives have always mattered and are treated as such. It was at this time I could see my dad getting a little upset and I knew that we would have to stop talking soon. I had one last attempt at me and I tried to use an analogy that my ad might understand. My father is a type 2 diabetic and uses Ozempic for his diabetes. We started talking about the Ozmepic trend and many upper class people are using it to lose weight. He admitted that this made him really mad and really affects him because Ozempic have been harder to access. I explained to him that this is similar to “All Lives Matter. If a doctor had you as a patient and three others that just wanted to use Ozempic to lose weight and he gave all of you the Ozempic because “All Needs Matter” how would you feel? He said “ i would be pissed, i NEED that to live, the doesn't NEED Ozempic they just want it.'' I said “exactly” people of color need black lives matter because they are being killed and abused just because of who they are and what they look like and not admitting that their race affects the way they are treated is denying what they NEED. Around this time I could tell that my father was just getting a little too defensive, it felt as though he was taking things personally so we stopped the conversation there, and I thanked him for talking and for being open. 

This teach out was very surprising. I decided to do this each out with my father because this is something he had openly been against. He did not understand black lives matter and he thought he was doing something good by not “seeing race”. He really surprised me with how he asked questions and admitted that he did not know or understand certain things. This meant a lot to me because my partner is a person of color and I hope this conversation opened my dads mind a little and just made him think a little deeper about the world around him.