I just want to throw this question out there: what are your thoughts about bringing children along to protest marches? One of the general lines of inquiry that I want to pursue in Children in Culture, (playing off of Nietzsche’s Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life), is the Uses and Abuses of Childhood for Life. How do we take care of and neglect children in pursuing different values and societal outcomes? Certainly we might want to inculcate particular values in our children by bringing them to a protest march or parade of any kind. Of course this depends on the values ostensibly embodied in the march and how they are being promulgated. I don’t think I am going out on a limb to say that it is disturbing to see a baby being baptized at a KKK rally, a kid in klan robes and a pointy hat, or a child being carried by his white supremacist dad at a Confederate Flag rally!
I remember being on my father’s shoulders, 4 years old, in a demonstration march in Thompkin’s Square Park (NY,NY) in 1967, ( I later found out it was against the Vietnam War),and there suddenly being a lot of jostling and pushing, and my father deftly putting me on the other side of a metal fence, safely out of harm’s way, until he came back around, scooped me up and took me home. Later in the 70’s, I remember being brought to a women’s Take Back the Night March in New Haven as a 12 year old boy, by my mother, and she becoming uncomfortable with a speaker’s rhetoric about ” slimy, biologically predetermined, violent men, coming up out of the gutters at night to rape women,” and my brothers and I being whisked away, back to our house to discuss different versions of feminism. I took my 7 year old daughter to a march in San Francisco against the invasion of Iraq in 1991 , where I carried a handmade political sign that I thought was sophisticated and morally hard hitting, and my daughter wore a 49ers jacket. The most memorable thing about that march,besides the size of the crowd, were the Bread and Puppet Theater’s larger than life puppets, masks and costumes.
Recently, during the Trump Era, I have been somewhat annoyed by young children mouthing, repeating, (what I assume they learned from their parents) insults at each other like “you’re a Trump chump.”During the most recent wave of Women’s Marches, in the midst of very inspiring images from the front lines, I saw a two year old holding a sign that said “I love naps but I stay woke,” which didn’t sit quite right with me insofar as it felt like the child was being used as a prop. A transgender woman friend of mine took a picture, at the January 17th, 2018 Hartford CT Women’s March protesting the Trump Presidency and in solidarity with the METOO Movement, of a woman who was carrying a sign that said that transgender women were men, which prompted me to wonder how children of different ages process any of these messages, marches and protests.
Enough pontificating on my preferences and feelings. Marches, protests, signs and t-shirts are but a piece of larger social messaging, interpellation, cultural production, reproduction and reconstruction processes, and are also made up of multiple micro events, lived experiences, conditions, choices and actions. My colleagues and I are working on how to present racial equality, the Civil Rights Movement and African-American history in culturally competent, developmentally appropriate ways to 3-10 year olds, and the subject of the “Children’s March on Washington” in 1963 has come up. How can we present marching, social protest, and advocating for positive social change in responsible, appropriate, non-doctrinaire ways? What are your perspectives on, and experiences with, children, public marches, and social protest movements? What is important to you as a parent, teacher, or adult member of a democratic society? What should we be thinking about and doing in relation to children and public spaces of protest and dissent. Please be civil. We can all learn from one another.
Resources
Disturbing photos of children and the KluKluxKlan http://allthatsinteresting.com/ku-klux-klan-youth
History of the Bread and Puppet Theatre http://breadandpuppet.org/about-bread-and-puppet
A Brief History of Women’s Marches https://www.thenation.com/article/a-brief-history-of-womens-marches/
We March, by Shane Evans ( children’s picture book,4-8 years old, about the 1963 March on Washington) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12220009-we-march
Let the Children March by Monica Clark-Robinson (children’s picture book 5-12 about the children’s march on washington, 1963 https://muse.jhu.edu/article/680943
Curriculum Guide from the Zinn Education Project for using the documentary film Mighty Times: The Children’s March https://zinnedproject.org/materials/the-childrens-march
