Decolonalizing is hard, take a friend

There is a certain point in the evening when I stop parenting effectively.  About 10:30, I find myself resorting to ignoring the children in the hopes that they will get bored and go to bed.  This is usually after several hours of dicussion about their day, their worries and weird body activities (one child is very fascinated by pressure marks).

In an attempt to be really boring, I usually stop watching videos and read.  The other night I was on Buzz Feed.  I read the front page and open all the articles that look interesting before reading through them.  This usually results in a collage of "cute kittens wearing hats", "DIY - make your cat a great hat", "Cool pictures of XX", "kittens making grumping comments about the world" excetera. I know Buzz Feed is probably not good for me.  I can read the latest headlines about the world and feel like I am keeping up, but not waste any valuable kitten analysis time.

The other night, ignoring the older child (S) who would not go to bed (or more correctly went to bed and got up repeatedly), I read kittens and then a piece about pictures of an Ethiopian Tribe and then more kittens.  S said words to stop any good liberal parent's heart "I don't like looking at pictures of black people."  As I could not in good concience continue to ignore her at this point, I asked for more information.  She told me that it made her sad, as these people were so poor they did not even have pants and we should not be looking at them just to amuse ourself.

While I did stop myself from getting into a discussion on colonialization, the gaze of the other and the commoditization of poverty - those are really a being awake kind of conversation - I was pretty proud of my girl for raising a really good point.  I had been consuming those pictures with no different a lens than I had for the kitten article before.  I had not sat back to think about the greater context of those pictures or to question whos lens we were seeing these pictures through.  How would I have reacted if these were First Nations People in equivalent dress?  Was it better that the photographer was non-white, that as the article said "he lived with them for a week"?

Not that I need to answer all those questions, but I like to think of myself as the kind of person that asks those questions and as a "good" parent it is tempting to want to do all the teaching and never make any mistakes, but as I thought about this some more, I was really proud of my daughter and glad to have another companion to push me to keep asking questions, even when I forget to.