This is NPR's Life Kit, I'm Michelle Martin. By now we assume most people have heard about

the talk. That's the conversation many African-American parents have with their kids about how to

avoid altercations with police or what to do and say if they're stopped. But with the recent

unrest sparked by anger over police brutality against black men, it got us thinking about the

role that white parents could play in talking to their kids about race and about this moment.

In this special episode of Life Kit, I talk with Jennifer Harvey, the author of raising white

kids bringing up children in a racially unjust America about how white and all non-black parents

in particular can talk to their children about concepts like privilege and allyship.

Jennifer Harvey is also a professor of religion at Drake University and she is with us now.

Thank you so much for having me. You just actually wrote a piece for CNN.com titled,

How Do I Make Sure I'm Not Raising the Next Amy Cooper, Amy Cooper being the white woman in

Central Park who was recently recorded calling the police on an African-American man who it just

asked her to leash her dog, which is in fact the law, and invoking his race. Basically,

it's like I'm going to tell the police that a black man is threatening me. I want to read from

what you wrote. You say most white parents of today have come up in families in which white

silence was a pervasive norm in our socialization. These same parents are now passing such

silence on to their kids. Could you talk a bit more about that? Sure. So, you know, many white

Americans today were raised in families where explicit racism was not what parents were trying.

Now, of course, some way to Americans were raised in such families, but many of us were raised

in families that thought that they were teaching equality, but the way that they did that was to

just say, well, we're all equal and not say anything more explicit about what does it mean when

you believe everyone should be equal, but many members of our society do not experience equality.

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