RACE (Part 1 - w/Sarah & Kwame, and Justin Guarini)

In part one of our exploration of communication with kids about race and skin color, we hear from Sarah Henson-Darko and Kwame Darko, a multiracial couple about the ways they engage on the subject of race with their kids: From being aware of what's happening in culture at large, to leaning in to their Ghanaian heritage, to preparing for "The Talk"—the one about surviving in your skin as a person of color.
We also have a conversation with actor, musician, author, and entrepreneur Justin Guarini, about growing up split down the lines of his own race, struggling to find belonging, and how he has finally begun to fully take ownership of his own identity as a mixed-race person.
You can find "The Talk" on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and if you'd like to contribute to the conversation by sharing your story about one of our episode topics, you can do so by sending a voice memo or an email to thetalk@thetalkthepodcast.com. 

Transcript

Sarah Henson-Darko: Alright, this is Sarah.

Kwame Darko: This is Kwame.

S.H.D.: We are a multiracial family. I am white.

K.D.: And I'm from Ghana.

S.H.D.: And our kids typically describe themselves as being brown, but more recently, when we pushed them a little, also said they identify as being black because they're not white. And so remember, they said, "Because I'm not white." 

You're listening to "The Talk": a podcast where we explore the possibility of creating a radical new communication environment between parents and children. An environment that's open, honest, and candid. And where nothing is off-limits.

S.H.D.: I remember when our daughter was in kindergarten and it was her special week to share and be recognized in the classroom. Each student drew pictures and wrote a sentence or something that had to do with their relationship with her. And I remember when those all came home in a little book. It's such a lovely gift. And I was like—I would get to some of the pages and I'd be like, "Where's Mia?" Because it's just a picture of a white kid or two white kids. And then I realized how much more likely it was that brown students would draw our brown daughter as brown and her white peers would draw our brown daughter as white.

Jeremy: What did that realization mean to you? I mean, did it make you understand anything differently about the world that your kids are growing up in?

S.H.D.: I think as much as what we've kind of talked about is about how we talk to our own kids. What I also want to, I guess, stress is how important it is for white families of white kids to be talking about brownness and blackness. Our kids need us to affirm them, but they also need their peers, their white peers, to affirm their brokenness and their blackness.

Jeremy: Was there a point in your kid's lives that you remember noticing them first becoming aware of their own skin color or becoming aware of your skin color? And what that felt like?

K.D.: Yeah, I mean, I think that—I was trying to remember if there was any time where they asked "Why is Mom white? Or Dad black?" And I can't remember that. I feel like—

S.H.D.: We don't have any sweet stories. I do remember when they were really little and we were on that playground next to the house and a black guy walked by who was really athletically built and had a bald head and a long beard. And from a distance, they thought it was you. I mean, this is when they were a "little little". They were like "Daddy!" And they ran until they got close enough to see it wasn't you. And then just one-eighty back to the playground.

Jeremy: Is it important to you to give your kids any particular perspective or preparation for what it might mean to be darker-skinned people existing in our culture?

S.H.D.: Well, I think, like we were saying, it's such a priority in all of our day-to-day conversations that, yes, we do think it's important. And one of the main reasons for that, I think, is that we want to control that narrative because we're all informed about those realities, whether we choose to be or not. And so we choose to be the ones telling that story rather than letting someone else tell that story.

K.D.: Yeah, I think especially there are times when the story of brown and black culture gets parsed into these minute details that miss the vastness of the history of all of those people. If you look at a history book today or you look at what's going on today, you won't know a lot of things that I studied, for instance, as a child in Ghana. So it's good to control that narrative of "No, that's not necessarily true. There's this whole other history."

S.H.D.: Well, and I think that controlling that narrative is not about control, it's about recognition that the narrative that exists, exists because of institutional racism and a racist history. So the societal narrative is a negative one. And we choose to control that narrative so that it is affirming and true and told by the people that it represents. 

Jeremy: Yeah. Does part of controlling that narrative include differentiating for them between their Ghanaian heritage and the heritage of other black Americans that they grew up around?

K.D.: Yeah, I think it's a—this is an interesting one here because they do know, I think, about black heritage, I think from school. But also they're very, very much aware that they're Ghanaian in their heritage. And so there is that dichotomy of being—Damien was part of the African Boys Club or something like that because they are a group of other African—kids with African parents.

S.H.D.: Oh, yeah, and they called themselves the West African—

K.D.: The West African boys, right?

S.H.D.: I think they see their blackness or brownness as being Ghanian. I'm not sure that they really think or know very much about that as being similar to or different than the Black American experience.

K.D.: Right. I don't think we've really made that dive into what that means and what that entails.

Jeremy: And I mean, that can entail some pretty sobering things. I think you're alluding to a specific meaning of the term "The Talk" as this conversation that parents of black and brown children have to have with their kids that white parents don't have to have with their white kids.

K.D.: Yeah, I mean, right now, the talk that I'm thinking about is the conversation I'm about to have with Damien. He is turning a specific age where people are going to start noticing certain things about him because he's a brown boy and with that comes certain things that he has to understand: that he can't internalize it and he can't let that define him. What folks might see or suspect and there are things that will happen to him that he might not even know that they're happening and to just be aware of those things.

S.H.D.: Well, and I think that as much as we make "The Talk" like a thing that we do all the time, I think we're really committed to pointing out things that we see, interrupting dominant narratives, pointing out injustices, calling out racist comments or jokes as we hear and see them from people or from media or television and talking about what the context of that is. So as much as we make "The Talk" present all the time, I think that what you're talking about is something way more personal. That it's different to talk about the experience of being a brown person or the experience of black people in America. That's different than saying "What happens when it's you? What happens when it's your humanity on the line? Your personhood on the line?" And that's a different kind of settling in the soul, I think.

K.D.: And I think for us also is that it's not just in America, right? It's internationally and traveling worldwide. You are going to be treated slightly differently— 

S.H.D.: Or not so slightly…

K.D.: Because of the color of your skin. So for me, that talk is about to begin because he's reaching that stage of education and of social interactions where that will come up a lot. People might say certain things, he might not catch what's going on, but it's happening. You begin to see a lot of "intelligent people" will not be brown, even though there are a lot of intelligent people that are brown, and that is what will be forced in his face.

Thanks to Sara and Kwame for sharing so vulnerably about their experience. Like Sarah and Kwame's kids, actor and entrepreneur Justin Guarini grew up in a blended race household. In just a bit, we'll hear from Justin about growing up in Atlanta in the 1980s as the son of a black police officer and an Italian-American TV producer and anchorwoman.

Dr. Nadine Thornhill: A lot of us, as parents, feel that we didn't have sufficient sex education, whether it was insufficient in school or it was insufficient in our homes.

Coming up soon on "The Talk", we're going to be talking about sex. There are plenty of reasons to start talking to our kids early about sex and it's really not as scary as it might sound.

N.T.: It's OK if you feel awkward, particularly if you're not used to saying these words out loud.

We'll be asking questions like "When is the right time to start talking about consent? Should kids be allowed to see naked bodies? What about porn? Is virginity important? And why does it seem like most sex educators are women?"

Dr. N.T.: If you haven't had a conversation with your kid, it's OK to say, "Look, you know what, I know we've never talked about this before and I'm not sure how this is going to go, but I'm going to do my best. Let's go."

As always, I really want all of you to be part of this conversation, so I'm inviting you to send a voice memo that you'd be willing to share with our listeners. It could be a short reflection on the formal or informal sex education you received growing up or an anecdote about succeeding or failing at communicating with your own kids about sex. If you'd like to contribute, you can email your voice memo to "The Talk" at Thetalkthepodcast.com. Or you can use the voice memo recorder on our website by visiting Thetalkthepodcast.com and clicking "Contact." I look forward to hearing from you.

Justin Guarini: We don't really think about it, but the word race. To me, when I hear that, I think a verb, and when I think race, it's like there has to be a winner and there has to be a loser, right? There has to be a constant struggle to get ahead.

Jeremy: Justin Guarini is electric. A magnetic presence in any room. His enormous smile and palpable joy are impossible to ignore. And as he would tell you, he's discovering new parts of himself every day. Justin is probably most widely known for coming in second place in the first season of American Idol as runner-up to Kelly Clarkson. That was nearly 20 years ago. And in the time since he has toured, performed at Broadway shows and TV commercials, gotten married, had children, and developed a successful business as a coach, speaker, author, podcaster, and much more. Justin and I met in 2012. Since then, we've been occasional colleagues and consistent virtual presences in each other's lives and a couple of months ago. Justin sat down with me over Zoom to talk about his experience growing up.

J.G.: So I was born in Columbus, Georgia. My father was a prominent politician, a police officer who would eventually become chief of police in Atlanta. A black man who'd become chief of police in a segregated police force. When he started out, there was a segregated police force and he rose all the way to the top job. And then my mother was an anchorwoman and a producer for the local ABC network and then would go on to be one of the first anchorwomen on CNN when it first started up. And so I grew up in the South, a child of mixed race. My parents weren't even allowed to get married before I was born or when I was born, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, this 1978. You could not get married to a white woman if you were a black man and vice versa. And so that was what I grew up under. One The other, I grew up in this sort of weird world of lights and cameras and entertainment. And I would wake up in the morning at five o'clock on a cot in my mom's dressing room at CNN, and I would see her putting on her pancake makeup, getting ready to go out. And then I would go to breakfast with the weatherman and I would play on the set. And then my father being this politician, all of these heads of state, all of these famous people, all of that would be coming to Atlanta and he would have some sort of role in it. And in the South, when you're a child, especially a child of my generation, you're to be seen and not heard. And so I had to put on the suit or the tux or whatever, and I had to go out and I had to stand up straight and I had to squeeze the person's hand and look them in the eye when I shook their hand and I just learned decorum and just learned the state of politics and all of that or at least the state of being in politics. And that was one portion of my life that then at the age of five or six, split when my parents split.

Jeremy: Right. And I'm really interested in this moment because your dad stayed in Georgia, your mom moved to Pennsylvania and got remarried. And so I'm curious how your life and your perception of yourself changed with that shift.

J.G.: I was literally split along the lines of my race. It was so interesting by day. And during the school year, I was Justin Guarini, son of Kathy and Jerry Guarini, and a white kid who just went to school and did all the things a normal child would do during the school year; would be would go to the Roman Catholic Church, right? And would be raised in that sort of religious "playground." And then during the summers, I would be Justin Bell, son of Chief Eldrin Bell, a black child who would go to the Black Baptist Church and who would travel all over the world and be in this sea of famous people and politicians and all this other stuff. And so my life was—literally I lived two different lives until I went to college and then eventually had my own adult life.

Jeremy: Yeah. Was there one or other of those places that you felt more comfortable and more like yourself, more free, or were you able to really compartmentalize between those?

J.G.: No, no, I wasn't able to and I didn't. I felt like a man without a country.

Jeremy: So neither place you felt like a whole self.

J.G.: One hundred percent myself. Yeah, I didn't feel like that because I  knew that I was different in each situation and I felt like I was only accepted to a point by either situation, by either grouping of people. And that was more my story, I think, than anything else. That was my perception. I don't know if that's necessarily true because there are so many people who love me and who care about me and who could care less about what my race was. But I think I was really conscious of it growing up.

Jeremy: But that perception in you that developed as a young kid came from somewhere, right? It came from somewhere. So it makes me curious about what kind of sort of implicit or subtle messaging you were getting from the people around you.  Did you know other kids who had interracial parents?

J.G.: No.

Jeremy: No. In neither place.

J.G.: Neither. It was—I mean, there's those light-skinned folks, right? But there's not—there was no one that I went to school who was like me. I think where it really hit home for me was in junior high, where I first really got my first taste of racism. I will never forget, and it was—I was ostracized on one hand, but then also it was just so blatant and all, I didn't know what to do. I just could laugh at it because there was this guy who—And it was back when Doc Martens were all the rage, right? And so we were in gym and we're in the gym locker room and we're getting dressed and he is just like—I would not be surprised if he was one of the people who was at the Capitol. Just that was already in him at that point. And he was like I was like, yo, man, your boots are great. And he's like, "Yeah, they're my N-word stompers." But he didn't say N-word. Yeah! And I was like, "ha ha ha." Right? And he was smiling at me and it wasn't malicious, it was weird because I know that this guy, if I was like, "Yo, dude, I need you to have my back," he'd have my back. It's weird. And I think he knew, right? That I was—. But he accepted me. It was so strange. And so it was like I felt like that was happening. And then there was like one black girl in our school. And when I told her that I was mixed, she was like, "Oh, oh." And she then called me a cracker N-word but like almost hyphenated. "Oh, so you're a cracker N-word." And I was like, "OK." And so even from my sister in the school, even then it was like, "You are separate. You're different."

Jeremy: How can you be expected to find a place in the world when you're perceived as a threat from every angle?

J.G.: Or as other.

Jeremy: As other, right. 

J.G.: Yeah, that's why I felt like a man without a country. And I kid you not that it has been probably—you know, there were some frayed wires, but 2020 is what really helped make significant connections for me in that area. And I'm forty-two. So we're talking between the ages of forty-one and forty-two. It didn't come together for me in the fullest sense until everything this past year really happened. And what it was for me is that I just decided to take a stand in my own lane, in my own self. I decided to take a stand. I didn't wait for other people to give me a position or a place in the world. I decided to say this is who I am. And I decided to identify with my Caucasian side and identify with my African-American side. But what really, I truly, truly just—instead of being that man without a country, I just said, "You know what? I am unapologetically who I am, which is not necessarily either one of these things." And I identify with that. I identify with "other." I'm comfortable with being "other." It's a blessing that I haven't really recognized and a gift that I haven't given myself. That like, "Oh. I'm what everyone's going to look like in two hundred years." Right? Like I'm ahead of the curve and I mean, not by anything I did, but it's just like, "So that's OK!" And that is—for me, that clarity, brought on a sense of certainty and then just helped to create so much more of a foundation in my life that I'm building more and more on and that I give to my children.

Jeremy: Especially this past year, what have your conversations with your kids been about? You grew up in this particular space, so you must know that there's a risk for them also finding themselves in this in this space. And so how do you talk to them about that?

J.G.: Well, we have very open conversations about it. And when George Floyd was killed, when the temperature just spiked through the roof, it opened up an opportunity for us to talk to our children about what race is and who we are. And every single time they were like, "Well, why are they doing this? Why are they doing that?" I made sure to say, "Well, look, this is what's happening to our people." I was very, very intentional in my use of language saying, "This is our people," And what's very interesting is that my father, their granddaddy, is both a black man and a cop. And so I had such a unique perspective and I still have just being able to speak to him. He gives me such a unique perspective because he not only was just "a" cop, he was the top cop in Atlanta, which is like the New York of the South, basically.

Jeremy: And in the early ‘80s. 

J.G.: Right? Like what? This is a hotbed of all of these issues. And he was at one point seen as a savior and at another point seen as a betrayer, right? And so when he goes into or went into a project and cleaned it out, there were those two factions of people saying, "Man, you're betraying us." "Thank you so much. You're saving us." And so his take on policing and what we've lost in policing is that A) our police do not represent and or come from the communities that they are set to police, right? That's a huge problem. And then on top of that, when people are protesting, when people are exercising their constitutional rights, instead of seeing them as an enemy, and you're going to have people who do things that they shouldn't do that are illegal, right? But my father always said if you were going to protest: A) I'm going to be out there with you, B) I want the organizers to be with me or to be wearing the yellow vests or whatever, and I want to be in contact with them at all times, because if I see something happening that is not OK or where I might arrest somebody, I'm going to go to that organizer and say "You better handle your people or I will. And the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to lock you up and then I'm going to lock them up." Right? And that's the kind of on-the-ground policing that we just don't have anymore. And that disconnect and the distrust now that has been sown between the police and between the people who are legitimately exercising their rights. And then it leads to the trickle-down effect of situations getting out of control. And then the media just shows the looters and the rioters and the message gets lost in this sort of polarization that we face now. 

Jeremy: Yeah. Do you have a pretty—are you in touch with your dad frequently? Do you have a good relationship with him?

J.G.: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. And it just has gotten better as I've gotten older. You know, I was angry for a long time as children can be in a situation of divorce. And yet, you know, over the past ten years, but especially the past, I would say even three years, I call him multiple times a week. There's so much history that I am soaking up from him as much as I can. I'll record conversations with him some time because when he was born in the nineteen-thirties, his head was crushed by the birth process. And the doctors at the time, white doctors said "This child is not going to live." They gave him up for dead. But his grandmother, who was a slave, took his infant body and just rubbed his head and massaged his head and massaged his head. The same hands that had picked cotton, the same hands that had been bound, the same hands that had born and birthed. She was a midwife. However many children. She just rubbed, rubbed, and literally, almost like play-doh, reshaped his head. And had it not been for her, had it not been for that ancient wisdom that kept him alive, I wouldn't be here. And that's a story that I love telling my kids because I wouldn't be here, my dad wouldn't be here, my children wouldn't be here, and we wouldn't be having this conversation. And so there's so much wealth in my relationship with my father. And it's taken me 42 years or 40 years to recognize that. We don't really think about it, but the word race. I mean, to me when I hear that, I think a verb. And when I think race, it's like there has to be a winner and there has to be a loser, right? There has to be a constant struggle to get ahead there. Think about a race. Right? All of those facets exist within the conversation of race and when it comes to racism, the subjugation of one race versus another. That's learned behavior. It's all learned, and the thing that I love about 2020 is with the complete shutdown of our entire lives, we all had the opportunity to have 20/20 vision on our lives. Some of us took the opportunity. Some of us didn't. And it's very interesting how you, many people I know, really took the time to take in and take stock of their own lives and then take stock of the experience of other people's lives, especially people outside of their realm of normal existence. Gorgeous. As terrible as 2020 was, look at the awakening that happened in so many people. And so, yeah, I think that the conversation of skin is so important when it comes to unlearning and reeducating ourselves. We have the ability to rediscover what our biases are, rediscover what our viewpoints are, and just move the ball forward, I guess, for humanity, if we take the opportunity.

Thanks so much to Justin Guarini for spending this time with us. If you enjoyed hearing from Justin, you can listen to our full uncut conversation as a bonus episode of "The Talk". You'll hear us chat more about our kids, about living life in faith instead of fear, and about the Netflix show Big Mouth, which you know I'm a fan of and I think you should be, too. Justin also has a new book coming out this month called Unshakable Confidence: The Powerful Formula for Being, Doing, Having, and Giving More Than You Ever Imagined. You can find the book by visiting Justin.club 

Thanks for listening to this episode of "The Talk". Thanks to this episode's guests: Sarah Hanson-Darko and Kwame Darko, and Justin Guarini. Thanks also to Drew Gasparini for the use of the song “Good Stuff” from his album “I Could Use A Drink.” You can find "The Talk" on the Web at Thetalkthepodcast.com and on Instagram and Facebook at @thetalkthepodcast. If you'd like to support us, you can do so by visiting Buymeacoffee.com/coffeetalks or by purchasing one of our beautiful tote bags which are available on our website. If financial support isn't an option at the moment, but you'd still like to help, leaving a rating or a review of the show on Apple podcasts or just telling a friend how much you're enjoying "The Talk" is a great way to do so. Dana Gertz created all of our original artwork. Mackenzie Yaddaw is our post-production assistant and a big thanks goes to my wife Jenny and to our kids, who are the reason “The Talk” exists at all. Goodbye.