COMMENTARY: The uncomfortable role white people play in diversity

— In my family, I’m always bringing up stories from the past, our family’s story, our diversity.

My daughter often rolls her eyes. “We don’t need to keep talking about this stuff. We get it.”

My son admonishes. “We know!”

In truth, their schools have done of a good job trying to make their population more closely resemble our country and our world. My kids have friends of all races, cultures and social classes.

However, as a female white mom married to a male white dad with two biologically conceived white children, I’m trying to make a different point.

I want them to understand that light skin color is not the norm from which everyone differs. White is not the signifier of normal.

Many white kids take diversity for granted. They have worked hard to overcome stereotypes and bias and to accept other people as different.

The fact that they may be someone else’s diversity rarely occurs to them, let alone most white adults.

Three influences have altered my white-centric perspective: my psychology students, the people with whom I work in my clinical practice and the diversity work of both my kids’ New York City private schools.

Some of my psychology students wanted to write a children’s book where every character had a different identity. Children’s books generally feature characters of one race or ethnicity, not multiple identities in interaction with one another. When we finished our first draft, we realized our characters had become very close friends. They each came from a different place but everyone had came from somewhere.

Skin color doesn’t define personhood, but since race is a marker of identity in our society, the experience of personhood includes having to deal with the meanings others attribute to racial identity.

Protected by the privacy of a clinical relationship, beautiful black and brown women have shared how ugly they feel. Gentle dark-skinned men convey the humiliation that overcomes them when white people mistake them for dangerous criminals.

Since whiteness has become synonymous with a better life, it is easy for any lighter-skinned person to use skin color as a shield against hurtful stereotypes about social class, gender, sexuality, family history or even mental illness.

When white people deny their own embarrassing identity markers, we perpetuate the hypocrisy that only people of color have these problems.

As a psychologist — no, as a person — recognizing status and identity anxiety as a mutual experience lifts the veil that ordinarily separates us from each other.

This year, the parents association at one of my kids’ schools named me co-chair of the diversity committee. I felt so self-conscious.

Group leadership called forth a greater reckoning with my identity than simply participating in a committee. It also provided me the chance to experience being a minority member of a group.

Sometimes I sat as the only white person at the table feeling really insecure, worried that I would be seen as a white stereotype instead of as myself.

How did growing up white with financial struggles intersect with racial diversity?

When white people want to “help” people of color, it always reeks of privilege and entitlement as in, “let me help you with your problems.” It’s a different sentiment than “let’s help each other with our problems.”

Did people of color trust me? Did they wonder what I was doing on the diversity committee? Was it my job to speak for the concerns of underrepresented minorities? Or did I contribute more by trying to put forth a more multifaceted approach to the question of identity?

How can we sit with each other’s differences without feeling compelled to rank one way of being or looking as being better or worse than the other?

Our diversity committee ultimately worked through these questions in our conversations. Although we did not fully answer them, we found that by talking about them, we discovered the theme of our work and developed a friendship.

I now look at diversity as something that is in my interest: I want to live in a society where dignified difference constitutes our common core.

Nuances in how we think, feel, work and love define what it means to be human. Everyone is unusual and unique.

Racism is just another word for hating our realness.

Our commonality as a country derives from the fact that we all have an identity just beneath the surface of our skins.

The variety of stories that inhabit the people who call this country home — from the brutality of slavery to the flight from genocides to the call to some better god — enable democracy’s creative synergy.

The hands that have built the instruments of modern America have been every color, every nationality and every religion.

I want to be part of a world that loves and embraces humanity as a diverse and interconnected organism. I want to be part of a world that accepts that every difference has a color, and every color has a unique meaning.

How do I do this?

I realized that it starts at home.

Rather than teaching my kids that they are white, I want to impart to them that they are part of a kaleidoscope — lots of continually shifting colors and shapes.

They don’t always want to hear their parents tell another story about grandpa’s poverty or the coal-mining relatives. But this history holds our family’s painful and joyous truths.

Every family need only peel back the layers of a few generations to find their own story.

Authentic family history exposes everyone’s diversity. A society that embraces uniqueness loves the messiness of the human condition. Being loved despite or because of our messy truths creates empathy rather than sympathy.

When we raise children to accept and acknowledge their own story, they learn to listen to someone else’s, with respect.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Susan Bodnar.

Susan Bodnar is a clinical psychologist who teaches at Columbia University’s Teachers College and at the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, two children and all of their pets.

How to raise boys to be good men

— Boys do what they are taught. They become what they see. Unfortunately, from mid to late adolescence boys face an array of bad, sexy guy images.

Upsetting stories about boys’ sexual aggression, such as the allegations of rape in Steubenville and Maryville, continue to surface.

These boys who make the news become symbolic of all males. We hear less from the other quieter boys, though they constitute a majority.

In the privacy of a psychologist’s office such as mine, however, many boys admit to longing for that “miraculous feeling when you hold someone special’s hand for the first time.”

Boys, like girls, have complicated feelings. They struggle with their identities. They have no idea how to approach females. The anything goes sexual mores of teen sexuality create pressure to perform as well as pressure not to violate.

Researchers have found that the more your son sees explicitly aggressive sexual behavior, the more his patterns of stimulation will be geared to such imagery. He will internalize these images as patterns. He will eventually be inclined to act upon them.

Those who perpetuate images of aggressive male sexuality do not get held accountable, but if your son gets caught in these acts, he could go to jail.

So what is the best way to raise a boy who has old-fashioned values?

It requires dialogue and discipline.

First, validate sexuality’s confusing nature.

“Where do you draw the line?” asked 15-year-old Tom. “I’ve been broken up with for not kissing a girl. But if I kiss her too soon, what if she feels taken advantage of or hurt?”

The blurry line between when to act on sexual feelings and when not to can make it hard for a boy to know what to do, especially when alcohol is added to the mix.

Anxiety, however, slows people down.

Learning to manage anxiety helps a boy develop confidence in himself. He learns how to listen to what he feels. That enables him to hear others. He then develops good judgment about how to manage the delicate balance between sexual impulse and sexual actions.

Second, remain firmly opposed to underage drinking. Do not allow him to attend unsupervised parties. Share articles about how alcohol affects the growing brain and discuss its disinhibiting effects.

Alcohol and drugs obliterate the anxiety that can become the building block of character. They make it impossible to discover the unwritten rules between two people who feel attracted to one another. They make it impossible to define the small personal steps toward genuine intimacy.

Sixteen-year-old Evan said, “When kids get together and drink, everybody expects some kind of sexual behavior. “

Kids jump from novices to lotharios without first learning how to be in a relationship. Sexual interactions become a faceless dance.

Third, advise your son not to have virtual or real sexual contact with someone he doesn’t know well.

Encourage your son to avoid sending any pictures of his body using social media. No sexting. No oral sex parties. They should not have sexual contact with someone with whom they have not shared a meal.

Instead, talk to your son about the fun and excitement of getting to know someone. Share happy and embarrassing stories from your dating life.

Gay and straight young men will and should have sexual relationships. Physical intimacy can provoke unexpected and complicated feelings. Sexuality between consenting adults can be powerfully expressive, but a person has to be mature enough to handle the intensity.

Intimacy takes time to happen, and everyone makes mistakes. Sometimes they also figure it out. This happens far more often than the sexual aggression that makes the news.

Ron, now a college student, said he learned romance from novels. Small for his age, he fell out of the crowd of boys who started drinking and making comments about girls and their bodies.

By the time he became a senior in high school he had grown bigger and looked more manlike.

In the fall he found himself attracted to an 11th-grade girl. He talked with her. He got to know her. They talked some more.

And by December they were still talking.

He remembered, “Our school was about to break for Christmas. We stood at the corner talking about going away with our families. I took her hand for just one minute and I kissed her right on the mouth. And then, it started to snow, wild flurries everywhere. Not really. But that’s how it felt.”

Ron and his girlfriend dated all year. They remain very close.

With love and support, some kids still find the mistletoe.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Susan Bodnar.

Susan Bodnar is a clinical psychologist who teaches at Columbia University’s Teachers College and at the Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, two children and all of their pets.