Scholarly Resource: Is There Ever a Right Time to Talk to Your Children About Fascism
- Busy Bees
- Apr 7, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 8, 2020
Scholarly Resource- Nasty Women: Is there ever a right time to talk your children about fascim by Kera Bolonik
Edited by Samhita Mukhopadhyay and Kate Harding
Oct 6, 2017
Summary: Kera Bolonik in “Is There Ever a Right Time to Talk to Your Children About Fascism?” recounts being reminded of the Holocaust constantly as a child by her mother who would constantly tell Bolonik and her younger sister about all the countries that persecuted the jews during the holocaust. She explains how her mother didn’t live during the holocaust but was a survivor of someone who survived the holocaust, Which is her polish grandmother. And from this she learned that hatred never goes away. “But this summer, I watched in horror the Trump rallies—the first warning. And no sooner was this American Führer elected then we saw a spike in hate crimes”.Now in the present Bolonik and her wife Meredith struggle to educate or inform their five-year-old black son of Trump's America, Bolonik is speaking for many of us when she reflects on the current political climate: “I’m not shocked that we’ve arrived at this place. For so many communities this has always been America—if you’re black, or Muslim, or Latinx or a woman or LGBTQ.” Yet she concludes that “confronting these bitter truths doesn’t need to wholly define us—because it’s too easy to succumb to despair.” Accordingly Bolonik and Meredith undertake a course of resistance by raising their son in the company of “passionate activists” who regularly attend political actions with him.
Response: This essay was very informative on how the narrator developed her opinions but there are a few things that she mentions that bring bias to the essay.
“But this summer, I watched in horror the Trump rallies—the first warning. And no sooner was this American Führer elected than we saw a spike in hate crimes. From the moment he was inaugurated this nightmare has quickly become realized with a barrage of vicious executive orders and treasonous, sinister, deliberately incompetent appointments”. I don’t think Trump being elected really has a correlation to an increase in hate crime. There is no evidence that could support this sentence, I believe this part could have been left out.
“Theo doesn’t fully grasp what makes Trump despicable, nor does he know what led him to the Oval Office—the racism and racial resentment of a huge faction of white Americans who felt so threatened by a black man in power for eight years” If Theo already knows who trump is and calls him a bad man but doesn't understand why he’s a bad man is it smart to educate him on what makes trump bad. I don’t think parents should educate their children on why people are bad I think it’s best to let children discover the reasons for themselves only because when parents tell stories they tend to overdo it and typically can implement strict ideas on impressionable children.
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