Children + Raising Up &nbspfor Racial Justice with Tia Mathisen

Tia: I am Tia Reese Matheson. I am originally from Birmingham, Alabama. I am a mother to three children. They are 10, 6 and 3. And I am co-founder with other beautiful women of a children’s organization, social movement called the Phillies Children’s Movement. I am the managing director of the Philadelphia Citizen, which technically is a media outlet that solutions focused journalism. But I also like to call it a movement. My husband is a white person, which as a black female, I think counts as a moment in my journey.

Tia: Oh, my attorney just won.

Kelly: Just one?

Aurora: Beautiful. So Tia tell us to 2013, you established March, a march. Philadelphia’s Children’s March and Movement. Tell us, what was the inspiration? What was the impetus? And what and what did you hope would happen?

Tia: Okay. Yeah. So 2013 was a heavy year. This was on the heels of the Trayvon Martin murder. And the community that I live in is very diverse. It has often been described as one of the most successfully, intentionally integrated neighborhoods in America. As a community member, I will. I really do believe that the majority of the people that are there want to feel the things that happen in society. They want to feel the feelings that others are feeling and that they believe very much in the common good and shared community. But they – and when when I say they I mean white people in this community – there’s just a level of surface of how far they’re willing to go in that common good and in that search for community. And so when on the heels of the Trayvon Martin murder, you know, just the atmosphere was so heavy in our society, especially in our community. And I think that it was for some reason the first time in a long time that America got to really see that this young man and that the law was actually against what is right and what is just. We as a community felt like there is something we must do. And I just remember a group of moms at the time. It might have been three or four of us. And we kind of got together and I opened up my home and I said, yeah, like, we can come, you can you can use my house to make fliers and posters. And so all sorts of things like let’s have a march. We were adamant that we didn’t want to have a die in you know, we wanted this to be child friendly because the reality for us is that the movement is about the youth who lead. Right. So if you don’t teach them to lead when they’re young, they won’t know to do this when they’re older. And if you teach them that it’s something that is scary, they’re never going to want to do it. So people, strangers, people I’d never met that just lived in my community, that wanted to come by and make fliers for this march that we were going to have came over. We were on our hands and knees on the floor making these posters. And I just will never forget it was freezing outside. And these little kids were, you know, between the ages of maybe four and maybe 10, 11 and their parents.

And, you know, white people, black people and mostly white people came out. That was our first march. After that happened, so many of the parents from that participated in that march – they wanted more. And we were like, shocked. We’re like thinking to ourselves, oh, no, we we weren’t meaning this to be something that was ongoing. This was just we wanted to respond really to what we were feeling in our homes and in our world. And so one thing led to another, and the moms that are the original founders of it, we kind of pulled together and started thinking how to, you know, formalize this into something that that could be be helpful, a resource to mothers so fathers, to community members, to schools who want to actually do this work and to do it beyond a surface level. And so that’s that’s how we got started. Originally it looked like having meetings in neighbors homes and having really candid conversations about race and racism and really deep conversations. And then A went into us having a group we formed a group called Mix and Match, which was specifically for children to have playdates together of different races. And while the kids played, which was them during their work on racism, and the adults would sit and chat and do their work on racism.

At the beginning, our goal was to see, you know, how far could we take? Well, meaning liberal progressives – how far can we take them on this journey before they stopped us, before they were willing to be done? How far could we take them within themselves and allow them to help us change a generation? So that was originally the goal for us, working with the the white families in the neighborhood and then us working with black families was, you know, how how much can we empower? How much can we validate? How much can we uplift? And, you know, give them the tools to say when they’re willing to speak about race and when they’re not willing when they’re willing to open up.

Aurora: So so you so you phrase some beautiful points that we want to sort of tease out an impact. So I think there’s something that’s very critical for our audience to to sort of take in and observe, which is 2012, Trayvon was murdered. The emotional impact of that that you felt in your community among both white people as well as people of color created this need to, as you said, respond. It’s amazing to me because I asked so many white friends and colleagues that those moments are so seared for us in our hearts. And when I say us Black people and most white people can’t even recall when it happened or where they were. And so, we’re back here again.

Tia: Mm hmm.

Aurora: And you’ve been here. Your community has been here. Your movement has been here. So how are you responding at this moment? And what has been the evolution of this movement that really is trying to sustain those that are Black and basically push and break a paradigm for the next generation of white children with the white adults that have been participating with you?

Tia: So what I like to say is that it’s been a journey. So what we realized is that over the time of doing this work over the years is that we didn’t want to actually always be responding. And so it became more about educating instead of always responding in reaction to trauma. And the reason that I believe we had to finally come to that conclusion is because there’s actually so much trauma that happens within the black community that we would always be responding. And it just isn’t possible. It isn’t impossible emotionally, mentally. It’s not possible for, you know, a group of moms who have small children. So we shifted gears a bit. And so we really started focusing on how do we educate and focus on educating so that we’re doing the work in the midst of the trauma and that when we see fit, when it’s like a community outcry, then we will respond with an action of all of them, of a march. So that’s why our name initially change changed from being the Philly children’s march to being the Phillu Children’s Movement because it stopped being just about the marches and started being about, you know, the whole thing. All of it. And so I would say now in response to the George Floyd incident and Breona Taylor and, you know, all the others that have happened in this with this man of maybe six months. It has been still about educating. What we’ve done as our response, I should say, in this time has been we created little justice for joy bags and we filled them with all the things that parents could use to talk to their children about race. And they had a lot of our information about our our Black to school campaign, which is our campaign for the school district to hire more Black educators to teach our children. So it had like a globe in there talking to your children about the way the world how the world is different. And it’s a big world and there’s lots of people on it and they live different lives. And there were these little picket signs. And that is to help children create a toy protest. Our toy protest is great. It’s it’s probably one of our best ways to introduce race and racism to children. And then in the process between now and then and now, it has been educating. So we when working with a lot of schools. Going in and meeting with parents and teachers and faculty or just to talk about where they are with race in their school – where the school thinks it is, and then the reality of where students and parents and even other faculty of color believe that they are. And so and how to merge the gap and lift them to lift them out of racism.

Kelly: To your point, there was one study we read that was like 70 percent of white mothers use a colorblind approach to talking about race with kids. And another study in this sage publication said 50 percent of white mothers have adopted a colorblind approach in addressing race in their homes. And the kids couldn’t be remember when that time was right. You know, that that was arbitrary. But to your question, like, how far can we take well-meaning, liberal, progressive white people?

Tia: You know, I think that it’s a personal journey, you know, and I can’t answer that for anyone. I think that it’s a journey that I every soul has to take on its own. I can honestly say in my own humanness, there was a point where I was only willing to empathize with another person to a certain degree because I was only looking at this is right and this is wrong. Until you’re able to break those down and realize that they are so much and are sectionalism between all of those things and that nothing is either or – you can only empathize so much. And so I think that to answer that question, it would really be how much are white people willing to challenge their boxes and look in to all of the intersectional vessels, veins that that carry and merge each human that they’re judging into creating the circumstance that they’re in? You know, so if you’re willing to to to challenge the box that says a mother with six kids that’s on welfare is just a victim and has a victim mentality, and because that’s wrong in your mind and you can’t look past that, then you really can’t empathize with her, but if you go back and look at that box and say, but what if it was a woman who didn’t have six kids and she was molested her entire life, would you have empathy for that person? OK. And then what if those six kids happened because she was t hat’s the only life that she knew. And she ended up being raped or molested and even into adulthood. And so that’s all she knew. And she’s looking for love. Oh, my God, that’s awful. And then what if she was verbally and mentally abused to the point where she was told she could do nothing? She wasn’t smart. She couldn’t finish school. And so she dropped out of school. Well, now you’ve got this truly mentally abused person who has six kids, who doesn’t have a lick of self-esteem. And really, the only way that she can feed the kids that she has is through government support, which we all pay into because they all help to feed us and they helped to pave the roads that we drive on. And you’re OK with that. It’s like, how much are you willing and how much are you willing to challenge the system that makes it OK for this person to stay in this abusive lifestyle that you now are not OK with paying with. But you weren’t OK with stopping it from starting in the first place because women were OK with being objectified her whole life and you were OK with her not going to a school that was properly funded so that she would not have a teacher that would discourage her the way that she has. And you were OK and you were OK and you were OK. And now you want to judge. So I just think that you know that until white people are willing to break down the boxes and really challenge all the things that have helped create the box that they judge, they cannot have empathy. And so that’s that’s what I mean when I say that.

Aurora: Wow. Thank you for breaking it down, sister.

Kelly: I felt that deeply felt that.

Tia: Thank you.

Aurora: And so in this space, Tia, where white people are being invited, and I would say all of us are constantly being invited to break down the boxes that keep us confined, that keep our hearts and our minds confined. I would say small, but let’s just stay with a word confined. What has the community together discovered in these mix and match conversations? What have you discovered are those areas where white people want and need support and education? Because we’re looking at the numbers and you know, I know from just my group of friends and networks and the the questions that come in to us from from the opt in white women, white parents want help because there’s something in them that saying, I don’t want the next generation. I don’t want to do my part to support the evolution of the thinking and the breaking out of the box and the staying in the binary right and wrong model. That doesn’t leave room for empathy. I don’t want that racial racialized pathology.

Tia: Right. Yeah, I you know, I think that – as with everything that I say there is no one one size fits all answer, you know, and I wish that there were. I think that we would have been done with this racism thing by now if there were a one size fits all, you know, kind of answer. But I would say generally in our all of our gathering type meetings, what I notice is that often white people and especially white men feel as if we are somehow by educating them, by bringing up the fact that their lives have been altered for their entire lives by their their the color of their skin, that somehow we are telling them that they are wrong and that they are bad. And so I think that it is such an identity shift in the brain to accept that for a person to accept that every thing they are and everything they’ve become is not solely based on their own doing. There’s a lot of pride that comes with the idea that I own this home because I’ve worked so hard. You know, I have this lovely wife because I’m so charming or, you know, whatever it is that you’ve obtained. And that’s why it is individual, because it really is based on where a person is within their own emotional maturity, with their own acceptance of self. You know, because if you are a person that’s at the beginning of that journey, then you are not going to hear some Black person tell you that maybe the reason you got that job is because you’re white and not because you were actually better than the other candidates in the pool. You’re not going to hear that, especially if you are a white person who comes from meager beginnings, who comes from a working class family, who, you know, what it means to struggle. You’re going to say, I don’t have privilege. What are you talking about? You’re going to you are going to reject everything that I am saying. And not that your truth isn’t true. Right. Because your truth is true to both of our truths are true. But what but in saying that for me, though, the hardest part of the work is validating that white people are not inherently evil because they are white and getting them to know that they still need to do this work even if they have struggled themselves and that it is not based on how much struggle you’ve had in your own life. It is truly based on the need for us as humans to decide to be human together. And in order for us to do that, we’ve got to accept that we’ve done some shitty stuff to other people. Some people are like, I’m happy in this little bubble and there’s nothing I can do about that. But I believe wholeheartedly that there are more people who are willing to take an extra step, even if it’s just one extra step at a time to. To dig a little deeper and not to demean themselves in the process, but instead to use their power to uplift others.

Kelly: I’m so curious because I feel like we talk a lot to our white friends and I have a lot of white friends that say to me, you know, what do we what do we do with our kids – Like, how do we teach our kids anti-racism? And, you know, this next generation just can’t. You know, I have hope for them. And I kind of like personally, I pull back and I’m like, if. To me, if you are not constantly working on this individually, yourself or with your husband or spouse or partner. And they don’t see you working through how difficult the levels are of this then. I don’t. You’re just trying to put a Band-Aid on something that’s a I don’t know, a pool of blood like it just. That sounds like to me, it’s just a quick fix sort of hack mentality. What how do you see that, Tia with with parents who want to, quote, teach their kids anti-racism?

Tia: So, you know, I always unfortunately, I take that with a grain of salt, because as I mentioned with the community that I live in, though, it’s wonderful and, you know, very progressive and can be quite liberal. Oftentimes it feels like they are people who believe in these ideologies. They share the same ideology, but they are just checking boxes, you know, so they click a certain like on a Facebook post. And that makes them for the cause. Or they, you know, buy a pink hat and now they’re, you know, feminist. So I. So it’s not so much about the outward external thing that you do to check your liberal progressive box. It is about the internal changing of the mind and the spirit that makes you do the work. To your point, Kelly. You know, you can’t teach your children anti-racism if you yourself haven’t done the work to be anti-racist. You know, I actually love the the children’s protest, the toy protest idea, because it actually forces parents to reckon with the work themselves. So you set your kid up and you’re like, OK, we’re gonna have a toy protest today. A toy what? What’s that, mommy? You know? So then that parent has to explain what a protest is and why we’re having it. So that’s the parent actually doing the work with that without even realizing it, you know? And they’ve got to think about how can they say these words in a way that’s going to A) let their child understand what they’re saying and B) not scare them and C) let it be something that they believe. You know, and so to be the person that’s just going to sit in a group of friends and, you know, have, you know, seltzer water and talk about how you don’t want the world to be racist. But you send your kid to a segregated school. You know that that doesn’t help the cause. So, B, be the solution. You know, do the work. Answer the hard questions. You know, do it now. My three year old will walk around if I say Mason say, black lives. He’s going to say, matter. It’s going to come out in single, instinctively out of his mouth. All right. And he’s three. So, I actually don’t have time for it, Kelly, to be completely honest. I have no patience for white women who want to just talk about how they want to create, you know, an all equal anti-racist world. But they are completely unwilling to make their lives uncomfortable in order to do what it takes to create such a space for other people.

Kelly: And to touch right where you are there when you said we don’t want to scare them. And so my kids now are 14, 12 and turning 10. And I’m at that point where I kind of see where we as white parents don’t want to scare our kids. Well, guess what? Our history is super scary. Like we had a super duper scary history and that there has to be almost levels of of of scaring, you know, or potentially scaring in going there because it is it was and is so violent. It was it is so, so based on oppression. And I don’t want them to grow up the way I grew up thinking that life, liberty and pursuit of happiness -.

Aurora: And everybody had it -.

Tia: And everyone it was and it was free to everybody. So if you didn’t get yours, you must’ve done something wrong.

Tia: Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Kelly: Exactly. So, for instance, my 12 year old we’re reading stamped from the beginning. The Y.A. version. And he’s very like, Mommy, I don’t – it’s like, scary. I’m like, yeah, buddy, I know. But, like, there’s something. There’s so many really important things for you to understand and get through the scared part to come out the other. Like, this is just a book. It’s a book, you know. Yes, it is our history. And yes, we need to know it. But there is part of this. As a parent, you don’t want to cause undue damage, etc.. But, you know, I guess I’m just looking to to ask your advice of like, how do we ratchet the scare? You know, I went latch it down. Your father in ourselves. Yeah. You know, I think that.

Tia: To be completely honest, I am not a parent that is unafraid to scare my children.

Kelly: Yeah, I agree.

Tia: To be completely honest. And so I think that things are age appropriate. And I think that there’s an age appropriate level of fear to. And here’s the thing that I have to remember myself, but I often I often say this to my friends when we’re talking about rearing our children. We’re not raising them to stay kids. We’re raising them to be adults. You know.

Aurora: Amen.

Kelly: Yes.

Tia: You know. So continuing to keep things in this Disney like space does not help them at all with anything. So when thinking about the fear, it’s like, what is it that caused these awful things to happen? Right? It’s not skin color. It’s power. Like, listen, son. Listen, daughter. I want you to understand just how bad power can be. This is the kind of thing that the need for power and money and greed will turn you into. It will make a person who has nothing. Not a pot to piss in, believe that they are better than someone else simply because of the color of their skin. That’s what power will do. It’s not so much of framing it and the like. Look at what the actions of our people did to these other people. It’s this is what the need for. This is what the need of power does. And the need for that can harm you mentally. It will completely warp your brain so that you think it’s okay to harm another human being because they look differently than you. Because it’s really not the fact that you want to harm them, because they look different from you. It’s the person who has more money and more power than you. That’s making you think that. So that you, too, can help harm these people. So that they can get more money and more power. And they’re just using you as the tool to make that happen. So, you know, so that is for me, it’s not so much about scaring them. It’s it’s showing them the truth. Right. Of what? Of what the forces at play make happen. So much so because this is not something that you are born into. You’re not born into racism. You are born into the structures that racism has created. And that’s the thing that we have to dismantle and look at all the time, wherever we are. But so the fear of that is like you don’t you don’t have to be afraid of this because you don’t have to be this person. This is a choice. You know, like I’m going to tell you what happened, because you need to know that you two are capable of doing this if you think this way. But you don’t have to be this way. You have the power to change this. And this is how we’re going to do it. So that is kind of like the conversation that I have with my older daughter, who’s 10. And when we talk about racism, we talk about it in terms of being an upstander and and what that means. And and you know, how you and how I empower her to to take things that are not just and really letting her know that she actually has power to make a wrong. Right. And that might mean saying something right away. That might mean going and find some help. It might mean, you know, writing it in a poem. It could mean a lot of things. But, you know, teaching kids that they have power versus being afraid to teach them about bad stuff is what parents should be doing.

Aurora: There’s something about community that you just also set. Right. There’s a couple of questions that I have in my mind. One is, how have you experienced and seen that community with the community and movement that you’ve created? But I also think in the powerful story in the break them that you just gave us, there’s also this underpinning of community, of being of being seeing yourself as a contributing member to this group called this community called humans.

Tia: Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

Aurora: And so I don’t know that there’s this, so I’d love if there’s any way that you could bridge that t.A with – you know, we’re teaching each other to care, to have empathy, to have empathy for those that sit outside of our on claims that sit outside of the model or box that I may sit in, right, because you started this with with this notion of empathy for someone else. And we believe that that’s such an underpinning of truly being a member of a community. And I’m just gonna keep it real. Like, I don’t think white people I think white people struggle to understand what community means and to be a member of community. I feel very lucky that my cultural background – I don’t know anything other than community. It’s a huge part of my value set. But I do not believe that white people are reered to think of community because we have such a notion of rugged, rugged individualism and it’s all about what I do and I get. And I can provide for me and maybe those few that I choose to have in my circle.

Tia: Right. Yeah So I completely agree with that statement. And I do think that it is cultural. You know, when I think about community, the community that we’ve created with with PCM is, you know, it is one that is spearheaded by, you know, one white woman and five black women and she’s an anomaly. And I think that she would say that it’s a choice that she has chosen to walk this this road. I don’t think that it is necessarily how she was raised. So whereas for Black people, it’s not a choice. It is. It’s what we know. You know, when I grew up, you know, my mom’s the youngest of nine. And, you know, Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s house, there was food everywhere. And we went right after church and the church was right next literally right next door to the house. And the idea that you wouldn’t have someone to watch your kid. So you had to hire someone else to do it was not a thing. You know, my mom is a school teacher. She’s retired now. But she also kept her job from when she was 14, where she would clean this white woman’s house every Saturday. So even when she became became a master’s degree teacher, still on Saturdays with a child, she still went to clean Miss Bell’s house. And she didn’t have to hire a sitter for me. Like, I went to my grandparents house and that’s where I was going to be. And I walked down the street to my auntie’s house and she always gave me a Coca-Cola and a banana or a dollar. You know, like that was that was my childhood. It was like everybody. It was the first cousin. It was the second cousin. And it was the cousin who was not even really your cousin. But they always around your family, you know, it was the A.. Who was not even your auntie. But you call her auntie because she’s older than you and she’s been your mom’s friend for forever. So community is something that is it’s not a choice for Black people. It is how we exist. It is how things get done. It’s mind boggling to try to assimilate into a community that doesn’t understand community, you know. And so for us at PCM, the community that we have as the core group of us moms, we decided a long time ago that we would continue this work, even if it’s just our little small group, like even if it’s just us moms creating just our kids to be amazing people, what we think are amazing people, then that’s what we’ll do. That’s the community that we will have. So community opens its arms without the need of validation and without the oppression of judgment and just does where as the way that capitalism which is basically what has raised white people is that in order for me to help you, I need to know I need to have some type of power over you. Whether that power be judgment about the circumstance you found yourself in or whether that be what am I going to get by it by helping you. And so there is always there are always strings attached to to that sort of help, whereas community just feels like home. It’s just a very different way of looking at society and looking at the world. And it doesn’t mean being a doormat. It doesn’t mean, you know, not holding people accountable. It doesn’t mean just letting people have money and they have to do nothing for it, which is what all the naysayers say. It means actually holding people accountable through love. Right. It means saying, I want you to get up off that couch and go get a job because you are better than this, not because society or somebody is gonna judge you or some. It’s because you as a human being, deserve more than what you’re even giving yourself. And the only way for you to get that is for you to do it yourself. I’m going to help you out. I will let you use my Wi-Fi. You can use my computer. I’ll drive you to the interview, outstay and pick and drive you home. But you are going to have to walk through those doors – And so that is what it means. It means it means changing other people and moving them through life, through love. And, you know, and love is an action word. It’s not a feeling. It’s it’s action, you know. So. So as as Martin Luther King would say, radical love. This radical thing. Right.

Aurora: Drop the mic. I’m in a pool of tears because you just broke that down Tina in such a clear and succinct and powerful way. And I hope I hope that our white listeners specifically can hear that and feel that and see. We are coming at what we define as community. We are in your body, in what we define as community from such different perspectives.

Kelly: What would you’re opt-in be for our listeners today?

Tia: Well, it was gonna be one thing, but after Aurora took me on that journey, I think I’ve changed my opt-in. So I would say to the listeners today, especially the white ones, to be open to challenging your idea of community and don’t do it naively. Don’t be gullible. Talk with people who do this because it’s who they are. Talk to black people who know what it’s like to actually live community and and be open to expanding your community beyond your children and your parents. And see that that is truly the gift that keeps on giving. It’s really true.

Tia: For this Philly children’s movement, I think that we’re going to continue our path of education and educating, pushing more into schools. So you can find out more information on our website or through our Facebook page. And we’re just going to continue doing the work.

Kelly: We look forward to doing that with you.

Aurora: We do. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Tia: Thank you for having me. This was great.

Kelly: Thanks to you. 

Kelly: Tia Mathisen is so clear. Seriously… ways that she draws the connections between community to child rearing to capitalism — it just makes so much sense.

Aurora: I 100% agree. And it just goes to show you — we can’t silo these questions. When we talk about our kids, about our families, we’re also talking about ourselves.

Aurora: And thank you all for listening. We want to know the questions you’re asking and the conversation you’re having on your frontlines. Let us know. Find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @the opt in.

Kelly: Music for this episode is by Jordan McCree. And the Opt-In is produced by Rachel Ishikawa.

Kelly: See you next week.

Aurora: Bye