The K-Word
Dear readers,
I don’t normally weigh in on matters of race, because, to borrow from John McWhorter, I can only tolerate so many groups hating me. But the CitiBike Karen incident of last week prompted me to express some verboten thoughts about who has a right to express what emotions or behaviors based on social category—and who doesn’t.
—LD
When I first heard that my child’s elementary school was forming a diversity committee around 2015, I was both excited and relieved. My daughter was different than every other girl in her school in a fundamental way—she exhibited many “boy-typical” qualities and proclivities—and I wanted to educate the community about gender nonconformity.
In order to do that, I basically had to communicate one thing: Boys and girls can look and act all kinds of ways.
What a salve that message turned out to be. Once delivered by the kindergarten teacher, the message assuaged the confusion, the unnerved feeling of those put off by a girl with short hair and sweatpants and mostly male friends. They understood. Rarely did it come up again (except in the bathroom, when kids who didn’t know her thought she was in the wrong one).
The diversity committee, though, was not what I expected it to be.