On the front page of today’s issue of the New York Times (bottom of front page, www.nytimes.com), there is an article about the problems and challenges many African-American parents have in finding suitable and comparable child care, in particular, nannies, despite income level or moving “up the economic ladder.”
According to the article: “interviews with dozens of nannies and agencies that employ them in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Houston turned up many nannies—often of African-American or Caribbean descent themselves—who avoid working for families of those backgrounds. Their reasons included accusations of low pay and extra work, fears that employers would look down on them, and suspicion that any neighborhood inhabited by blacks had to be unsafe.”
One of the interesting things about the article is how deep-seeded and insidious the problem seems to be—with biases and racial stereotyping on all sides of the issue—agencies, nannies, and parents. One agency owner in the article is quoted as saying, “Very rarely will an African-American woman work for an African-American boss.”
I find myself mulling over the layers of this issue—race, class, economics. And, I know how intense and emotional issues surrounding the raising of our own children can be. We sit our children in front of PBS and show them a world that is diverse and vibrantly brilliant with open-mindedness and possibilities—but when it comes to maneuvering through the realities of an actual every-day world, things are still complicated and full of biases, inequities and stereotypes.
In the article, parents weigh whether they want their children taken care of by a nanny who understands the experience of growing up as a minority in a racist society with also wanting to have a nanny who can prepare and coach their children for life in upper-middle-class America. Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, nannies and agencies are weighing their own concerns and biases. Sounds like a very complicated problem indeed.