My wife and I are both white, as are our two children. We live in the suburbs of a major U.S. city. Both of our kids play competitive soccer. Recently, we made the decision to move them from our local club to a club that is a little farther out and therefore a bit more rural. We felt the clubs in the suburbs were a little too competitive, full of money and privilege. We did not like our kids being part of this world. By moving them to a different club, we hoped the experience would become more about soccer, social relationships, and being active—all the things we wanted them to get out of this.
This exurban area is more racially diverse than our suburb, and so the club is also more diverse, which we were very excited about. However, this diversity has created a host of problems that we do not know how to handle. My wife and I are millennials and have a very ally-centric approach to how we interact with marginalized people. This has proved problematic when trying to deal with young Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids.
I’m a longtime youth soccer coach, so I volunteered to help and was asked to be an assistant coach on my older son’s U15 team. The first thing I noticed is that almost all the kids are multiracial. The second thing I noticed is that they do not respect cultural boundaries. Nowhere is this more evident than in the freewheeling use of the N-word. Other than my kid, they all say it.
I feel like, as an adult, I should put a stop to this, but as a white person I also do not feel comfortable policing the usage of that word. That said, when a kid I thought was white said it, I lost it and told him that it was totally unacceptable. I came to find out that despite his looking white, his father is Black. His father was understandably upset, and I apologized; however, this only made the kids start saying the word more. This also included one of the Black kids on the team declaring that everyone on the team, including the two white kids, was allowed to use the word. My son knows better, but now there’s a white kid on the team who uses the word all the time. (Confirmed: Both his parents are white.)
This is further complicated by the fact that the head coach is Latino and he doesn’t care. I talked to him about it, but he basically said that all the kids say it and I should get over it.
How can I, as a white man, override the kids who are persons of color on things like N-word usage? If a Black person, even a 15-year-old, tells people they can say the word, I don’t think I as a white person can challenge that. Right?
And that brings me to my existential crisis. Am I just old now? Is my way of looking at the world now wrong? I remember when my boomer parents would say things, and still do, where I would roll my eyes at how unenlightened they were. Has that just become me now? I feel like we as millennials did so much to move us forward on progressive racial, cultural, and LGBTQ+ issues. Is that time over and it’s time to let the younger generations take the next steps? And if so, where do I, as a 40-year-old cishet white man, fit?