Mayo Clinic Employee Experiences: On the rewards and challenges of raising children of color

By In the Loop • December 3, 2020

Mayo Clinic is a unique place: the culture, the values, the people. "Mayo Clinic Employee Experiences" explores the experiences of Mayo Clinic staff as they navigate life personally and professionally. Sharing these experiences increases understanding of others and ultimately contributes to finding connections, belonging and inclusion at work.

In this episode of "Mayo Clinic Employee Experiences," you'll hear from Yerronda Lewis, an administrative assistant supervisor, and Alisha Barton, a medical assistant, as they reflect on their experiences raising children of color. Lewis shares her perspective of being an African American mom raising four African American children while Barton shares her perspective of being a white mom raising children who are mixed race.

LEWIS: Everyone wants to be heard, and when you feel heard, then you feel valued.

NARRATOR: In this episode, you’ll hear Yerronda, an administrative assistant supervisor, and Alisha, a medical assistant, share their perspectives on raising children of color.

BARTON: My husband and I have been together for 25 years. We have a daughter who just turned 24, a son who is 18 and just started his first year at Arizona State University during this pandemic, and then we have our bonus baby, a three-year-old.

LEWIS: I am recently divorced after 10 years. I have four children: two sons and two daughters. They range from 18 to 30 years old. The youngest, my daughter, started online classes at Arizona State University, too.

BARTON: I am Caucasian. My husband is Black, which makes my children mixed. But as we know, the world sees them as Black. That was hard for me to come to terms with, and my husband and I have had a lot of those discussions. When they were younger, I didn't really understand it, but as they get older, I certainly see that is the way it is. My children refer to themselves as being African American, being Black, rather than saying that they're mixed or Caucasian. I can say having a mixed daughter, I don't have the same fears that I have that I do for my sons.

Having an 18-year-old son who is six-foot-tall, big, strong, bearded, who is no longer a cute little boy to the world — he is a big Black man. He is looked at as that. We just had a discussion. One of his recent assignments was to write about how things were different when he was a child and how he perceives them now. His paper was written about the police. He said that when he was a child in an elementary school, the police were fun to him. He was able to get in their cars, and they were seen differently. But as an adult, his interactions have changed. With new world events such as George Floyd and many other people, he looks at police and situations differently.

LEWIS: I'm African American. I have four African American children. My sons are both adults. They’ve both had interactions with law enforcement. I raised them to be respectful to everybody, not just law enforcement — that there was no difference in the way that you treat people, and you should expect that in return. However, it's not always necessarily so. My son Sean, who’s in the Army, interacts often with law enforcement. He defuses bombs for a living in the Army. He says, when interacting with them, it could be good, it could be bad. He enters his interactions with them the same. How he’s received just depends on the person that they're interacting with because some people are afraid quite naturally of a bigger, more dominant-looking male.

Another thing that my son likes to reiterate is that you have to hold your own and stay calm in the situation so that you can have an interaction with them. I can't say that they're not worried that something may go wrong. You never know what someone else is thinking. You have to always be thinking, "I need to do and make the right moves so that I don't make this person nervous or make them scared." For me, that's always scary. I pray every day.

BARTON: So do I.

LEWIS:  For all of them — not just for my sons, but for my daughters, too, with everything going on right now. You have people on the streets that have their signs, they're protesting for and against. They don't know where your child or your person stands. I stay diligent in keeping her informed and letting her know "Be aware of your surroundings. Be concerned about what someone else is thinking" because everybody walking around with these phones in front of their faces is not thinking about their surroundings necessarily.

BARTON: Absolutely. Did you have to have the law enforcement talk with your children about how they would react should they ever be pulled over, encountered by law enforcement?

LEWIS: That's a really good question. I did not have that conversation with my children, to be honest with you. It came from male family members because, as a woman and mother, telling my sons is a little bit different than them having a conversation with a man who has experienced it already. What I did do is just offer support and reminded them when they walk out of the door every time, "Remember who you are. Remember who you're representing."

BARTON: That's very good. I didn't have the talk either. I am not African American. I don't know the experiences. I may witness them, but I do not experience them. So it was my husband who had the discussions with my children.

LEWIS: It's a tough talk. But we do what we have to do to make sure that they feel secure and know that they are loved and valued in a society that sometimes does not make them feel that way.

BARTON: These things have always happened. It's just that, now, they're more televised. More people hear about it. It didn't increase or change the manner in which we spoke about it at all because we've always had to address these issues.

LEWIS: People were coming to me to check on their Black friend under the assumption that it affected me differently than it affected them. It's sad, but as Alisha said, it didn't affect me differently because this has been going on in our families for so long. I’m not going to say that we are numb to it, because it does still affect us. It took for the death of a man on Facebook Live for people to get it, for people to see what we've been saying for hundreds of years. It's my sincere hope that more people get it, and that they not only get it but put action to it. Us saying it for all these years never changed anything. It can't be us that fixes it. It has to be the majority. Ultimately, I believe most people want the good. We like to see good happen although it's not our reality. But we can change it with action.

LEWIS: Tell me about something that's been rewarding about being a parent of children of color.

BARTON: Experiencing and learning the culture has been probably the most beautiful thing. I have made sure that my kids have been around their African American part of the family. I make sure that my daughter is around her grandmother and her aunties on that side so that she can experience things more than just me and my culture. I want them to experience both sides. I think sometimes people do keep that hidden. Mixed children sometimes have it a little tougher in some senses. There have been times where my daughter felt like she didn't fit in on either side. With my son, I can't say that that's the case. He's never felt that way. He's always fit in where he is, but my daughter did have some issues where she didn't fit in either side no matter where she went.

LEWIS: For me, some of the most rewarding things have been that they have excelled despite our circumstances. They make me so proud because they're good human beings. Not just a Black man or a Black woman, but good and decent human beings. Watching them interact with people of diverse cultures and then coming back to share with me their excitement teaches me. For me, that's been the most rewarding.

BARTON: My recommendations would be to listen to your children. Observe things, be open-minded, understand that there's more than one just one point of view. Be open and understanding, learn, educate yourself, and also teach your children. Teach your children to be nice to everybody. Whatever color your children are, whatever their ethnicity is, raise them to be nice to each other.

LEWIS: My first thing is always is to honor God. Because then they will learn to be nice. They also will know how to forgive. And the last thing is to tell the truth. You tell the truth so that they know what they're going into versus feeling like society or anything is going to be easy. This life is not easy. It's a journey that we take day by day by the grace of God.

BARTON: My hope is that we don't have to continue having these conversations. My hope is that it's resolved — that people love each other. That there are no biases based on skin color, education, poverty level and social-economic status. That these conversations just don't have to be had because there's just the love of people for being the human race.

LEWIS: When you said that it brought to mind Martin Luther King's quote where he says, "I can't wait for the day for my daughters to go to school and not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." That's something that I look forward to for all humanity. And that their hope for the future is that there is still hope for the future.

NARRATOR: As you reflect on this conversation, consider how these experiences are different or similar to your own.

HELPFUL LINKS