Julia E Hubbel
1 min readJul 24, 2020

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Your term "basic home training" for me is loaded in several ways. Part of what comes up for me is an article written by another Black writer who provided a questionnaire (this goes back a few months) which challenged the reader to answer either for themselves or their families (or both, preferably) how they teach their kids to have Black, and I would add Black excellence, normalized. From favorite authors and actors, to the kids' friends and teachers, to all of the touchpoints that a child has growing up. Where are the touchpoints that normalize color, normalize excellence, normalize respect and regard for people irrespective of color (culture, etc)? Home training is our baseline for how we enter the world with a fundamental understanding of what's right and what's wrong. If a child is insulated and isolated from Black early on, and infiltrated by hate messaging, the fragility is already in the DNA. The other part is that if I am not taught to expect excellence from myself and others, then I will develop the habit of misplaced superiority. The reality is that AMERICA is fragile, and it's a terrible sickness. So is denial. I think the term is powerful, and for what it's worth, I believe it deserves its own article. Folks are so afraid to challenge what they learned at home, even when their instincts scream at them it was wrong.

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Julia E Hubbel
Julia E Hubbel

Written by Julia E Hubbel

Stay tuned for some crossposting. Right now you can peruse my writing on Substack at https://toooldforthis.substack.com/ More to come soon.

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