Yesterday my 7-year-old son reported to his 9-year-old brother that another child in the neighborhood had called him and several other little boys "an a-hole".

My 9-year-old's response was, "A whole what?"

I'd love to claim that it's because he's never been exposed to such language, but yeah. So not true. Which was very apparent when the 7-year-old broke down exactly what hole he was talking about.

I'd also love to claim that the 7-year-old picked that up in school, but we homeschool.

So it's my fault. All of it. According to my husband, it's always my fault simply because I'm the only white person in my house.  I asked him what happened to my white privilege, but, according to him, I have to check that at the door. I don't get to bring it home. 

Except that, even with all of our messing around, that trail of white privilege still creeps in. It's there every time someone turns on the television or opens a newspaper. Our book shelves are full of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin and Maya Angelou and WEB DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston...but my husband is a teacher and I used to be, and we have the same textbooks used in our local school systems; the bias in them is undeniable.

On November 4, 2008, my daughter and I were at the local Democratic victory party when the news broke that, seconds after securing the state of Virginia, Barack Obama was elected to office by the nation. In the middle of room, surrounded by adults jumping and screaming, my daughter, the same girl who had screamed until she was hoarse at the previous night's rally, stood still, her face covered in tears.

At 13-years-old, she understood the significance of what she had just seen probably more than many of the adults around us.

When she was in second grade, in a public school, she came home complaining that her teacher was seating her next to the same boy everywhere--in the classroom, in the computer lab, in the cafeteria. It turned out that the teacher was having a hard time with the two little black boys in the class and so had decided that the two little black girls would be a good influence. She thought that maybe, if she didn't know how talk to little black boys, the little black girls would. And so she paired them up. All the time. 

When she was in first grade, she got into an argument with classmates about whether or not George Washington had owned slaves. They had just been to Mount Vernon and had seen where the slaves were buried; the tour had led them through the kitchen and talked about the "servants" who lived upstairs. It would have been a perfect "teaching moment", to remind the students what they had seen, no matter how vaguely it had been mentioned during the field trip. But the teacher said nothing.

 In third grade, she told us she was uncomfortable with her part in the end-of-year assembly. During one of the songs, she and other black students were on their knees, working in a "field", while white students stood around them and sang. The teacher didn't realize what she had done or how it would feel to those kids or how it would look to others.

The next year we started homeschooling.

Families of color are one of the fastest growing homeschool demographics. The numbers are still disproportionately smaller than white homeschoolers, but an increasing number of parents are realizing that, while the schools might be legally integrated, the education itself is not.

Yet, I've heard people argue that we owe it to others to stay in school. If the "good" families leave, who's going to be left to fight? and, worse, who's going to be the diversity that all these white children need?

Apparently, my children are meant to be sacrificed for the greater good.

Hell, no.

My first responsibility is to my children.

My husband is still on the inside, working long hours at the schools that need him most and getting paid a fraction of what he would get in another field. A good part of that fraction gets cycled right back into the school, helping students who struggle even with the cost of reduced lunch. He is available to parents and students in the evening and on weekends. He does whatever he can to fight for those who need it.

And those kids usually have parents. And those parents care. They just often work very long hours, sometimes two or three jobs, and sometimes that's still not enough and my husband is there, in the school, to advocate when other teachers make assumptions about what defines a "good" family.

That's his job.

Those white kids who need diversity? Yeah, not our job.

In the 40-plus years since integration, our public schools--the curriculum, the classes, and many of the buildings--are still segregated. If the school system has refused to acknowledge that in more than 4 decades, they damn sure aren't going to acknowledge it, let alone fix it, during the single decade my child is in school. Which means that my child would be a tool used to chip at a broken system at the expense of her education.

A lot of black parents are tired of waiting, of assuming that it will just take time. The time that it's taking is time, and children, lost. That realization in part explains the increase in black homeschoolers. It explains the growing movement towards establishing Afrocentric schools.  Until the system is ready to change, parents have to take care of their own children.

That decision to remove our children from a broken system doesn't remove the need for activism within the system. One act isn't exclusive of the other.

But change is needed and it has to start somewhere.