The Hired Guard
June 3, 2010
JAMES P. writes:
There is a New York Times story today about workplace protection for nannies. You will note, in the article, the assumption that the bill is a good thing because it will extend workplace protection to illegal immigrants. It is pretty much a given that the nanny will be foreign and probably in the country illegally.
This picture says it all — a black nanny with two white children in her care. Whatever happened to white women raising their own children?
Laura writes:
As I said in earlier posts about nannies, the black nanny of the past was more like a family member who in the best cases possessed maternal protectiveness and love for her white charges. I’m sure there still are some like this, but the low-paid, low-skilled hired worker of today is more like a prison guard than a nanny. Some of the wealthiest women in the Western world turn their offspring over every day to women who are clearly bored stiff , who come from an alien culture, who may speak a different language and who possess no real attachment or loyalty, but possibly possess hostility, toward the culture of the children they guard. The underlying assumption is that none of this matters to children, that they are similar to luggage that can as easily be transported and guarded by someone who does not share their culture as someone who does.
To me, there is no more striking evidence of the decline in the stature of motherhood among white women, as well as in awareness of the role of culture in the developing psyche, than the dozens of black and Hispanic women walking everday through the monied avenues along Central Park with white children in strollers.
— Comments —
Lisa writes:
It is very interesting that non-white nannies are being given care of white children while at the same time nearly half of all adoptions by whites in the US are of non-white children. Ponder the effects – culturally, economically, religiously, and in every aspect possible – of these seemingly harmless choices.
Randy B. writes:
The white children will have exposure to vocabulary and musical opportunities they would otherwise be sheltered from. White people are well known for oppressing their children, and this type of cultural desegregation will provide the same benefits that society has enjoyed from our experiences with the public school systems. Based on my limited experience, just overhearing cell phone conversations will be enlightenment they would miss out on, if God forbid their parents assumed the burden of rearing their own children.
