After Chance The Rapper released his anticipated record The Big Day last summer and shared the story of asking his childhood sweetheart Kirsten Corley for her hand in marriage, he’s pushed Tom Cruise’s couch-jumping antics aside to be crowned the internet’s most prized “wife guy.” Now, Chance takes his big husband energy to new heights as he’s graced the cover of Parents Magazine with an adorable photo of his picture-perfect family.
Along with appearing on the cover, Chance and Kirsten sat down for an interview with the publication about how they raise their children to be socially conscious. During the conversation, Chance addressed the country-wide demonstrations over racial injustice and offered advice on how parents can properly educate their children on issues of inequality:
“I would like to believe that all the stuff we’re going through right now is transformative in the immediate sense that my daughters are going to grow up in a much more safe and just society. I personally think that the way I was taught about a lot of this stuff, in terms of equality itself, it was taught to me in a way that racism was in the past tense: There were people that didn’t know we were all supposed to be the same so they made mistakes and eventually we all learned and grew from it. And that’s not necessarily true, or the reason why there was racial inequality. It was so that certain people could have a better life and it didn’t treat anybody that was considered ‘other’ in humane ways, and it’s not something that is over either. […]
I think the way you address what’s going on this country is head-on. Not necessarily a way that’s so visceral that it makes your kids over-emotional, but in a way that’s direct. If you’re a parent of Black children, it’s important that you empower them and explain to them the beauty that’s within their Blackness because that’s not really going to come outside of the home. There’s not a lot of representation of beauty within the mainstream media that looks like us. If you’re a white parent ore any other parent, you gotta just teach your kids the history of the United States and how it started with chattel slavery and how, even when slavery was abolished, there was Jim Crow laws, the prison industrial complex, just aching them that there’s a lot of ways that slavery didn’t end.”
Chiming in, Kirsten said teaching children about racism should begin in the home: “I honestly feel like it starts at home. Racism is born at home. If their parents or other people are talking about people based on their skin color, it makes them have that kind of disposition towards people of color. Kids need to be taught to love people and not that they don’t see their color, but just love them in spite of it all and just be kind of everyone.”
Watch a clip of Chance and Kirsten’s interview with Parents Magazine above and read the full cover story here.