Parents try to teach their children to use their words. It’s an important life skill to be able to identify emotions -- and, as we get older, to articulate complex ideas.

Here’s a chance for parents to use our own words. Two political candidates in Missouri recently handed us a perfect opportunity.

First, there’s Jeanie Ames, a Missouri woman running for the school board in a suburban St. Louis district. Screenshots of her Twitter feed, which she has since made private, were posted on a photo-sharing site and reported by the local media. She referred to Michelle Obama as “a giant rat.” She tweeted that the Black Caucus is what is wrong with America and that Puerto Rico is “one trailer park payment away from being homeless.” She also called for a ban on Islam in America and for another “crusade.”

Decent people are horrified and disgusted by her beliefs, but we can’t afford to look away from the ugliest parts of our communities. We have to expose the ugliness for what it is, especially when it’s coming from a person running for a seat on a school board. And it’s important that we show these harsh realities to our children; they should be just as aware of who wants to control their schools as we are.

Children should know exactly what it is to call for banning an entire religion. It’s called bigotry.

Supporting a “crusade” to rid America of an entire religious group? That’s what the Nazis attempted when they murdered 6 million Jews.

In her online bio, Ames calls herself a “Confederate.” The Confederates fought to preserve slavery in the South. Ames tried to describe these views as “politically conservative.”

That’s an insult to political conservatives. These tweets are racist.

Remember, even David Duke doesn’t call himself a racist. Nowadays, white supremacists want to be called “alt-right” or “white nationalists.” Instead, we need to call these beliefs what they are.

This may lead to another discussion of why some people feel comfortable sharing hate-filled views on social media. It’s likely because they have created a supportive audience of like-minded people, and those who disagree don’t want anything to do with them. When the rest of us are silently disgusted, these views become normalized. If our children don’t hear us loudly condemning bigotry, they’ll think it’s a common way to think. If they don’t hear us calling such remarks what they are, they’ll have a distorted view of what “politically conservative” means.

But let’s not stop there. We’ve also got Courtland Sykes, a Missouri Republican running for U.S. Senate. Sykes is making national headlines for reposting his position on women’s rights, as reinforced to his fiancee: “I want to come home to a home-cooked dinner at 6 every night, one that she fixes and one that I expect one day to have daughters learn to fix after they become traditional homemakers and family wives.”

He also states his goals for his future daughters: “I don’t want them to grow up into career-obsessed banshees who forgo home life and children and the happiness of family to become nail-biting, manophobic, hell-bent feminist she-devils who shriek from the tops of a thousand tall buildings they are (sic) think they could have leaped over in a single bound -- had men not ‘suppressing them’ (sic).“

The best advice to give our daughters is: If they encounter a man with views like this, run in the opposite direction. These are outdated, misogynistic ideas of what women should or should not be. Women are just as worthy of having a career and a family as men are.

Here’s a chance to explain the power and abuse of social media. Parents should say Ames’ tweets were racist and Sykes’ post is sexist, and be able to explain why to their children.

Let’s make a social media example out of these two.

And, for those in other parts of the country sneering at the ignorant, backwards candidates we’ve got running in our state -- don’t think for a minute these people aren’t in your communities, too. The last election proved that millions of Americans are willing to overlook candidates’ comments that vilify and denigrate racial and ethnic minorities and insult women.

So talk about these social media posts with your children. Call them what they are, and ask your kids to do better than we have been.

Use your words.

My teenage daughter startled me with a Big Question out of the blue while I was working in the kitchen.

“What do you think causes racism in society?” she asked while warming up leftovers in the microwave. We hadn’t been discussing any related topic, and rarely has my opinion been sought so directly from her. So I tried to answer as quickly as I could, unsure how long I would have her attention before someone more interesting texted her.

“Fear, competition for resources, power structures that exploit difference,” I said. A bit later, I texted her that the way people are raised also causes racism to persist.

I’ve spent the past week thinking about her question. I posted the question on Facebook and received nearly a hundred replies from thoughtful friends. Their most popular response was that ignorance or isolation from people of different backgrounds were the root causes. But I’m skeptical about this. If education and personal relationships could end racism, why does it still persist among people with plenty of knowledge and exposure?  

I turned to the work of scholars who study these issues.

Ibram Kendi is a historian and author of “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. He is also the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. He makes the strong case that we cannot educate and love our way out of a racist society. The root cause of racist thoughts and policies is self-interest, he argues. The group that benefits from the way society is set up resists making it more just, so racist thought is used to justify racist behavior and policies. He shares many historical examples that bear this out: Slave owners needed to justify their economic interest in subjugating other humans, so they claimed Africans were less than human, less civilized. Racist practice supported by racist thinking.

Kendi defines a racist as a person who expresses a racist idea or supports a racist policy. A racist idea suggests that one racial group is superior or inferior to another racial group. A racist policy is one that leads to unequal outcomes, he explained recently on the podcast “To the Point.”

When you look at modern America, you can see evidence of unequal outcomes in wealth, employment, housing, education, health, policing and the criminal justice system among racial groups. Do you believe it’s something innate in blackness that leads to these worse outcomes? By definition, that’s racist.

The nonracist explanation would be to look at which policies lead to those outcomes and work to dismantle those to create a more fair society. In order to do this, we have to be able to hold two competing views in our heads at once. A person can believe in equality and still have some racist beliefs. A country can make racial progress and still have racist policies.

Anti-racist progress in this country has always been met by racist progress, Kendi says. Even those of us who say we believe in equality and are disgusted by those who march in white hoods or with Tiki torches can have unexamined racist views or support policies that uphold racist outcomes. Even the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, who abhorred slavery, for years held the view that blacks should be freed to leave America and set up colonies elsewhere. His thinking about racial equality changed over time, as evidenced by his speeches.

This is where hope lives.

“A racist is not who a person is. A racist is what a person is, what a person is saying, what a person is doing,” Kendi wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. Once we recognize our self-interest at stake, confront our own biases and counter that thinking, that’s when we move toward a more fair and just society.

I shouldn’t have been so surprised about my daughter’s question. After all, we have recently heard the statement, “I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed” from the highest officeholder in the land, in response to multiple claims that he referred to African nations as “sh-tholes.”

It’s a good time to help our children sort out what these sorts of contradictions really mean.

It will take more than education and love to challenge deeply embedded racist thinking and actions.

It takes honesty.

She wanted him to play with her hair.

In the online essay detailing an anonymous woman’s terrible sexual encounter with actor Aziz Ansari, I kept coming back to this detail: “When she sat down on the floor next to Ansari, who sat on the couch, she thought he might rub her back, or play with her hair -- something to calm her down.”

Instead, he asked her for oral sex. And despite what she really wanted and how shaken she felt in that moment, she consented.

This was the most illustrative and poignant moment of missed expectations in this hard-to-follow narrative.

She wanted intimacy. He wanted sex.

The anonymous account been alternatively described as “a bad date/bad sex” or a sexual violation, depending on how you read the essay. Some feminists have argued that when you are having sex in a sexist culture, when you are socialized to either pursue or be pursued, consent is more complicated than saying yes or no. To be more clear, getting what you want from a sexual encounter is more complicated than saying “yes” or “no.”

The scenario as recounted in the Babe.net essay described familiar and traditional gender stereotypes. He kept trying to have sex with her. He was aggressively persistent. She warded off his advances, gave into some of them and eventually gave up on the date and left, feeling terrible.

Their contrary expectations collided in a way that left one party feeling used and dehumanized. But while parts of this story might seem familiar to many of us, it unfolded in a cultural moment of eroticized aggression, when it’s easier than ever to engage in dehumanized sex.

More than 25 years ago, a small, private liberal arts college in Ohio made national headlines when it tried to reform the idea of consent. Antioch College passed a policy in the 1990s that required students to get “affirmative consent,” which meant that sexual partners needed to ask for explicit consent before proceeding in a sexual encounter. The policy was widely ridiculed -- from an editorial in the New York Times to a “Saturday Night Live” skit lampooning this “overzealous” notion of date rape.

At the height of the media attention on the Antioch Sexual Offense Prevention Policy, I was a freshman in college. I remember thinking how ridiculous it sounded. Who talks that way during a romantic or sexual encounter? Who asks for permission every step of the way?

Twenty-five years of experience later, with children who will be leaving for college in a few years, it seems far more reasonable.

And yet, in practice, perhaps it makes even less sense.

This generation’s first sexual experiences are mediated through a screen. A middle-school boy is far more likely to ask a girl for a nude than a date. Teens see porn much younger and more often. Post-internet pornography is a more aggressive and degrading version of what was widely watched pre-internet. There is endless choice and opportunity in hook-up apps. Technology has not created a more egalitarian sexual landscape; it’s introduced aggression and power imbalance at a younger age than ever before.

And it’s made it more difficult to expect or ask for emotional intimacy. Imagine a profile that says, “I expect to be held.” Or, “I would like a text the next day.”

Even if the ideals of explicit consent are part of the conversations we have with our children, it has to happen in way that works in the tech-saturated sexual milieu in which they are coming of age. Emotional intimacy is easily divorced from sexual intimacy, which for some people feels less satisfying, or even dehumanizing.

Zoe Peterson, associate professor of psychological sciences and director of the sexual assault research and education program at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, says images of sex in the media -- not just porn -- don’t show a lot of talking.

“People have an idea that explicitly asking for consent is unsexy because we don’t have many models of it,” she said. It goes beyond asking and responding “yes” or “no.” It’s a bigger conversation of what a person is into sexually and his or her values.

Young people starting to navigate this terrain are just beginning to learn their preferences and how to exercise their agency. It can be difficult to express for those who don’t like to have uncomfortable conversations face-to-face.

“To ask for intimacy is really vulnerable,” Peterson said. “There’s a lot of fear of rejection, especially when there are no good models of, ‘how do you even do that?’”

To me, the allegations against Ansari didn’t suggest that women have lost their sense of agency. It’s that we’ve internalized a very low bar of expectation in such encounters.

Antioch’s explicit consent policy doesn’t sound so radical anymore.

Now, what sounds radical is being able to say, in a moment of vulnerability and sexual openness, “I just want you to play with my hair.”