My Daughter the White Girl, Part 3

"A rainbow would be boring/if it were only green or blue/
What makes a rainbow beautiful/is that it has every hue/
So aren't you glad you look like you?"
From We're Different, We're the Same.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

(Continued from Part 1 and Part 2)

At first, I followed the red herring that the word “pretty” represented. I told her, “I know all the princesses you see have light skin and yellow hair, but that’s not the only kind of beauty. There’s lots of different ways to be pretty.” She said, earnestly, “But some of the princesses have brown hair, like me.” She nodded for emphasis. I realized I’d gone down the wrong path in the conversation.

Silver was telling me that people’s value hinged entirely on their “prettiness,” a value inculcated in her by books, videos, and toys, most of them by Disney, and most of them outside my house—at her day care, at friends’ houses, at the doctor’s office. Girls also cannot escape the peer-pressure of “prettiness.” It doesn’t help when adults reinforce this value by constantly commenting on little girls’ outfits and looks. (Latina Fatale made me notice my complicity in this.)

I found myself facing two fronts instead of one. Now, it was not just the question of working against cultural messages of race, but also gender.

It was actually Po Bronson himself during a live chat about NurtureShock who gave me the word I should have used in the first place: wrong. “People with light skin didn’t want people with dark skin to go to the same schools or eat in the same restaurants or live in the same neighborhoods because they thought they weren’t as good or pretty or smart as people with light skin, but that was wrong. And people with all different colors of skin, they fought long and hard to change that. They said, ‘No, that’s not fair.’ And they got hurt because of it. Other people hurt their bodies. But they did it anyway because it was the right thing to do.

“And Silver, it doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside. Whether you’re pretty or not, it’s not as important as being a good person. People stood up for what was right, for what was fair, and that is the most important thing.” I could feel pressure building up inside, the urgency to pass it on. Miraculously, she was quiet, her eyes fixed on me.

I said, “You know, if they hadn’t stood up for what was right, then Grandma wouldn’t have been able to marry Mezhaidig, because Grandma’s skin is brown and Mezhaidig’s skin is light, and I wouldn’t have been born.”

Then her eyes lit up. “And you wouldn’t have been able to marry Daddy, because his skin is light and yours is brown!” “That’s right!” I said. The pressure eased. Daddy was ready. I helped Silver put on her shoes, hugged her tightly, kissed her, and said, “I love you, baby.” “I love you, too, Mama,” she said, and walked out the door.

No bunny's really color blind/Maybe it's a fact/We all should face/
Every bunny makes judgments/Based on race.—
with apologies to Avenue Q.
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I have to keep reminding myself that I can’t overcome racism and sexism in a day, not even with my own children. It’s a process. Just as absorbing racism and sexism is something she has learned little by little, every day. I have to remain vigilant and pounce on the moments when I can change her perspective and reveal the prejudice for the injustice it is.

But I can’t help but feel a little sadness and distance. For her, these discussions will continue to be abstract. She is protected by the privilege that her skin color provides her. For me, racism is something that I will always take personally, as an attack on my very being.

It’s funny how we can wish for our children to have it easier than we did. And yet, when it comes, success is bittersweet. We pass on our wisdom, but will they really know it if they don’t live it? The only president Silver has known is Barack Obama. While I grew up at a time when being biracial was so unusual as to be almost freakish, she is growing up at a time and in a place where being biracial is almost the norm. I have to console myself with the knowledge that, in our microcosm at least, this is progress.

My Daughter the White Girl, Part 2

Silver and Ocho's dolls. (Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

(Continued from Part 1)

There’s nothing quite like having spent your life being mad at racism, learning about its insidious effects, living on both sides of the equation in the United States and in West Africa, and having your precious child say something racist. It sent me into a full panic. How could this happen? 
 
Ever since I had read NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, I had made it a point to talk openly with Silver about skin color and body difference. In the chapter entitled “White Parents Don’t Talk About Race,” the authors trace a variety of studies to build a case that not talking about race explicitly with children results in kids forming their own biases in favor of their own race. White parents in particular felt uncomfortable talking about race with their children. They relied on vague statements such as “everyone is equal” to convey a message of colorblind equality. One of the researchers, Brigitte Vittrup, summed up the problem when she said, “A lot of parents... admitted they just didn’t know what to say to their kids, and they didn’t want the wrong thing coming out of the mouth of their kids.” 
 
These parents assume that children are born colorblind and that if they don’t practice prejudice in their own household, the children won’t pick it up. For them, drawing attention to racial difference is tantamount to opening the door to racism. Bronson and Merryman argue that children already notice racial difference, and that by not talking about it, parents convey the message that only people like themselves are OK, and they imply that racial Others are somehow less nice, trustworthy, friendly, etc. as whites are.
 
I had my own experience with a child “naturally” noticing—and fearing—difference. When I lived in Senegal, my youngest “sister,” less than a year old, would cry the moment she saw me. Even in a cosmopolitan city like Dakar, she saw few foreigners in her neighborhood, much less in her house. It took a week of seeing me every day before she warmed up to me. This story, of African babies crying at the sight of a “white” person, I heard repeated often amongst Peace Corps volunteers and expats. Similarly, when Silver was an infant, my Congolese ex-boyfriend came to Los Angeles with his Senegalese wife and their dance company. We spent an afternoon and an evening catching up. Silver, not a very trusting baby to begin with, wanted nothing to do with them. 
 
Bronson and Merryman only touch on the role that cultural and social messages play in forming racist attitudes outside of parental influence: “Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence.” They don’t speculate, however, on how early these messages in the cultural environment begin to saturate a child’s mind with information on racial hierarchies. 
 
It was easy to know when Silver began to notice gender differences. Her favorite colors seemed to change overnight from turquoise blue and red to pink. She would say things like, “Boys don’t have long hair” or “No, Mama! Not those pants! Those are boy pants! I want girl pants!” I blamed the older girls at day care. 
 
And yet it seems that kids rarely come out with overt signs of noticing racial difference by themselves. Certainly, Silver didn’t talk about it until I started to. But if African babies cry at the sight of a “white” foreigner, and my “white” daughter cried at the sight of two Africans, perhaps attitudes towards racial difference form so early, in a pre-verbal stage, that our only choice is to undo early racial bias.
 
Armed with the evidence from NurtureShock, I diligently acquired all the right books: We’re Different, We’re the Same; Shades of People; All the Colors of the Earth; Whoever You Are. We talked about the people we knew and what colors their skins were. We talked about how we have different skin colors within our own family, how Grandma’s skin is darker than Mama’s skin, and my skin is darker than Silver’s. 
 
Silver has, and had, plenty of African-American teachers. For a while, her favorite teacher was a woman of Xhosa heritage—not just Black, but Africa Black. What we don’t have here are friends (e.g., people who have come over for dinner or had us over for dinner) who are African-American with dark-brown skin. Most of my African-American friends are on the East Coast, and the few I had here finished graduate school and scattered to take up jobs in Chicago, New York, Boston, Ohio, etc. Since I became a parent, I haven’t met many other African-American parents because I live on the Westside in Los Angeles. We have white people, Asians, and Latinos in abundance. Black people? Not so much. Many of the African Americans I know are mixed—I swear, we halfies/hapas/metis/mestizos must be the majority here—and so come in a range of shades, few of them dark.
 
So when my daughter told me, “I don’t like people with dark brown skin,” I knew I had to seize the moment to undo my terrible mistake. I said the two words that opened the door: “Why not?”
 
And that’s when she said, “I don’t like them because they aren’t pretty.”
 
I started cursing Disney in the foulest terms I could come up with. Silently, of course. 

(To be continued in Part 3.) 

My Daughter the White Girl

Photo by Kevin Miller

“I don’t like people with dark brown skin.” 

This is so hard to write. I mean, who wants to start a conversation that goes, “My five-year-old daughter is racist”? But this is how deep it goes in our culture. My daughter doesn’t know how to read, but she has read the signs that tell her: Black people are marginal Others. 

Of course, this conversation started right before she had to leave for preschool. She had been dressed, brushed, fed, and sunscreened. My husband’s coffee sat ready on the counter. Any moment now, he would emerge from the bathroom with clean teeth, and they would have to put on their shoes and go. 

Moments before, her little brother, Ocho*, and I were reading Bear on a Bike, and Silver* came to sit with us. When we read books now, the kids point to characters in the book and say, “This is me. This is you. This is Mama. This is Daddy.” So Ocho pointed to a girl with dark brown skin and a star-shaped thatch of curly hair and said, “This is Silver.” She immediately protested. “NOOOOOOO! I don’t want to be her!” 

I could ignore where this was going. I knew this moment could mean the difference between my husband getting to work on time... or not. 

But then again, I couldn’t ignore where it was going. Not when I had grown up feeling acutely conscious of being the only brown girl in my class. Not when I had struggled with seeing only white girls around me at school, on television, in print, and no reflections of me or my family. 

And not when I had learned the names of Martin Luther King, Jr., El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Rosa Parks, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, and on and on to those whose names I don’t know, but whose courage not only changed my world, but made my life possible. Those who marched in the streets, faced savage dogs, fire hoses, fists, clubs, and bullets. 

In moments like these, I am overwhelmed by what I know and what she doesn’t yet. Yuri Kochiyama. Cesar Chavez. Leonard Peltier. Audre Lorde. More names than I can possibly list. Loving v. Virginia. The Bluest Eye. This Bridge Called My Back. Social movement upon social movement. A lifetime of history, literature, political analysis, and lived experience of discrimination in America. Enough examples to fill a library of books on how ugly and twisted human nature can get, and the myriad ways that we, the marginalized, have fought back. 

And here my daughter sits next to me: to the eye, a white girl. California tan skin, brown hair with sunny highlights. Round, brown eyes. Wherever she goes, adults coo over her, call her “princess,” and tell her how cute and adorable she is. 

People mistake me for a nanny. Children look at her, look at me, and say, “You’re her mommy?” 

Between what I know already and what she will learn is a gaping maw of meanness and hate that I am not willing to teach her about yet. Like any mother, I would like to spare her the fear, shame, loneliness, and self-hatred I grew up with. Mean, to her, is when a kid in her school calls her “poopy,” or when she wants to watch a video and I won’t let her.

My previous attempt to explain discrimination to her completely backfired. We were listening to Sweet Honey in the Rock’s All for Freedom. (I mean, how much more racial could I get? There’s even a version of Kumbaya on it—“Cum Bah Ya”—with African-style polyrhythms.) Her favorite track at the time was “Calypso Freedom,” which she called “Freedom is coming and it won’t be long.” “Mama, what does it mean?” she asked. 

So I tried to explain segregation. I used much of the same language that Sweet Honey uses on the CD. I said that kids with dark brown skin weren’t allowed to go to the same schools as kids with light-colored skin. I tried to explain anti-miscegenation laws, red-lining, and Jim Crow in four-year-old terms. I asked her if she understood. She said yes, and added, “Mama, I don’t want to talk about this any more.” Which is how I knew I’d overwhelmed her and that she didn’t get it. 

But I didn’t realize how badly I had done my job until months later when Silver said she didn’t like people with dark brown skin that she didn’t know. “Why, honey?” I asked. She answered, “Remember how you told me that people with dark brown skin aren’t trained the way that people with light skin are?” 

Oh shit. 

(To be continued in Part 2.) 

*Not their real names. I'm not that L.A.!