#365Feminist Selfie 1: Hair (specifically, body hair)

The brows are lightly waxed.
Because I'm half Armenian.

First in my #365FeministSelfie series.

I haven’t shaved for 23 years. I know, I know. Shaggy underarms are at the top of the list of Feminist Stereotypes, probably right next to “burning your bra.” You’d think I attended college in the 1970s rather than been born during that decade. 

I tried shaving, but after six years of gashing my legs and getting red, itchy rashes under my arms, I threw in the towel. 

Actually, the reason I thought that not shaving could even be possible was due to Pia, the Swedish exchange student who attended my high school during my sophomore year. Pia wore miniskirts, showing her long, white-blonde leg hair to God and everybody. Of course, within two months she had begun to shave as part of her acculturation process. But she had already made her impression on me. 

I’m going to say right here, because I know the first riposte this post will provoke, that I have had my fair share of sexy times with men even though I don’t shave. (I say only “men” because I doubt anyone is going to chime in on the comments with “No self-respecting hot lesbian would want you with that disgusting pit hair.”) Yes, Virginia, there are hetero cis-men who hit skins with women with body hair and either don’t mind or actively enjoy it. After all, ahem, I do have two children with my handsome, hetero cis-man husband. 

I am not alone in my alarm at American culture’s intolerance for body hair. Not because I think that all women should let their body hair GROOOOW FREEEEEE! I am not opposed to women (and men) who trim, shave, wax, electrolyze, or thread off some or all of their body hair. Bodily autonomy is a feminist principle. 

But I do object to a culture that excludes, shames, or punishes women (or men) who do not wish to participate in depilation. 

I never thought about how early this enculturation starts, until one day when my daughter’s friend, five years old, came up to me and whispered, “Most women shave off the hair under their arms.” She said it in the exact tone of an old lady admonishing another that her slip was showing. “I know,” I whispered back, and smiled. She shot me a look of mingled incredulity and distain and walked away. 

I am fortunate that the kind of places I have worked—queer-oriented public health, publishing, teaching abroad, graduate school—did not require a conventional [American] cis-woman presentation. I didn’t have to shave, wear high heels, or wear make-up. This is not to say I don’t groom myself (although my grooming has slipped a bit since my small children have transformed the simple ritual of showering into a major undertaking). 

I just don’t think women should be held to a higher standard of appearance—that is, one that demands more attention, time, and expensive products—than men. 

I hate that stock sitcom gag where a man rolls his eyes over how long it takes a woman to get ready to go out. On the one hand, the joke theatrically bemoans the vanity of women; on the other, it writes over the ways men have historically required women, as their property, to represent and display beauty and—by extension—wealth and class. Although most of us are no longer categorized as property, we can still be props—as adornment, as visual pleasure for the male gaze, as symbols of affluence, often in service to increasing men’s social capital. (And the methods of beautifying—the couture, the accessories, the jewelry, the shoes—simultaneously showcase yet hide the labor of those of far lesser economic and social status—mostly women, some even children.) 

My refusal to shave is one way that I opt-out of the expected time-consuming ritual of costuming for feminine performance. It’s my small, daily rebellion against this facet of sexism. By being “out” about not shaving, perhaps I can be Pia to another woman or girl. 

It is also an assertion of the importance of my pleasure, my time, and the integrity of my body. I have decided that men’s aesthetic pleasure does not rank above my bodily discomfort—pain from cuts, itching from rashes. I prefer to use my time doing something that gives me pleasure rather than removing my body hair. 

For some women, the removal gives them pleasure, and that can be a feminist act, too. 

But in a gender-equal world, every woman deserves the right to her own calculus. 

In Britain, women are going razor-free in August (i.e., Sleeveless Season) to raise money for women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). So if you do shave but are poils-curious, you can experiment for a good cause.

And now, to cheer us all up, please see this Robot Hugs comic on the Body Policing Police. Enjoy! 

Beyond Girls and Boys

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

This week, I’m very proud to announce that you can find me on Black Girl Dangerous:

“Beyond Girls and Boys: Teaching Gender to My Kids”

 

10 Reasons Why Maria Kang Is Wrong Wrong Wrong

I don't work out. I lift my kids.
So I have biceps, but not a taut tummy.
Also, I don't know how to Photoshop out my nipples.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

... and one bonus one!

(If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read this.)

1) “What’s Your Excuse?” My job isn’t fitness, and my body is not an ad for my business.

2) Some of us have priorities other than appearing fuckable to 20-year-old guys.
 
3) Not all of us have a stay-at-home-husband. Or a partner at all. Or relatives who can take the kids anytime for free. Or money for sitters. Or access to licensed, good quality day care. Gee, you know what might help with that? Universal child care.
 
4) Why don’t all moms work out while their kids are playing at the park? Maybe because they are enjoying a moment to themselves. Maybe because they are trying to have a little adult social life as a break from being around children all day. Maybe they have kids who demand a lot of attention. And maybe women who make different choices than you have completely legitimate reasons for doing so.
 
5) Being skinny isn’t the same as being fit.
 
6) Over-exercising is a thing.
 
7) Fat-shaming is bad for everybody. Including the children. Maybe especially for the children.
 
8) Different bodies are different. It makes my heart ache to think that Kang has struggled with an eating disorder in a quest to attain the societal ideal of a “perfect” body. Maybe if we didn’t define “beauty” in such a narrow band along the spectrum of our body shapes and sizes, no girl would push herself to such extremes to look a certain way.
 
9) You know another Asian-American woman who has struggled with an eating disorder? Margaret Cho. Cho has coped with this through being a bad-ass feminist and GLBT advocate. Instead of internalizing norms of feminine beauty, she has dedicated herself to challenging and dismantling them. I know which solution I’d rather choose.
 
10) My tummy is no longer taut because my abdominal wall stretched out when I grew two human beings inside of me. Maybe we, as a culture, should try to honor these bodies that have created life. Doesn’t that have its own beauty?
 
And the bonus reason Maria Kang is wrong wrong wrong:

11) Now I have to explain that not all hapa-Pinays from SacTown are like this. 

Not enough reasons? Don’t worry, there’s plenty more.

Special thanks to HapaMama Grace Hwang Lynch and Cynthia Liu of K-12NN for the thought-provoking Facebook dialogues that led to this post.

Spanking: Afterthoughts to Fight or Flight

The Pick-Up-The-Kid-N-Go method.
(Photo by Kevin Miller)

So low is the profile of my blog and, apparently, so aligned the audience that I haven’t received any countering arguments or comments to my post on spanking. That doesn’t mean that I haven’t imagined any. 

Reading over it again, I realized I missed one obvious argument: “Well, if it stopped her from hitting you, wouldn’t it be worth it?” 

Except that wasn’t what happened. In the days that followed, Silver ratcheted up the hitting. I don’t know if my example had made it acceptable to her, or if she liked it because she realized it was an easy way to provoke me, or if she had her own toddler logic, but it took me weeks of NOT hitting her in response to undo what I had done in a single flash of suspended judgment. 

I wrote this post while visiting my father-in-law in Florida. He happens to be a developmental psychologist, and he read it the next day. (In fact, my husband was raised by two developmental psychologists, which must explain why he’s so calm and balanced. I find it immensely reassuring that he finds our kids exasperating and mentally exhausting sometimes, too.) 

My father-in-law talked with me about some of the current research on spanking. He noted that much research shows an increase in aggression in children who are spanked, but that one researcher in particular, Diana Baumrind, cast doubt on this connection. Baumrind’s 2001 study on the effects of spanking,* which is well-respected for its thorough methodology, demonstrates that “an occasional swat, when delivered in the context of good child-rearing, has not been shown to do any harm.” From a New York Times article: 

Dr. Baumrind described findings from her own research, an analysis of data from a long-term study of more than 100 families, indicating that mild to moderate spanking had no detrimental effects when such confounding influences were separated out. When the parents who delivered severe punishment—for example, frequently spanking with a paddle or striking a child in the face—were removed from the analysis, Dr. Baumrind and her colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Owens, found that few harmful effects linked with spanking were left. And the few that remained could be explained by other aspects of the parent-child relationship. 

“When parents are loving and firm and communicate well with the child,” Dr. Baumrind said, “the children are exceptionally competent and well adjusted, whether or not their parents spanked them as preschoolers.” 

My problem here is that, for me, spanking came out of a place of anger and frustration, and I can see all too clearly the slippery slope that such an “easy and fast” discipline method can lead to. Escalation from “an occasional swat” seems inevitable. 

Would it have made a difference if I had spanked my daughter in a calm mental state rather than a heated one? I will never know. But if I am calm enough to rationally apply spanking, then I am calm enough to use alternative methods of discipline. If I am not calm enough to use those methods, then I am not calm enough to spank, and I have to walk away. 

The temptation of spanking is that it is a quick enforcement of an ignored “No!” But oftentimes a child’s misbehavior has an underlying cause, an unmet need or unexpressed emotion. If my choice, when I am calm and rational, is to quickly enforce my will with a spanking, or sit with my child to find the root cause of her anger, I will choose the latter. 

This requires a luxury of time that I don’t always have, but as a middle-class American WAHM of only 2 children, I probably can indulge in this luxury more than many parents. My choice means probably several “wasted” hours, waiting for children to blow out their tantrums. And I do mean hours. My daughter, in particular, has hurricane-level tantrums, and each one can take at least an hour to blow out. 

Many families don’t have this luxury of time. A parent who has to get to a shift on time, or a school-aged child who will be punished for excessive tardies, or a parent overwhelmed with caring for multiple children or even multiple generations... the list of exceptions is long. (In the cases when I simply can’t wait, I pick up my child and we just go, kicking and screaming all the way.) 

Ultimately, however, I cannot conscience teaching my children not to hit by hitting them. It will likely be years until I know if I have made the right choices. Or I may never know. But every day that I don’t spank my kids, my heart is at peace. I’m not sure I can say that about any other aspect of my parenting. 

*I haven’t checked to see if this study has been updated. I do have issues with the fact that the demographics of this study are homogenous, and that the researchers only tracked the children until the age of 14. My own “detrimental effects” of spanking didn’t appear to myself until I had my own children.  

Fight or Flight

(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

I belong to a group called Multicultural Kid Blogs, and a couple of my fellow mother-bloggers posted recently on spanking. Cordelia Newlin de Rojas explicated the role of spanking in French parenting, while Kim Siegal contemplated it in the context of her new home in Kenya. Both discuss their observations, congruent with research presented in NurtureShock, that in a culture where spanking is considered the norm, children don’t find it psychologically damaging, nor does it result in increased aggression. (I should also state that they don’t advocate spanking, and they don’t spank their own kids.)

The aggregated research on the effects of spanking seems to be inconclusive, likely because it would be difficult if not impossible to assess how spanking affects every child in every culture while controlling for other factors. 

I don’t want to delve into the science of spanking, however. Instead, I want to provide a snapshot of the way that spanking has played out in my life.

Frequently as I parent, I ask myself, WWSMD: “What Would a Senegalese Mom Do?” From carrying a baby on my back to benignly ignoring my kids sometimes to making my daughter watch her little brother, this question helps me keep perspective on American parenting. But one tradition I haven’t adopted is hitting. Senegalese children can be hit by parents, extended family, or even neighbors if they are truly out of bounds of good behavior. “Damay simi sama daal!”—I’m taking off my shoe!—is a threat every Wolof child understands. Although I choose not to hit or spank, I am uncomfortable with declaring that no child should be spanked, ever. I don’t wish to be a cultural imperialist—the road to hell, and all that. I know plenty of people who can declare, in various languages, “I was spanked, and I turned out fine!” Rather, I want to add my voice to an anecdotal history of spanking.

Both Newlin de Rojas and Siegal specify that spanking means a slap with an open hand on the behind, not done in anger, but as a controlled method to enforce discipline. They try to draw a firm line between spanking and beating. 

I grew up in the 1970s, when spanking was very much the norm in the U.S. My parents spanked rarely, as a last resort because I had gone beyond the pale and—I am certain now—they had run out of other discipline options. I remember clearly my dad saying once before spanking me, “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” With parental hindsight, I now understand what he meant. Yet I can simultaneously call bullshit on this assertion now as easily as I would have if “bullshit” had been in my vocabulary at that age. To compare his emotional pain to my physical pain is to compare fruits of the genus malus with those of the genus citrus.

Oddly, I don’t remember any of my particular offenses that led to the spankings, only the spankings themselves, and the feelings of pain, humiliation, and shame that accompanied them. I assume they “worked” in that I avoided being “bad” sometimes because I was afraid of getting a spanking. I do remember times when I had done something “bad” —usually a mistake, like breaking something—and wanting to hide my act because of that fear. 

The day I decided I wasn’t going to be spanked anymore is as clear as the other memories are murky. I had been playing around with my dad, and I was in high spirits. I tried to get him to drink milk diluted with water. I couldn’t stop giggling. I had, in short, been bitten by the silly bug. I wanted his attention, my energy spiraled upwards and upwards as I fought to hold it. At some point, I knew I had pushed the boundary too far, and I could tell my dad was ready to spank me. 

I immediately backed up against my grandmother’s cabinets, my hands over my butt. I might even have been baring my teeth. I recognize now that I had entered fight-or-flight mode. I didn’t know how I was going to stop my dad; but I was determined with every fiber of my being NOT to get spanked. 

Whatever was in my eyes, my dad didn’t spank me, and neither parent spanked me again.*

Fast forward to my own parenthood, and the only day I experimented with hitting my child. This was not the “official” definition of spanking. I was mad and at the end of my tether. I had exhausted my other parenting tactics. So I was already frayed when my 2-year-old daughter slapped me... and it hurt. What seemed quicker than thought, my hand reached out and smacked her on the thigh, hard enough to sting. She recoiled from me, shock and hurt in her face, and said plaintively, “Don’t hit me!” 

I realized, in that moment, I was contradicting with my actions the core moral imperative I was trying to instill in her: don’t hurt people. If children learn best through modeling, I was providing the worst example. I felt like a beast, and I knew I was a hypocrite. 

That’s when I decided I would not hit my children. I can’t raise my hand without imagining a dog flinching in anticipation of a blow. That’s not the relationship I want to have with my child. 

But digging deep, thoughts and memories provoked by my colleagues’ posts, I realized this isn’t the only reason. Recently, my son has started to bite me when he’s frustrated. I’m still getting used to this new response, so he keeps slipping in bites before I can defend myself, and they hurt. Particularly yesterday, when his bite landed on my nipple. 

Nothing pushes me into a rage with my children as when they hurt me. “DON’T HIT/KICK/BITE ME!” I snarl. And I can feel it, my animal self, the fight-or-flight coming to blot out my reasoning centers. I have to walk away, choose flight instead of fight.

I have only been hit by a few people in my life: my parents and my grandfather. 

When my children inflict pain on me, it returns me immediately to that moment, my back up against my grandmother’s cabinets, my hands protecting my body. It’s not a moment I want my children to have.

So I say no. And it will stop. 

(What happened in the weeks after I spanked my daughter in the coda to this post, Afterthoughts.)


*I realize that the combination of my last post and this one make it sound like I had a truly terrible childhood, and I just want to tell you, No! Really! My childhood had lots of happy times! Just as Tolstoy found unhappy families more compelling as literary fodder, so do I with the less happy moments of my childhood. NOT that I’m comparing my writing to Tolstoy’s!

Readings:

Are French Kids Better Behaved Because They Are Spanked? (InCulture Parent)
Do read the comments, since “French parenting” is hardly a monolith, as some of the comments point out.

Rethinking Spanking from the Land of Kibokos (Mama Mzungu)

Is Spanking a Black and White Issue? (The New York Times)
When casting around for other articles on spanking, I came across this roundtable discussion. Much talk of spanking in the U.S. centers on African-American communities, possibly because it is more acceptable, or because African Americans speak more openly about it, or both, or for a bunch of other reasons. (Certainly amongst my friends, those who discuss it with a certain nonchalance are African American, although not all my African American friends were spanked, or describe it nonchalantly.) I think I remember, although I cannot find it nor be sure that I really read it, an account that argued that African-American parents enforce discipline more strictly because acting “out of line” carries higher consequences for black kids in American society than for white kids. (Certainly Trayvon Martin’s fate—among several others—would bear out that theory.) I want to draw particular attention to Daphne S. Cain’s contribution, where she writes, “Corporal punishment is not counter to mainstream parenting practices; it is actually the norm” as a counterpoint to the discourse that spanking is not acceptable in American society.

Another realization I had when composing this post was that this is the only scene I remember from the entirety of Ingmar Bergman’s film, Fanny and Alexander.


 

Significance, Part 2

(Photo by Kevin Miller)

(Continued from Part 1.)

About two weeks ago, I began a post I titled “Significance.” Then the jury in the Trayvon Martin trial came to their verdict, and I was unable to think of anything else for a while. 

I have been trying to pick up the thread of “Significance.” I have, in fact, almost 900 words of the original Part 2. But, for the moment, I have to scrap them all. I have been writing around what I want to say, because I wanted to keep elements of my personal history private. 

I started “Significance,” in part, to explain why I am currently a stay-at-home/sort-of-working-at-home-if-you-call-this-working mother. But I realize that none of this will make emotional sense unless I talk about the situation of my childhood. 

My parents divorced when I was 2 years old. They came up with a joint custody arrangement where I would spend four days with my mom, then four days with my dad. In the 1970s, divorce was still rare, and in addition to being one of the few brown kids at my school whose grandparents came from the here-there-be-dragons unknown lands of Armenia and Philippines, having divorced parents made me ... well, you can imagine. 

Unto itself, the divorce wasn’t that bad. I don’t remember when it happened, and I don’t remember a time when my parents lived under one roof. Living in two houses was my “normal.” I remember the aftermath, overhearing tense phone conversations between my parents. I remember being afraid when my mom cried. 

My parents married when my dad was 25 and my mom was 22. I was born the day after my mother’s 24th birthday, an age that seems incredibly young to me, considering I was a decade older when I gave birth to my own daughter. 

A therapist once told me that if I wanted to avoid a divorce, I shouldn’t marry until after the age of 30. “You need to know who you are,” she said. “You want to be fully formed as a person.” My mother was not fully formed when she married. Like many women, she essentially transitioned from her role of daughter to wife. So after her divorce, she started on the path to figure out who she was as an adult and what she wanted out of life. 

During this search, my mother didn’t mother me very much. Our closest times revolved around books and food. I can still hear my mother’s voice when I read certain favorites from my childhood to my kids now. And I remember my feelings of delight and belonging over several shared ice cream sundaes. But I also remember being alone, a lot. 

I don’t want to delve into unhappy details of my childhood. It is now in the past, and my mother and I have forged a new relationship as adults. In addition to her responsibilities as a professor, my mother is a loving and attentive grandmother to my children. 

I recently read the article that Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker’s daughter, wrote about growing up as the daughter of a feminist author and leader.* Not only does it sadden me to read about the ways she felt neglected and ignored as a child, but it also sickens me to see her words churned through right-wing sites like Breitbart and the National Review online as a testament to the failure of feminism. 

I want to be clear on this: my mother’s shortcomings in her duties as a parent were not because of work or feminism. I am a feminist, and my parenting is infused with feminist ideals of gender equality and radical redefinitions of masculinity and femininity. My parents’ divorce can be attributed, in part, to a lack of equality. My mother mentioned, as an example, familial and social pressures for her to regularly put on dinner parties where, of course, she would be solely responsible for cooking and serving—which is why the dish I associate most with her is instant ramen noodles. (My father, on the other hand, knuckled down with cookbooks and put a home-cooked meal on the table almost every night.)

I fully believe that a woman can work and also be an engaged and devoted parent. Indeed, for many women, the fulfillment of working makes them better parents. 

But I can’t quite escape that feeling of loss from my childhood. The wound is there, and it aches sometimes, like the scar at the bottom of my belly where my babies were pushed out of my body. 

So now, right now, when my children are small, when I am still the center of their worlds, I want to be here for them. I am not with them all the time—they go to preschool while I grocery shop, juggle the finances, do the laundry, tend the garden, take a nap if I slept badly the night before (e.g., wedged between my two thrashing offspring), read articles, talk on the phone, go to doctor/dentist/acupuncture appointments, schedule the plumber, prep for dinner, have a weensy bit of an adult social life, bang my head against my laptop while I try to write, and do all the things that are difficult or impossible to do with two strong-willed kids in tow. 

But all those hours when they are not in school, and it feels like a lot, I am here to play with them, read to them, keep them from fighting with each other, feed them, take them to dance class and swim lessons, talk with them, and, mostly, to hold them when they need to emotionally fall apart.

They will not be little forever, as every parent with older children reminds me. Later, they will have friends and activities, other interests and people to fill their time and share their thoughts with. And this is not what I want to do forever: tending to hearth and home and little ones. But for these few fleeting years, this is what I want. And I don’t see why that can’t be a feminist choice, too. 

(To be continued in Part 3.)

*Excellent feminist responses to Rebecca Walker’s article here and here.  

Seventeen and Stupid

Site of my high-speed chase
(Photo by Anoosh Jorjorian)

Here's how I view it:

When I was about seventeen, my friend and I parked, unknowingly, in front of a vacant house. We were just sitting in the seats of my car, talking, because it wasn't yet curfew time. A guy in a pick-up truck drove by us slowly, went around the block, and drove by us again.

At that point, we thought he thought we were making out and was coming back for another look. But when we started up the car to drive around the corner to my friend's house, the guy pulled a U-turn and started to follow us. We didn't want him to follow us to my friend's house, so we continued past and went to a main street. We picked up speed. He picked up speed.

I then got into the only high-speed chase in my life, because we didn't know who this guy was or why the hell he was following us, and it scared the shit out of us. I ran red lights. I got on the freeway and pushed my grandmother's tan 1980 Honda Civic to its limit of 70 mph. The pick-up was practically on my bumper.

Eventually, a cop pulled us both over. The guy in the pick-up turned out to be someone who had babysat my friend when my friend was a preschooler. The guy said, sheepishly, "I know this kid. He's OK." He had assumed we were planning to break into the vacant house and, when we started to drive away, it only proved to him that we must be guilty of something. The cop chewed us both out. To the guy, he said, "Next time, let us handle this." He asked me, "Why did you run?" I said, "We were SCARED." The cop let us go.

If we hadn't been an Asian-looking girl and an Irish-white boy, how might this have gone down differently?

I'm writing this post after thinking about Amy Davidson's question, "What Should Trayvon Martin Have Done?" And I realized, well, I know what I did do. And in other circumstances, in another body, I might have been shot to death.

Vigilantes are, frankly, terrifying: Who is this person? Why are they after me? In the vigilante's mind, you are someone suspicious. In your own mind, you are going about your own innocent business when some stranger starts to stalk you. A regular person would call the police and leave it at that. It's beyond the bounds of societal norms for a person to take the law into his own hands. It's one thing, after all, to stop a rape or a robbery in progress. It's another to target someone who isn't actually committing a crime.

Do you remember being seventeen? I remember being completely absorbed in a world of music, movies, schoolwork, peer hierarchies, and dating. When I thought about adults at all, it was the daily injustices my dad subjected me to: curfews, housework, family obligations, permissions denied. Adults occupied a realm of power that I hadn't experienced yet and that had authority over me. At seventeen, I dreamed of adult autonomy without understanding the reality. I was still living in my dad's house. I was closer to the age of being told to beware of strange adults than to being a true adult, on my own.

The way I reacted to being followed by a pick-up was stupid—I could have gotten into a car wreck, or caused a car wreck. If we had gone to my friend's house, gotten out of the car, and involved his dad, we would have cleared up the misunderstanding. And yet, if the man in the pick-up hadn't been a neighbor, but someone intent on harming us, then getting out of the car might have been the stupid decision. But until you know both sides of the story, you can't know which decision is the right one, if a right one even exists.

I'm sure Trayvon was afraid for his life when Zimmerman confronted him. How many of us, followed and then approached in the dark by a large man, would have fought for our lives in that moment?

If the racism of this case can be distilled to a single moment, it's the moment when you have a black kid and a non-black man facing each other, neither sure of what the other is up to. That the jurors and many, many other people identify solely with Zimmerman at that moment tells you everything you need to know about racism in this case. And it's the gap between those with Zimmerman's perspective and those with Trayvon's that seems unbridgeable. 

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.! 

Where Do I Get My Ideas?

I am wrestling with an unscheduled post on race, body acceptance, and clothing. My younger child also caught an unscheduled virus, which means I won't be able to write tomorrow because he will be staying home from school, and I blew through my babysitting budget last week trying to Get Things Done and fulfill my activist duties.

But I promised myself to only take last week as a hiatus, so here's a quickie.

One of my biggest challenges as a parent is to not beat myself up all the time over not being a perfect parent. Yes, I've read plenty of articles on being "a good enough parent," and I am working on embracing my imperfections. I know, intellectually, that being a "perfect parent" is not possible, nor even desirable if it were possible, but perfectionism runs deep in my family.

For me, parenting is a daily struggle to rewrite old patterns of behavior and attitudes that stem not only from my own childhood, but that have been reinscribed over generations. I am learning about epigenetics, and it helps me to understand how we carry our ancestral histories with us, within our bodies. (I will write more, much more, on this topic.) It can make me feel overwhelmed, that I am trying to swim against the tide of depression, fear, and anger from two separate lineages that meet in me. But it can also help me forgive myself when I fail.

At her preschool, my daughter decorated a small journal for me for Mother's Day. It's exactly like the composition books they use at school to record their thoughts (either dictated to a teacher, or "written" themselves), except in miniature, the perfect size for me to carry around in my purse.

This is where I jot down my thoughts and ideas to explore and flesh out later. I glance at the inscription to give me courage and to inspire me to be the mother my daughter deserves. It is a gift that she gave me, and it represents what a gift she is to me. Parenting has given me focus and purpose that I was seeking before her birth. Not to say that I feel like I was born to be a mother, because mothering does not come "naturally" to me at all, but—to quote Talib Kweli—if life is a beautiful struggle, then creating and guiding the lives of my children is my beautiful struggle, in all its messiness, heartbreak, silliness, absurdity, complexity, and grace.