In September 2003, I started babysitting a one-year old boy. My daughter is just six weeks older than this boy so they’ve grown into best buddies. They play crazy games with lots of chasing and shrieking, she bosses him around, they fuss at each other, they explore the backyard and lately, she cries when he goes home.
Last week, I was talking with this 3-year old boy, discussing who would be picking him up. His parents have been divorced for almost a year now, and they share custody equally, so one week his mom picks him up and then the next week, his dad picks him up. (The day in question, his dad was due to pick him up–on Wednesday nights, the parent without custody for the week gets to have the boy overnight.) So every afternoon, we talk about which parent is coming. This particular day, I said, “Tell me about your dad.”
And the boy said, “My dad is black.”
This fact was no surprise to me–after all, I can’t possibly overlook the fact that his father is an imposing man with strong African features. He’s from Nigeria, after all, and still speaks with a lilting accent.
But I was shocked, nonetheless, because we don’t use labels to describe people in our house. We’ll talk about their eye color or their hair color or on a rare occasion, their skin color (brownish, my kids will say, or kind of tan or even pink). But never black, white, Asian, Hispanic.
So I gently asked, “Who told you that?”
“Susie.” His 4-year old cousin.
I blinked. Then said, “Tell me about your mom. What about her?”
He said, “My mom is white.”
I said, “What about you?”
He said, “I’m white.” With his big brown eyes, he glanced down at his tan skin when he said that.
I just sighed. Why do we have to use these labels in this first place?
That day, when his father picked him up, the first thing the boy said was, “Dad, you are black!” And his father shrugged and said, “Yes, I am black.” I kind of shrugged. What an awkward moment.
The next day, when his mom picked him up from my house, she said, “Um, did anything racial come up yesterday?”
I told her about the boy saying, “My dad is black.” I told her that he reported his cousin told him that. She said, “Oh.”
Then she told me that the night before, the boy’s dad called her and accused her of being a racist. He said he didn’t want the boy to have to deal with racial issues at his age. She said, “I don’t either!”
Until that day, the boy simply had a dad and a mom. Now, he knows that he has a black dad and a white mom. Does that mean it matters? Does the label make a difference?
Commenting on racial and ethnic issues makes me nervous. If one notices differences, is one a racist? If I don’t mention someone’s ethnic heritage, am I disrespecting their culture? I can never be anything other than a white woman and as such, it’s hard to figure out what I’m allowed to say or not say.
I used to live in an area with a mostly white population. I remember the afternoon we were visiting a church couple and the wife explained about all that she had to leave behind when they left Detroit for northern Michigan. They sacrificed their beautiful home with its white carpets when Detroit began desegregating its schools in 1976. She spoke as if fleeing desegregation was somehow noble and righteous. In their eyes, they rescued their kids from having to go to school with black kids.
I suppose I am a coward because I said nothing, though I felt a queasy in the presence of this woman was seemed unaware of her utter racism.
So I was happy when we moved back here to the Pacific Northwest where our children go to school with a diverse population of kids. We do our best to raise our kids to be colorblind.
But then a child hears from another child who heard from an adult somewhere that some of us are black and some of us are white and some of us wonder why those labels make us cringe. I wonder if the day will ever come when we are all just plain old people who have different colored eyes and different ancestors and different shades of skin?
Actual Unretouched Photo 