More adventures in parenting – the interracial edition

So – let’s jump right in shall we?

If you are white, you can get away with not thinking or talking about race, pretty much ever. And even if you think you think a lot about race, you probably don’t think about it as much as you think you do. However, if you are a white single mom who winds up going to Howard for law school, marries the guy you meet there, and has two beautiful brown babies with him, you are going to wind up thinking about race a lot more than you ever thought possible, and in ways you never thought possible[1].

And despite all the thinking you do about race, sometimes you are going to drop the ball and forget something important. This post is how I forgot to tell my daughter her dad was Black.

So, let me start with some basic demographics; my family doesn’t match. We are –

Mom – white

Dad – Black

D – 15, boy, white

Z – 7, girl, mixed, aka pinky-brown

G – 5, boy, mixed

Like a lot of interracial families, we have taken a matter of fact of tone about skin color – mommy and D are pinky-white, daddy is brown. Z decided when she was 2 that she was pinky-brown, so we’ve been running with that for the past 5 years, and G has been largely unconcerned with what exact shade of brownish he is.

One evening the entire family was sitting down to dinner and we were discussing our family’s German, Irish, Norwegian and been-here-forever American heritage. While serving the mac-n-cheese I casually mentioned, don’t forget you have ancestors on your father’s side from Africa too.

And that is when I blew Z’s mind.

“Wait – WHO is from Africa!?!? Grandma is from Cleveland!”

She has no idea. We haven’t told her, so how would she know? There are moments when you get to a glimpse into how your kid views the world, usually in the process of somehow destroying that worldview, like when you find out that your 3 year old thinks that his pre-school teacher lives at school because he is completely freaked out by seeing her at the grocery store; this was one such moment. I muddled though some explanation of Daddy’s connection to Africa;

Well, honey, Daddy’s family from way back is from Africa, you know, Daddy is Black or African-American, and Black folks came to America from Africa way back when.

Z was quiet. This NEVER happens. She talks all the time. I think until that moment, she had had no idea Daddy was Black; she had never connected her father’s or her own brown skin any kind of identity, it was just another incidental variation. Just because race was something I thought about all the time, didn’t mean it was something she thought about, ever. And now for the first time, she was thinking about it, and thinking about it as it related to her.

As we sat at the dinner table, I could see the wheels turning in her head and I wanted to reach in there and make sure that all the connections that were being made were good, strong and empowering. I could see every Black History Month presentation from school being re-filed and re-categorized in her brain. She knew about the civil right movement, and had written about her school namesake’s Sargent Shriver’s school desegregation efforts in Chicago for a project, but until that moment, I don’t think she knew her connection to those stories. Whole mental schema were being rearranged in her head and I was powerless to stop it. I wondered if I had provided enough brown skinned baby dolls, enough books with pretty, smart Black girls as the main character and I wondered if maybe I should have done something sort of Afro-centric at some point in my parenting (that thought kind of wandered in and wondered right back out, we aren’t a Kwanza-celebrating kind of household).

In our all of our conversations about skin color & curly hair in this house (and trust me, we have had A LOT of them, Z really wanted to know why no one else was her exact shade of pinky-brown and has hair quite like hers), we had never made the connection between her skin color, Daddy’s skin color and some identity, to an idea of Blackness. Z knew they were tall because of Norwegian genes, but they didn’t know that their brown skin and curly hair came from somewhere, and that somewhere was Africa.

So I didn’t exactly forget to tell her Daddy was Black; I just had sort of assumed I didn’t need to tell her at all. I was so used to living with the idea of race in my head, it had never occurred it me that Z would see her Daddy’s brown skin and not identify him as African-American, thereby connecting him, and her, to a rich and complicated history in America.

The next day I picked her up from school, and she told me that she told her friends that she was part African-American and that some of them didn’t believe her. I told her not to worry, as long as she knew it, it was ok. And beside, it’s kind of silly not to believe her, I mean, us pinky-white folks have to mix with something to get pinky-brown kids. She was OK with all that, and a few months later, when she and her brother we getting ready for International Night at school, Z’s list of “things we are” went something like this (with comments from G. in parenthesis)

Irish (that’s why we are lucky)

Norwegian (Yeah Vikings!!)

African-American

German

And who is that other guy we are related to? (I dunno? more Vikings!).

I was ok with that list, but more importantly, she was OK with that list.

[1] For example, my oldest son and I had a conversation about the racial identity of squirrels when he was about 4, because here in the DC area there are black squirrels and grey squirrels. And the black squirrels live in Rock Creek Park and, therefore, also at Howard University School of Law. When he was little, he wanted to know if they were Black squirrels, or squirrels who just happened to be black and hung out at Howard. See what I mean? Never anticipated that one. By the way, you are welcome for the truly awesome mental image of Black squirrels.