These questions made me uncomfortable because they forced me to reckon with my own latent racism. It meant admitting the extent to which I had become self-congratulatory about my own social consciousness. I would no longer be able to ignore or politely shake my head at things that I’d spent my life ignoring or politely shaking my head at: history, literature, art, news, politics, and current events that weren’t “about me” or “mine.” I’m certain it’s possible to become the parent of a black child and continue to ignore those things (though not without some measured effort), but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to. It’s one thing to know that institutional racism exists or to grapple with it intellectually. But to be confronted by its existence on a regular basis is, as I would soon learn, a game changer.
The adoption form gave me an out. I could have said, You know what? I’m not up for this. And that’s exactly why it made me so uncomfortable, mirroring back a version of myself that I didn’t particularly like or want to look at. When it came down to filling out the form, though, neither Jill nor I could bear the thought of leaving even a single box unchecked. If a birth mother looked at us and decided we weren’t the right family for her child, okay. But what child could we possibly, preemptively, say no to? With Jill looking over my shoulder, I checked every box.
* * *
Nearly nine months to the day after submitting our paperwork, Jill and I were matched with our son’s birth mother; she, like our son’s birth father, is black. From that moment, Jill and I were clear about what we wouldn’t do—perpetuate notions of color blindness or further narratives about a “post-racial” society and raise a black child as if he wasn’t. Even as the term “post-racial” was being called out as fantasy, it felt more like an absurdity in the daily context of raising Shiv. It infuriated me to hear people declare, “I don’t see color,” as if it were some kind of virtuous position; to treat my child as if his color is irrelevant is to erase him and to deny the fact that his color is all that some people will see about him.
Knowing what we didn’t want to do still left us with little sense of what we would do. Models for race-conscious parenting, though more prevalent than they’ve ever been, are still few and far between. We couldn’t speak to Shiv about being black, but Jill and I have had our own varied experiences with prejudice as gay women. Growing up with two moms also meant that there would be added elements of identity and prejudice for Shiv to tackle.
For a while, we held our worries, concerns, and plans in an orbit around Shiv, not directly involving him or discussing them with him. At the start, our parenting concerns were fairly universal anyway: sleeping and eating schedules, daily logistics, managing behavior, doctor’s appointments, and so on. We were already used to living as an interracial, same-sex couple before adding Shiv to the mix; long looks from strangers were not new to us. As a brown woman in America, I have also grown accustomed to unsolicited comments from strangers about my skin color and questions about my ethnic background. (Just before I wrote this sentence, a waitress told me that I “didn’t look Indian,” something I’ve heard my entire life.)
But adopting Shiv dramatically increased the amount of attention that even I was accustomed to receiving. Part of this is due to Shiv—he is a wildly charismatic human, thoroughly extroverted, always seeking to connect with those around him. And the other part is that our family doesn’t look like most other families; we don’t make sense to people when they look at us, at least not at first. When Shiv was still too young to understand, I felt a sense of fraught anticipation. At some point, the difference that he and our family represented to the broader world would begin to register with him. And, at some point, perhaps the same point, our family would begin to receive attention that was not well intended. When you’re living as a person of color in America, it’s a question not of if but of when. For each month that passed without incident, I carried the knowledge that it wouldn’t last.
As a southerner, I find it telling that my son’s first experience of blatant prejudice took place in Portland, Oregon, supposed bastion of tolerance and progressivism. Shiv, my mom, and I were spending a few days in the city before traveling down to Eugene, where my best friend was about to graduate with her doctorate from the University of Oregon. One beautifully sunny day, we took public transportation to the Portland zoo, where Shiv correctly identified a bald eagle without any hints from me (thanks, Visual Dictionary) and delighted in the sight of his first live polar bear. After a fair amount of trekking, he discovered a shaded play area that included a giant sandpit filled with digger trucks, shovels, and buckets; there were at least ten other kids hard at work when we arrived. My mom went off to find some food while I sat on a nearby bench, watching out of the corner of one eye the way parents do.
Shiv was one month away from turning three, and I was trying to let him work out social conflicts on his own; he had a year of preschool under his belt, where they encouraged kids to do the same, so I left him alone until I heard what was unmistakably his cry of distress. I found him in a standoff with an older white boy, whom I later discovered was five years old, over the possession of a particular dump truck. “Black boys can’t play here,” the boy told me. I froze.
I do not think Shiv completely grasped why what was said was hurtful, but he understood the intention behind the words. In my brain, I scrambled to uncover some thoughtful piece of parenting advice I might have filed away for just such a situation. I don’t know exactly what I said to the other kid, though I remember saying something. I wanted to scold him, but I also knew that he was parroting back something he’d heard a grown-up say, with full awareness that it was an insult, though not perhaps of its full significance.
After a conversation with the boy’s babysitter (who was also white and completely mortified), and a conversation between the babysitter and boy, he and Shiv reconciled and wound up playing together peacefully in the sand. At this point in his life, Shiv was still learning about unkindness in general, attempting to grasp why people might be hurtful to others in a whole host of contexts, from villains in fairy tales to mean kids on the playground; he had not yet distinguished that some people would be motivated to treat him differently because of the color of his skin.
It didn’t take long. Less than two years later, Jill, Shiv, and I were enjoying another beautiful afternoon, this time at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, an enormous affair that features an impressive carnival midway and vendors selling every type of fried food you can imagine. That was the first year that Shiv was tall enough to graduate from the kiddie rides and gain access to an additional crop of rides and fun houses. As he stood in line to gain entrance to an underwater-themed fun house, it became clear to me that the ticket taker was ignoring him. There had been some jostling, and the line wasn’t necessarily well formed, so he waited patiently on the stairs for her to call him forward. He was the only child of color in line; the ticket taker was white.
At this point, I felt myself begin to fume—even writing about it, my hands get shaky—and though I knew what I was seeing, I checked in with Jill. “Am I being paranoid, or…?” She knew immediately what I meant, which was a relief. We were both still hesitant to intervene, knowing that doing so might only make the situation worse, but also devastated by the look of disappointment and confusion on Shiv’s face. Gathering him up to leave and get in line for another ride would feel like a punishment to him. Then the ticket taker actually scolded Shiv, implying that he had cut in the line, sending him back a few places, which made our decision for us. Jill, the white mom, intervened, much to the woman’s surprise. She softened, though not enough to smile at him or tell him to “have fun!” as she had with the other kids, when letting him in. Jill and I, both working to wrangle our anger, met Shiv at the exit, where he proceeded to tell us how cool it had been inside. Suddenly, his face fell. “Why that lady was mean to me and not the other kids?”
We sighed, took a deep breath, told him the truth. Some white people are ugly to black people. Some
white people think that they’re better than people who aren’t white. It’s really unfair and we’re sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong.
* * *
Growing up in the 1980s, I was sold a cultural narrative of all colors of the rainbow are beautiful, but we don’t talk about racism! As a brown, queer woman, I can testify that sentiment didn’t work for me, and I was unwilling to sell Shiv a story that I knew was more wishful thinking than truth. We couch color-blind rhetoric as hopeful, even well intentioned, but that ignores the day-to-day reality of people of color and undermines our experience with feel-good rhetoric. Providing Shiv with a censored view of the way our society works might feel easier in the short term, but that willful ignorance would leave him completely unprepared to face the world as it is.
But telling a small child the truth about the ugliness in the world is a very unpleasant task, and we Americans tend to opt for a lot of erasing instead. The positive, upward trajectory of Progress! that’s taught in every American history class means denying the racism and violence that has occurred, and continues to occur, in this country. We like to focus more on all of the things that are “better now,” while refusing to talk about what still needs work. Whether I wanted to or not, I knew that I could not rewrite history or shield Shiv from uncovering unpleasant realities on his own; how would he feel when he discovered I’d kept the truth from him all along?
The most potent resource I would encounter to help me develop a parenting approach in response to this question came, oddly enough, from an episode of This American Life that I happened to listen to on a morning walk. Episode 557, “Birds & Bees,” examines three topics generally considered dangerous territory to discuss with kids: sex, race, and death. The episode describes its middle segment as tackling “the other facts of life that you don’t want to have to explain to children because you wish they were not facts or a part of life at all.” Narrated by the comedian W. Kamau Bell, the segment describes his personal struggle to determine just what to say to his two young mixed-race daughters about race in America. He describes two metaphoric pools: the race pool and the racism pool. The race pool, he recounts, is filled with positive stories of black achievement, heartwarming books, and diverse TV shows. Introducing his daughters to this pool was no problem and a no-brainer. But the racism pool—where the rest of the stories live and which is a lot less fun to swim in—Bell avoided and then felt guilty for avoiding.
After a particularly infuriating experience with racism in his own neighborhood, Bell organizes a public meeting to discuss the issues. At the forum, he meets a young black woman, Kadijah Means, a high school senior and Bay Area activist, who so impresses him with her understanding of “the broad strokes and the nuances” of race and racism that he decides to interview her father, in order to learn how to raise such a well-informed and self-assured daughter.
What Bell learns surprises him: Kadijah’s father, Cliff Means, had not only taken his daughter to swim in the racism pool at an early age; he had thrown her in the deep end. By age five, she had learned about slavery, Jim Crow, and historically racist policing policies in their home state of California. Cliff Means did not hold anything back, nor did he soften the edges of the rough truths he was asking his young daughter to swallow.
It is unfashionable in a helicopter parenting culture to push young children to swallow difficult, or even unpleasant, truths. With the impulse to protect comes, necessarily, an implication that children are unable to handle complexity and disappointment. To deliberately ask your child to see the ugly truth about racism in our country’s past and present can feel, on first blush, extreme and unnecessary, cruel and perverse. Why introduce things that will interrupt his innocence? Won’t the world do that eventually anyway?
And that’s the point. As I took a long walk and listened to Kadijah and Cliff Means’s story, I realized what Means did for his daughter—he armed her with knowledge. No one could surprise her or catch her off guard or insult her because she already knew the whole story herself. She knew how to see racism, and she also knew how to separate it from herself. This was the gift her father gave her. He knew that keeping the truth from her was not a form of protection; rather, it made her more vulnerable.
I find that most, if not all, of the parents I speak to (who are mostly, if not all, white) are alarmed by the “deep end of the swimming pool” approach to talking to kids about race; it feels extreme, unpleasant, unnecessary. Many remain convinced that race “just isn’t going to be an issue” for our kids the way it has been for kids in the past. Some of them even seem to believe that by talking to their children about race, they will somehow make race and discrimination real for their children in a way that wouldn’t happen otherwise.
The research begs to differ. Mahzarin Banaji, a Harvard University scientist who is best known for co-developing the famous Implicit Association Test, says that children as young as age three can pick up and parrot racist behavior within a few days of being exposed to it. A study conducted by University of Massachusetts–Amherst researcher Lisa Scott found that by nine months, infants have an easier time reading the emotional expressions of adults within groups they interact the most with; no wonder, then, that babies will display a preference for the faces of those who share their skin color. By the time they are preschoolers, our kids have already begun to differentiate how they play with children of their same race from how they play with “others.”
I think about white students I’ve taught, who come from liberal, progressive families but have been raised not to speak of race at all. Even as high school students, they struggle to understand the distinction between identifying race-related realities and saying something racist. They are such beginners, and I can’t help wondering to what extent that is due to the discomfort of the adults in their lives, who sold their kids an easy story rather than deal with the messy complexity of the truth.
* * *
In 2016, when my school’s holiday calendar aligned with the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, I decided that I would take Shiv. Like all Smithsonian institutions, the NMAAHC is vast, with multiple floors and wings that would take days to explore fully. I was there with a four-year-old, so I knew I had about two hours, max, before his attention gave out and his restlessness kicked in. With that in mind, we stepped onto a long escalator, then into a large elevator which took us several stories underground, the glass sides of the cab revealing dates written on the wall, flashing us back in time until we stepped out into the fifteenth century, the start of the African slave trade. This was what I had come to show him; it was why we were there.
The trip was my attempt to control his exposure to ideas about race, to get ahead of the game when it came to difficult topics I knew he would inevitably encounter, no matter how much I might try to shield him. I control the food he eats, when he sleeps, the media he consumes—why would I leave the first time he learned about slavery to chance? How much he would absorb I did not know, but I felt I owed him the truth.
What the visit will mean to him, what he will remember, I cannot say. He was uncharacteristically quiet as we walked through the exhibits and quickly asked me to pick him up and carry him—“Hold you, Mama”—though I knew he was not physically tired. At sixty-five pounds, he was not easy to heft, but nothing about that visit was supposed to be easy.
He was far from the only child his age there, though it was only black children I saw and mostly black adults, with a visible minority of white faces. Their presence made me wonder whom the museum was for, who the assumed audience might be. I was clearly not the only one who had thought to bring their black child. I was surprised by how quickly Shiv picked up on the feel of the space, how somber and withdrawn he became. He pointed to specific parts of the exhibit to ask questions: a pair of child-sized shackles struck him the most; he was unable to understand why anyone would want to treat a child that way.
In our family we believe that evil is not inherent but chosen or taught.
Therefore, we speak not of bad people and good people but of bad ideas, bad choices. There is danger, I feel, in fooling ourselves into thinking that all the people who perpetuated a slaveholding state were somehow evil, different from us, separate, removed. A comforting thought. One I have learned to refuse.
An artistic rendering of a slave auction was the last thing Shiv asked me to explain. “Mama, I don’t want to talk about this stuff anymore.” We moved quickly through the Civil War, into Reconstruction, into the segregated Pullman car of the Jim Crow era, and upward (literally—even the NMAAHC is not immune to that classic Western conception of time) into the present day. I have a photograph of Shiv standing, smiling, in front of a collection of four quotes that serve as the final panel inside the history galleries: one, a statement from the Chicago Commission on Race Relationships; another, a quote from Barack Obama; the third, Alicia Garza’s declaration “Our lives matter”; and finally, Maya Angelou’s affirmation “I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”
* * *
Since that time at the Portland zoo, Shiv’s encounters around race have been fairly innocuous and mostly coded; I see them more than he does. I grew up spending a great deal of time as the only non-white person in white spaces, and those uncomfortable, alienating experiences are less likely to occur in Houston than in Memphis. In both his hometown and mine, Shiv and I will sometimes find ourselves the only non-white people in the room at birthday parties, on playgrounds. It is a space that feels comfortable, or at least familiar to me. But Shiv’s presence adds an extra layer to the experience, one that makes me itchy and in a hurry to get it over with, moved by my instinctive desire to protect my child.
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