Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

by Beverly Daniel Tatum

  Breaking beyond the structural and psychological limitations imposed on one’s group is possible, but not easily achieved. To the extent that members of targeted groups do push societal limits—achieving unexpected success, protesting injustice, being “uppity”—by their actions they call the whole system into question. Miller writes that they “expose the inequality, and throw into question the basis for its existence. And they will make the inherent conflict an open conflict. They will then have to bear the burden and take the risks that go with being defined as ‘troublemakers.’”17

  The history of subordinate groups is filled with so-called troublemakers, yet their names are often unknown. Preserving the record of those subordinates and their dominant allies who have challenged the status quo is usually of little interest to the dominant culture, but it is of great interest to subordinates who search for an empowering reflection in the societal mirror.

  Many of us are both dominant and subordinate. Clearly racism and racial identity are at the center of discussion in this book, but as Audre Lorde said, from her vantage point as a Black lesbian, “There is no hierarchy of oppression.”18 The thread and threat of violence runs through all of the isms. There is a need to acknowledge each other’s pain, even as we attend to our own.

  For those readers who are in the dominant racial category, it may sometimes be difficult to take in what is being said by and about those who are targeted by racism. When the perspective of the subordinate is shared directly, an image is reflected to members of the dominant group that is disconcerting. To the extent that one can draw on one’s own experience of subordination—as a young person, as a person with a disability, as someone who grew up poor, as a woman—it may be easier to make meaning of another targeted group’s experience. For those readers who are targeted by racism and are angered by the obliviousness of Whites sometimes described in these pages, it may be useful to attend to your experience of dominance where you may find it—as a heterosexual, as an able-bodied person, as a Christian, as a man—and consider what systems of privilege you may be overlooking. The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging our complicity in the oppression of others.

  Our ongoing examination of who we are in our full humanity, embracing all of our identities, creates the possibility of building alliances that may ultimately free us all. It is with that vision in mind that I move forward with an examination of racial identity in the chapters to follow. My goal is not to flatten the multidimensional self-reflection we see of ourselves but to focus on a dimension often neglected and discounted in the public discourse on race.

  PART II

  Understanding Blackness in a White Context

  THREE

  The Early Years

  “Is my skin brown because I drink chocolate milk?”

  THINK OF YOUR EARLIEST RACE-RELATED MEMORY. HOW OLD WERE you? When I ask adults in my workshops this question, they call out a range of ages: “Three,” “Five,” “Eight,” “Thirteen,” “Twenty.” Sometimes they talk in small groups about what they remember. At first they hesitate to speak, but then the stories come flooding forward, each person’s memory triggering another’s.

  Some are stories of curiosity, as when a light-skinned child wonders why a dark-skinned person’s palms are so much lighter than the backs of his hands. Some are stories of fear and avoidance, communicated verbally or nonverbally by parents, as when one White woman describes her mother nervously telling her to roll up the windows and lock the doors as they drove through a Black community. Some are stories of active bigotry, transmitted casually from one generation to the next through the use of racial slurs and ethnic jokes. Some are stories of confusing mixed messages, as when a White man remembers the Black maid who was “just like family” but was not allowed to eat from the family dishes or use the upstairs bathroom. Some are stories of terror, as when a Black woman remembers being chased home from school by a German shepherd, deliberately set loose by its White owner as she passed by. I often ask audience members, “What do you remember? Something someone said or did? A name-calling incident? An act of discrimination? The casual observation of skin color differences? Were you the observer or the object of observation?”

  In large groups, I hesitate to ask the participants to reveal their memories to a crowd of strangers, but I ask instead what emotions are attached to the memories. The participants use such words as anger, confusion, surprise, sadness, embarrassment. Notice that this list does not include such words as joy, excitement, delight. Too often the stories are painful ones. Then I ask, “Did you talk to anyone about what happened? Did you tell anyone how you felt?” It is always surprising to me to see how many people will say that they never discussed these clearly emotional experiences with anyone. Why not? Had they already learned that race was not a topic to be discussed?

  If they didn’t talk to anyone else about it, how did these three- or five- or eight- or thirteen-year-old children make sense of their experience? Has the confusion continued into adulthood? Are we as adults prepared to help the children we care about make sense of their own race-related observations?

  Preschool Conversations

  Like many African Americans, I have many race-related memories, beginning when I was quite small. I remember being about three years old when I had an argument with an African American playmate. He said I was “black.” “No I’m not,” I said, “I’m tan.” I now see that we were both right. I am Black, a person of African descent, but tan is surely a more accurate description of my light-brown skin than black is. As a three-year-old child who knew her colors, I was prepared to stand my ground. As an adult looking back on this incident, I wonder if I had also begun to recognize, even at three, that in some circles it was better to be tan than to be black. Had I already started internalizing racist messages?

  Questions and confusion about racial issues begin early. Though adults often talk about the “color blindness” of children, the fact is that children as young as three do notice physical differences such as skin color, hair texture, and the shape of facial features.1 Certainly preschoolers talk about what they see, and often they do it in ways that make parents uncomfortable. How should we respond when they do?

  My own children have given me many opportunities to think about this question. For example, one winter day, my youngest son, David, observed a White mother helping her brown-skinned biracial daughter put on her boots in the hallway of his preschool. “Why don’t they match, Mommy?” he asked loudly. Absentmindedly collecting his things, I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about—mismatched socks, perhaps? When I asked, he explained indignantly, “You and I match. They don’t match. Mommies and kids are supposed to match.”

  David, like many three-year-olds (and perhaps some adults), had overgeneralized from his routine observations of White parents with White children, and Black parents, like his own, with Black children. As a psychologist, I recognized this preschool tendency to overgeneralize as a part of his cognitive development, but as a mother standing with her child in the hallway, I was embarrassed, afraid that his comment might have somehow injured the mother-daughter pair standing in the hallway with us. I responded matter-of-factly, “David, they don’t have to match. Sometimes parents and kids match, and sometimes they don’t.”

  More often, my children and I have been on the receiving end of a preschooler’s questions. The first conversation of this type I remember occurred when my oldest son, Jonathan, was enrolled in a day-care center where he was one of few children of color, and the only Black child in his class. One day, as we drove home from the day-care center, Jonathan said, “Eddie says my skin is brown because I drink too much chocolate milk. Is that true?”* Eddie was a White three-year-old in Jonathan’s class who, like David, had observed a physical difference and was now searching for an explanation.

  “No,” I replied, “your skin is brown because you have something in your skin called melanin. Melanin is very important
because it helps protect your skin from the sun. Eddie has melanin in his skin, too. Remember when Eddie went to Florida on vacation and came back showing everybody his tan? It was the melanin in his skin that made it get darker. Everybody has melanin, you know. But some people have more than others. At your school, you are the kid with the most!”

  Jonathan seemed to understand the idea and smiled at the thought that he was the child with the most of something. I talked more about how much I liked the color of his pecan-colored skin, how it was a perfect blend of my light-brown skin and his father’s dark-brown complexion. I wanted to affirm who Jonathan was, a handsome brown-skinned child. I wanted to counter the implication of Eddie’s question—that there was perhaps something wrong with brown skin, the result of “too much” chocolate milk.

  This process of affirmation was not new. Since infancy I had talked about how much I liked his smooth brown skin and those little curls whenever I bathed him or brushed his hair. I searched for children’s books depicting brown-skinned children. When Jonathan was one year old, we gave him a large brown rag doll, complete with curly black hair made of yarn, a Marcus Garvey T-shirt, and an African name. Olayinka, or Olay for short, was his constant companion at home and at the day-care center during nap time. Especially because we had lived in predominantly White communities since his birth, I felt it was important to make sure he saw himself reflected positively in as many ways as possible. As many Black families do, I think we provided an important buffer against the negative messages about Blackness offered by the larger society.2

  But Jonathan continued to think about the color of his skin, and sometimes he would bring it up. One Saturday morning I was cooking pancakes for breakfast, and Jonathan was at my side, eagerly watching the pancakes cook on the griddle. When I flipped the pancakes over, he was excited to see that the cream-colored batter had been transformed into a golden brown. Jonathan remarked, “I love pancakes. They are brown, just like me.” On another occasion when we were cooking together, he noticed that I had set some eggs out on the kitchen counter. Some of the eggs were brown, and some of them were white. He commented on the fact that the eggs were not all the same color. “Yes,” I said, “they do have different shells. But look at this!” I cracked open a brown egg and emptied its contents into a bowl. Then I cracked open a white egg. “See, they are different on the outside, but the same on the inside. People are the same way. They look different on the outside, but they are the same on the inside.”

  Jonathan’s questions and comments, like David’s and Eddie’s, were not unusual for a child of his age. Preschool children are very focused on outward appearances, and skin color is the racial feature they are most likely to comment on.3 I felt good about my ability as a parent to respond to Jonathan’s questions. (I was, after all, teaching courses on the psychology of racism and child development. I was not caught completely off guard!) But I wondered about Jonathan’s classmates. What about Eddie, the boy with the chocolate-milk theory? Had anyone set him straight?

  In fact, Eddie’s question, “Is your skin brown because you drink too much chocolate milk?” represented a good attempt to make sense of a curious phenomenon that he was observing. All the kids in the class had light skin except for Jonathan. Why was Jonathan’s skin different? It didn’t seem to be dirt—Jonathan washed his hands before lunch like all the other children did, and there was no change. He did often have chocolate milk in his lunch box—maybe that was it. Eddie’s reasoning was first-rate for a three-year-old. The fact that he was asking about Jonathan’s skin, rather than speculating about his own, reflected that he had already internalized “Whiteness” as the norm, which it was in that school. His question did not reflect prejudice in an adult sense, but it did reveal confusion. His theory was flawed, and he needed some help.

  I decided to ask a staff member how she and the other preschool teachers were handling children’s questions about racial differences. She smiled and said, “It really hasn’t come up.” I was amazed. I knew it had come up; after all, Jonathan had reported the conversations to me. How was it that she had not noticed?

  Maybe it was easy not to notice. Maybe these conversations among three-year-olds had taken place at the lunch table or in the sand box, away from the hearing of adults. I suspect, too, that there may have been some selective inattention on the part of the staff. When children make comments to which we don’t know how to respond, it may be easier simply not to hear what has just been said or to let it slip from our consciousness and memory. Then we don’t have to respond, because it “hasn’t come up.”

  Many adults do not know how to respond when children make race-related observations. Imagine this scenario. A White mother and preschool child are shopping in the grocery store. They pass a Black woman and child, and the White child says loudly, “Mommy, look at that girl! Why is she so dirty?” (Confusing dark skin with dirt is a common misconception among White preschool children.) The White mother, embarrassed by her child’s comment, responds quickly with a “Ssh!”

  An appropriate response might have been: “Honey, that little girl is not dirty. Her skin is as clean as yours. It’s just a different color. Just like we have different hair colors, people have different skin colors.” If the child still seemed interested, the explanation of melanin could be added.4 Perhaps afraid of saying the wrong thing, however, many parents don’t offer an explanation. They stop at “Ssh,” silencing the child but not responding to the question or the reasoning underlying it. Children who have been silenced often enough learn not to talk about race publicly. Their questions don’t go away, they just go unasked.

  I saw the legacy of this silencing in my Psychology of Racism classes. My students had learned that there is a taboo against talking about race, especially in racially mixed settings, and creating enough safety in the class to overcome that taboo was the first challenge for me as an instructor. But the evidence of the internalized taboo is apparent long before children reach college.

  When addressing parent groups, I often hear from White parents who tell me with pride that their children are “color-blind.” Usually the parent offers as evidence a story of a friendship with a child of color whose race or ethnicity has never been mentioned to the parent. For example, a father reported that his eight-year-old daughter had been talking very enthusiastically about a friend she had made at school. One day when he picked his daughter up from school, he asked her to point out her new friend. Trying to point her out of a large group of children on the playground, his daughter elaborately described what the child was wearing. She never said she was the only Black girl in the group. Her father was pleased that she had not, a sign of her color blindness. I wondered if, rather than a sign of color blindness, it was a sign that she had learned not to be so impolite as to mention someone’s race.

  My White college students would sometimes refer to someone as Black in hushed tones, sometimes whispering the word as though it were a secret or a potentially scandalous identification. When I detected this behavior, I liked to point it out, saying it is not an insult to identify a Black person as Black. Of course, sometimes one’s racial group membership is irrelevant to the conversation, and then there is no need to mention it, but when it is relevant, as when pointing out the only Black girl in a crowd, we should not be afraid to say so.

  Blackness, Whiteness, and Painful History

  Of course, when we talk to children about racial issues, or anything else, we have to keep in mind each child’s developmental stage and cognitive ability to make sense of what we are saying. Preschool children are quite literal in their use of language and concrete in their thinking. They talk about physical differences and other commonly observed cultural differences such as language and style of dress because they are tangible and easy to recognize. They may be confused by the symbolic constructs that adults use.5

  This point was brought home to me in another conversation with my son Jonathan. As a working mother, I often found trips to the grocery store to be a g
ood opportunity for “quality” time with my then four-year-old. We would stroll the grocery aisles, chatting, as he sat in the top part of the grocery cart and I filled the bottom. On such an outing, Jonathan told me that someone at school had said he was Black. “Am I Black?” he asked me. “Yes, you are,” I replied. “But my skin is brown,” he said. I was instantly reminded of my own preschool “I’m not black, I’m tan” argument on this point. “Yes,” I said, “your skin is brown, but Black is a term that people use to describe African Americans, just like White is used to describe people who came from Europe. It is a little confusing,” I conceded, “because Black people aren’t really the color black, but different shades of brown.” I mentioned different members of our family and the different shades we represented, but I said that we were all African Americans and in that sense could all be called Black.

  Then I said, “It’s the same with White people. They come in lots of different shades—pink, beige, even light brown. None of them are white like this piece of paper.” I held up the white notepaper on which my grocery list was written as proof. Jonathan nodded his agreement with my description of Black people as really being varying shades of brown but hesitated when I said that White people were not really white in color. “Yes they are,” he said. I held up the paper again and said, “White people don’t really look like this.” “Yes, they do,” he insisted. “Okay,” I said, remembering that children learn from actual experiences. “Let’s go find one and see.” We were alone in the grocery aisle, but sure enough, when we turned the corner, there was a White woman pushing her cart down the aisle. I leaned over and whispered in Jonathan’s ear, “Now, see, she doesn’t look like this paper.” Satisfied with this evidence, he conceded the point, and we moved on in our conversation. As I discovered, we were just getting started.