Follow Up on Race

beate continues:

To what extent are you comfortable articulating issues and questions of race with your non-white friends?
...
I'm uncomfortable with asking my minority friends to explain how race works in this country--yet clearly it's a field where I have tons to learn. Do you share my dilemma? How do you handle it?

I certainly understand how you feel. Personally, I have been lucky to have some very kind, generous friends willing to talk about stuff with me. I can't say I remember many "okay, tell me all about race" conversations, but there have been plenty of race conversations, often initiated by me, in which I learned a lot.

I guess most of my learning about race has happened in academic ways. I've read a lot of books and sat around a lot of seminar tables talking about it with people whose job it is to teach me about it.

It's my job to teach about it now, and I see the issue from a slightly different perspective of feeling the need to protect my minority students from their white peers who want to look to them as the race experts. When I taught at a mostly white, mostly well-to-do (upper-middle and upper-class) university, I generally had about 10% minority representation in my classes. That might mean one or two Black students. I teach a lot about the relationship between white and Black Americans for the past 200 years, and often the white students would all literally look at the Black students (or sometimes student) when we'd be talking about it. I worked hard to remind them (without coming out and saying it) that I was the expert in the class and they should ask me their questions about Black issues in U.S. culture, not the person who just happened to have skin the same color as W.E.B. DuBois or Frederick Douglass. (Often enough, the Black students in my classes were second or even first generation immigrants but the white students just saw them as "Black" and thus, African American and experts on African American issues.)

I think it's important to remember that this is a concrete, historical and cultural subject that can be learned. You can't learn what it feels like on a personal level to be a race other than your own, but you can certainly learn about how race works in our culture. And just because someone has a particular identity doesn't mean they are experts in the history of those who happened to share their identity. I mean, have you seen the stats on what the "average" (read: white) Stanford or Berkley student doesn't know about basic U.S. history? White students, that is, don't necessarily know (what is widely assumed to be) "white" history. So I look at it mostly as a subject that it's my job to learn about by doing the research. Now I also get the wonderful (though sometimes frustrating) opportunity to teach other white students about it and thus spare some Black person out there the experience of watching yet another white person shove her foot in her mouth at an unfortunate moment.

cloudscome adds:

I am working to build positive black identity through language, role models, literature, etc. I would be interested to read how you are doing that. Do you have any good kid's books to recommend?

Nat's still little and has yet to notice racial difference. But I spend a lot of time thinking about the need to make sure she knows how beautiful and smart she is while living in a society that tells her otherwise. I love kids' books and have a small pile of race-related ones in the cabinet waiting for her to be old enough to stop tearing and chewing them up. But my priority for teaching her a positive self image that includes race is giving her Black people to look to as examples of successful, happy, smart, proud adults who look like her. I don't think the importance of that can be overstated. For me, I almost see it as my top priority in parenting--perhaps second only to a fabulous education. (Well, I guess both of those are second to giving her an unwavering faith in my unconditional love and support for her happiness, but that isn't too challenging yet.) So as she gets older, I get more anxious to look around and make sure she gets opportunities to bond with Black adults she could imagine growing up to be like. And as the post below shows, we aren't really there yet to the extent we'd like to be, but we're working on it and will keep working on it.

It's hard to be an interracial family in such a segregated country. There is virtually no place to stand and be all of what we are. It isn't a matter of people "approving" or "disapproving" of our family, it's a matter of where to live, where to go to church, where to shop, where to play. It almost always comes down to a choice between one race or another predominating. And I am usually happy to be in the minority so that my daughter doesn't have to be, when I can choose that. But then there's the question of her peers wondering why she has white parents and there she is, in the minority again after all.

Sometimes, on the playground, children ask guileless race questions of us and I imagine what it might be like when she's old enough that they just start asking her. For example, one day on the playground, a little Black girl with a nearby preschool group asked a biracial (looking) boy if I was his mommy. "No!" he said as if she was crazy. She looked at me then, and said "whose mommy are you?" Nat was standing at my feet, her hand on my knee. I touched her head. "I'm her mommy" I said. "Oh" said the little girl quietly and ran off. Soon after, the biracial boy asked me to watch him do a trick on the monkey bars--then another and another. He and I were bonded pretty tightly by the time his (indeed, white) mommy came to collect him.

Another time at another playground, a Black girl about two years older than Nat played with us on a rocking boat (with two other Black children) for a while and finally got up the courage to ask me "why is she [Nat] Black?" "One of her mommies is Black" I answered. "Are you her mommy?" she asked. I told her I was one of her mommies. She reported all this to her care giver who later asked me if Nat was my foster child.

Another time, a white girl about 5 years old asked me if Nat was my baby. I told her she was. "But she's brown" the little girl said. "She's adopted" I answered. I didn't like my answer in that case and have spent some time turning it over to try and come up with a better one that doesn't make Nat the oddity. Yet I know that what I said answered what that little girl was really asking. It's the information she was looking for. I heard her a minute later say to a friend in an overacting pretend voice, "I'm adopted!" New concept? Maybe.

Someday before very long, Nat is going to be getting these questions herself and they aren't just a matter of adoption or just a matter of Black pride or white liberal okayness with interracial families. They are a matter of explaining in-betweenness in a world that loves to keep things in tidy categories. I have lived in in-between places for much of my life and learned the ropes of not fitting in early. Nat will learn them earlier yet. I hope she decides like I did, that it's a blessing. Those are certainly our family's values and we will undoubtedly make them clear overtly and implicitly. So far, Nat has a fairly stubborn way about her. She's not defiant or willful (more than the average toddler--perhaps a little less than the average toddler so far) but she has a real sense of confident self about her. I am counting on that carrying her through the playground discussions to come.

Later, I'll post some of my favorite books for kids and adults if folks are interested. Right now, I'm headed to bed.

Comments

[rabi]

definitely interested in the books. (especially the kid ones, but because I like to read them...)

[Beate]

You are right to emphasize the fact that race can be studied academically and has a large body of literature with which to engage. Also, I too have had experiences of having to redirect classroom discussion when students relied on the one visible minority student to educate them. That said, I think that a reasonable grasp of how race matters in this country requires personal narratives in addition to social science. These may be easier to come by in the humanities. But I guess what I'm getting at is that my understanding of class, based on social science, has been deepened by my growing up (as a deacon's kid) next to a housing project, and later in a small village, in a country where class talk is fairly common. Race segregation in the US, I find, makes it far more difficult for me to get the same qualitative understanding of race that I have of class. I've had the occasional experience of a minority student nearly APOLOGIZING when s/he pointed out racist barriers that might limit certain job opportunities.

Anyway, thanks a lot for indulging me on this issue and penning a number of really thoughtful posts on it.

[art-sweet]

Definitely interested in your book list!

[Emmie (Better Make It A Double)]

What a beautiful, though-provoking post. Thank you.

[Tracy]

Sometimes, when I talk about adopting our daughter with little kids, I refer to her bio-mom as her "tummy mommy". I don't know if that helps you any, but at any rate, I think you gave the appropriate answer to that little girl!

[Shannon]

Thank you for this dialgoue. I could read/write/talk about these issues all day. Both of my daughters were born in open adoptions. We're white. (And I must add that being boilded down to a single color has always rubbed me the wrong way. We're actually Italian/Irish and Italian/Irish/French. Recent DNA studies show that none of us have any idea how White, Black or Other we really are. Some of us have more African genes than Eastern European genes even though our skin indicates the contrary).

We live in a very alternative-thinking small city, but racially it's not diverse. We go out of our way to socialize in the most diverse part of town just to give ourselves the opportunity to see some color. It's a global thing. We did this with D, our oldest, because we value diversity. We had no idea three years later our youngest would look so different than us. When people see Z's black baby dolls they're often surprised to learn they were passed down from D. Giving D black dolls was a way for us to support and embrace the fact that not all families look alike. Then along came Z and our practices were taken to a whole new level.

An acquaintence once said of Z in front of D, "She's yours? Was she adopted?" It was a shock to the system. I said, "Why do you ask?" - "Because she looks so different than you and D" - "Not all of us look alike," I said with (forced) cheer, "Right, D?" Then I launched into this whole thing about race in this country and why is skin color the number one identifier for so many of us, and have you considered X, and thought about Y and Z. Sometimes when we're with my sister and her (bio) children (one is African American, the other West Indian) people assume Z is their little sister and that my sister and/or I are their adoptive or foster moms. It's very mysterious to me since in this day and age I know better to assume such things. But generally speaking we live in a supportive, forward-thinking community so we count ourselves lucky.

Thanks for reminding me that skin color does not make one an expert on Race Relations in the U.S.

I look forward to your book list!

[lorrie]

1/2 black and 1/2 white progressive and liberal Montessori school (Yes! Popular and prestigious! In SOUTH CAROLINA! BOOYAH!)...Now Mad is in a Catholic school for 3rd grade..the different colors of the rainbow are tapering off