More about Race, Beauty and Transracial Parenting

Beate said:

I see a dilemma here: The need to counter society's negative messages with positive ones of your own conflicts, to my mind, with the risk that constant judgment of ANY kind will generate insecurities. I'm following the logic of Alfie Kohn's "Unconditional Parenting" when I say that the constant affirmation of Nat's intelligence may some day raise the question (from her or others) of why you're not just taking for granted that she's smart. And yet I see why it's necessary to counter outsiders' negative input. Frankly, I have no idea how I would handle this dilemma. It's a tough one.

Sara said:

I think that the right amount of affirmation is hugely helpful, but too much praise reeks of insincerity.

Sadly, one's mother's view of one's beauty is probably the message least valued by just about any child over the age of 10 ... I think that making sure that the message is reinforced from other directions might be really helpful.

I appreciate Beate's recognition of the dilemma. It's definitely a dilemma, and as Nat has grown older and has started getting wiser to the world around her, our handling of that dilemma has shifted. No doubt it will keep shifting as the need arises.

The bottom line is, there's no right answer to the problem, because it's a problem rooted in and expressed through white supremacy and racism, plain and simple. There's no antidote to racism that any one parent or any one family can achieve on its own. When Sara suggests the need to reinforce family opinion with outside opinion, she couldn't have hit the target any squarer. The trouble is, where do we find that outside opinion? Look around. Where are girls and women who look like Nat represented as intelligent and beautiful? (For extra credit, compile a list of places where they're represented as inherently ugly, stupid, behavior problems, sexually loose and/or rapable, poor, drug-addicted, and otherwise undesirable and pathological.)

The only place I've found reinforcement of positive images of dark-skinned, kinky-haired girls and women is in strong Black neighborhoods in major cities: On the street in DC or Chicago where Nat is set upon at every turn by gushing Black adults telling her she's gorgeous, at the Black feminist bookstore (alas the passing of Sister Space in DC when U Street gentrified and their rent got raised), in the natural hair salon like the one we visited with Uncle Wayne in Seattle, where I met a wonderful woman who works with One Church, One Child and talked with me about the value of homeschooling Black children. And so our goal is to live in a place like that sometime soon and be sure Nat is surrounded by a real community of real people who love her and value her.

Meanwhile, our little commnunity such as it is does its best. Much of our decision-making about taking Nat consciously to the mirror and pointing out her beauty in the specificity of her features comes through earnest conversations with Black parents who do this with their own children, and whose parents did it for them. "Direct socialization" as one mother of daughters put it for me, is almost the only tool we have to combat the negative messages that our children are bombarded with through indirect socialization. Telling my daughter her brown skin is beautiful does feel awkward to me. But that is the price of raising a Black daughter in the 21st century U.S. I don't have the luxury of following the no doubt good advice of child development experts that too much praise can be harmful. (I read that in Einstein Didn't Use Flashcards myself, and thought, "where the heck does that leave our family?" with our commensurate need to give Nat some kind of counter-message from a popular culture that tells her she can never be beautiful and she's unlikely to succeed educationally.

It leaves our family where Black families have always been in this country. It's another moment of realizing that we have lost some white privilege we didn't know we had.

The reason I'm writing this follow up is because I think many of my white readers have probably not thought of it that way. I know that before I was Nat's mother, the idea of making such a big deal out of a child's beauty and/or intelligence would have rung artifical to me too. But how do you think those little girls in that film came to see those white dolls as "nice" or "pretty" or otherwise desirable? And what can I, as a mere individual mother, do to combat that? This is one of the few tools I have with a child not yet 2 years old.

When Nat is older, we'll be able to let her pursue her heart's desires and give her all kinds of complex opportunities to learn to appreciate and love herself in complex ways. It's one reason I want to home school. I want to give her opportunities to have ideas, try them out, succeed and fail on her own terms and learn to try again without feeling defeated by classroom rules or grades.

I have read interviews with adult transracial adoptees who say they felt their parents didn't find them beautiful; that they had no memories of being told they were beautiful and how that messed with their sense of self-worth and how they interpreted it in racial terms. And if the worst thing Nat can tell her therapist about me someday is "my mother told me I was beautiful too much" well, I'll take it.

As Trey points out, there's too little praise and there's too much praise. It's a tough line to walk, but if I have to err, I'd rather err on the side of a child who bats her eyelashes at herself in the mirror and declares "pretty girl" any day of the week.

Comments

[Nancy]

This dialogue has been interesting to watch. I have seen you with Nat, heard you speak with Nat when we have been on the phone, listened to stories you tell about Nat. I have never felt like you praise her too much or that it could be seen as insincere in any way.

I think putting something in writing sometimes leaves the impression that the message is somehow more rigid or strong than it is intended. What I mean is that saying you praise Nat a lot might strike some as potential overkill but it's all in what is mean by a lot.

Some people only say "I love you" on occasion. Others think you can never say it enough. Who is right? And how can you possibly know anything without seeing the actual people involved?

[Sara]

Guilty as charged. I wasn't judging you, and in fact thought when I read your original post that it's wonderful that you frequently comment to Nat and others about the fact that Nat is beautiful, smart, and good. Every girl needs a little affirmation from her mama sometimes. Nonetheless, I admit that I was viewing your dilemma from a perspective that doesn't fit with your situation. I have thought a LOT about the issues involved in being a white parent to a child of color, as my husband is dark brown, so whether we become parents by birth or adoption, we'll end up with a child that doesn't look like me, at least racially speaking. Nonetheless, my family's issues are different, as my child is most likely to either be biracial (with all of the complicated issues involved there), or of foreign origin (a foster care adoption isn't possible for us because while I'm American, we're not living in the USA). Also, having a secure man of color in the family (my husband was raised in a country where everybody looks like him) will create a very different family dynamic. In addition, being straight adds yet another different dynamic, as I was remembering that positive comments from men meant a lot more to me while growing up than did positive comments from women in general, and my mother in particular. So, my thoughts, which are based on my own experience, might not have been appropriate for your (and Nat's) situation. Sorry if my post seemed insensitive to your actual situation. For the record, I admire and respect your efforts in trying to deal with the problem of race head on, and realize that there are no easy answers.

[elswhere]

It is so tricky, isn't it. But what you say sounds really solid to me. There's only so much you (me, any of us) can do to counter the influence of the wider culture, but as parents, our most powerful tool is love and its expression. If you tell Nat over and over that she's beautiful, even if some anxious part of her later also wonders whether you were protesting too much, she'll always have that visceral memory inside, bouying her up.

[Yvette]

This is an excellent topic. I understand the perspective of those who may have fears about "too much praise." However, I thoroughly reject it for my own daughters.

It is easy to downplay praise when every image that is presented in the societal environment reflects your daughter in a positive light. In that case, it is even easy (perhaps necessary) to "downplay" such praise and direct socialization in your own home.

Such is NOT the case for parents rearing children who are not reflected in this way in society.

The only thing I would stress is that the private, direct socialization must be backed up by advocacy and more public efforts, which the children themselves can see. Why should my daughters believe that their skin and hair is beautiful when their mommy does not speak out against all-White images of female beauty in the wider environment?

The other day as we were watching TV one of my daughters commented "You know Mommy, whenever they show commercials with beautiful ladies in beautiful dresses, they're always White, never brown."

I agreed with her and we talked. But after several more commercial breaks where she audibly pointed this out to me, it occurred that my private reinforcement was not enough. Together we are now working on how to contact some of these businesses to express our hopes that they begin including more diverse advertising...

[chanie]

thank you for raising these issues in such a thoughtful way.
i think as a mom i struggle with the praising physical beauty issue too, even though i am white and my daughter is white. i want her to think she is beautiful, because i know in a couple years, she probably won't and will only find the bad things about her body or face. but don't want to focus to much on physical that she thinks that is more important to me than her personality.
i can appreciate how race and skin color complicates this even more. i like yvette's suggestions of activism and critical discussion of popular culture.

[Erin O']

Today I was teaching at an afterschool program I go to every week. 95% of the kids are AA. Today I was working with the 4-5 year olds, and we were looking at portraits. I brought reproductions of portraits by a variety of artists from different time periods, representing black, white, hispanic and even some Muslim children. I purposely showed only 2 images of white subjects, with many more images of people of color, especially AA children. I don't usually do a demonstration painting, but I wanted to remind them of how to use the watercolor paints properly, and I (now I realize it wasn't a good idea), did a quick self-portrait. I have straight hair and white skin. Guess what all of the little girls wanted to paint? A "self-portrait" with straight hair and white skin. Only one of the girls fits that description. The others are all AA.

One of the girls was upset because she got a bit of color onto her face in the painting. I pointed out that her skin is brown, and that we could fill the face in with brown paint, and it would look more like her. I actually saw the light bulb go on over her head. We spent time talking about what we all look like, the different hues of our skins, that it is ok to use brown paint on the faces of the people in their paintings.

I think part of it was definitely because I modeled a painting for them, which I almost never do -- kids invariable want their pix to look the same as one they've just seen, portrait, landscape, whatever. Especially if their teacher makes it.

But I had just read your post earlier in the day, and I wondered how much of it was about them wanting to be different than they were.

It was only after we talked about how pretty their puffs, twists and braids looked, how you could make different shades of brown, that they started to experiment on their own with their paintings.

It was eye-opening. And I'm glad I read your post when I did. And I will never model another self-portrait again.

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[Jennifer (Penguin)]

Thanks for another fascinating post. I'm not sure that it's relevant (white woman raising white boys!) but something that I'm really trying to work on with my boys is very specific praise - e.g. not just "you're so clever", but "that was very smart of you to have worked out by yourself that ...."

The more specific the praise, the more the child (or anyone else) believes it and values it.

so I throw that into the mix as another way of trying to make sure that Nat believes some of it when she's a teenager.