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Grown In My Heart’s Adoption Carnival VI asks:
How do you handle racism? GIMH knows that some of you may not have encountered this in adoption but what WOULD you do if you were to encounter it?
The question references two blog posts about families reacting to racist comments by young children. I highly recommend reading them.
Kids do recognize skin color, even if they don’t attribute the same values to it that adults often do. My Brown (”I’m not Black! I’m Brown!) son wanted to exclude all the White kids from his pretend party. He only wanted to invite people who “had the same” as he did. We now have The Berenstain Bear’s book No Girls Allowed, in which Brother Bear and Sister Bear each create their own exclusive clubs for members of the same sex. Although the book ends with everyone co-mingling, Jack decided that only boys could go in his room for awhile today.
If I didn’t have a brown son, would I care so much about skin color? That is, would I care if the books I bought reflected different skin tones? Would I notice if the schools had children of different colors? Would I be as happy to see a lot of Black kids playing in a park and have them play with my child?
I don’t know, but the blog posts really got me thinking. Growing up, my best friends were Phillipino and Hispanic. Linda was very dark, and, when I took a trip with her family, apparently her Dad got questioned about me. I always knew she was dark, like “burnt toast” she would say. It never mattered. Similarly, in high school, my friends were of different colors. Technically, two of them should have hated each other – their words – because one was Japanese and one was Korean. They laughed about it.
But when I entered college, my roommate was Black. She said to me, “You haven’t spent a lot of time around Black people have you?” I said, “No. Why?” She said, “It shows.” She never expanded on that. (Then again, this was the girl who set up her mirror so she could spy on our other roommate wherever she was in the room. Weird.)
All of this is to illustrate that I feel that I was raised to be colorblind, for the most part. Maybe that’s because I’m White, but I live in a place where I’m the minority. The dreaded colorblind worked, to some extent, because race was all around me, and it was never a big deal.
Unfortunately, I know that I can’t raise Jack that way. He has brown skin, and, even in place where White people are the minority, he’s going to be judged for that. I’m hoping that such judgement will diminish as generations age, more people are of mixed heritage, and reason prevails. I feel fortunate that I haven’t experienced any racist remarks – yet. I’m sure they’ll happen. And when they do?
I hope to react with the class and grace of the women who shared their experiences. I hope I have the guts to address the parents of the child(ren) in question and talk about the situation calmly. I hope Jack won’t feel too hurt or humiliated, and he’ll come out of the situation knowing that he’s right and they’re wrong.
