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| Image credit: Photo by GarySmith70 on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
"Mama, I'm half black, half white," Janie calls to me from where she's playing in the living room.
I'd been wondering when this day would come, the day when my biracial daughter would finally notice race and start talking about herself in racial terms. Before either of my children were born, race loomed in my imagination as the greatest parenting challenge I would face. I worried a lot about how I, as a white woman, could raise my children to live in a world that would see them as black, with all the racial stereotypes and prejudices that went with that.
I read books and articles about how to raise healthy biracial children. I observed my own children and how other people reacted to them and how they reacted to others. And I found that young children don't understand the concept of race; it's learned. It takes children a while to make sense of those color words — "black" and "white" — being used for people who really aren't black or white at all, but share a set of features common to people of African or European descent. It takes them time to recognize what features those people share. And it takes time for them to internalize the stereotypes that go with those racial labels. Race doesn't become an issue until we make it an issue. So I try very hard to meet my children where they are rather than to make an issue of it for them. Parenting around race hasn't been without its challenges, but so far it has taken up much less of my daily parenting bandwidth than issues related to autism.
But I felt that, today, I'd entered a new phase. Janie had stopped seeing me as light skinned and Daddy as dark skinned and herself as golden skinned, which simply describe how we all look as individuals. She had finally figured out what those terms "black" and "white" meant in terms of categorizing us as part of racial groupings in society, and with that understanding would come all the burdens that our culture puts on those words. I'd never heard her use these terms before, never heard her test them out and play with them, so her simple statement caught me off guard. Maybe that's why I responded the way I did. Perhaps I've been too sensitive to my own tendency to see the world in another kind of black and white to be comfortable with Janie's stark breakdown of herself, but I said the first thing that popped into my head as I walked toward the room she was in, "That's true. And you're probably some other things too."
"What?" she said.
"You know," I said rounding the corner into the room, "You have black and white and some other things too in the way you're made up."
"No, Mama," she said, looking up exasperatedly at me from where she was playing on the floor, "That doesn't even make any sense. There are no other colors on a chess board!"
And then I saw. She had a chess board on the floor in front of her and had been laying out the pieces, combining both black and white on the same side of the board to make a pretty pattern: half black and half white. Her side of the board was half black and half white. She was going to play half black and half white. She was half black and half white.
Oh. Race wasn't an issue. I made it an issue. Look at that.
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