Bagheera and the ghost. Halloween 2013.
Halloween is just around the corner. Ettu, obsessed with everything and everyone Star Wars, is planning to be a rebel trooper (I think; I get them all mixed up these days). Nooa, my very own wizard in the making, wants to be Harry Potter. But here's the catch: he has insisted on wearing a mask, because, as he says, "Harry Potter has a fair face." When I suggest how absurd this is and proceed to show him Google images of all kinds of kids (and not just the fair ones) dressed up as Harry Potter, he softens in his resolve; however, now he says, he'll settle for the wand and the cloak and will be just a "stupid ol' wizard," in other words, not Harry Potter himself. He seems to be softening, though, so we'll see. A couple of years ago, when Nooa was obsessed with all things princesses and Frozen, he bewailed his dark hair, longing for the blond locks of Elsa. In the end, he opted to be Bagheera from the Jungle Book instead, with a long full black leotard from head to toe. Ettu is a little more fluid. That same year, he was Farmer Bean from Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. As long as he could sport a toy pistol (a solid prop for this cruel, gun-toting farmer bent on destroying the cunning fox), he was a happy camper. Skin tone be damned.
I have always been struck by the way talk of race seems to affect so many of us, from the earliest ages on. Last year, I read a book about parenting called NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman that had a fascinating chapter on race: "Why White Parents Don't Talk About Race." In this highly influential and ground-breaking book, which was published nearly six years ago now, the authors spend a good deal of time trying to get at the heart of the question of when is it too early or too late to talk to your children about race. The New York Times blog Motherlode tackled this subject in the 2012 piece by KJ Dell'Antonia "The Danger of Not Talking to Your Children About Race:"
“...when we don’t talk about race, our children continue to think about it — and what they think is that it matters too much to talk about. Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman wrote about this gap between what parents think we’re teaching, and what children are learning, in their “NurtureShock” column for Newsweek in 2009. It’s the children whose parents do directly address race — and directly means far more than vaguely declaring everyone to be equal — who are less likely to make assumptions about people based on the color of our skin.”
My sense is that the dominant reaction to discussions about race is simply to avoid them. And I think this happens far more between white parents and their children than between nonwhite parents and their children. Perhaps it's because we truly believe a "colorblind" approach means that we are teaching our children tolerance by not making race ever an issue. Frankly, like many other things, if you avoid talking about it, you can kick the proverbial ball down the road so that you don't have to explain the not-so-pleasant, even brutal realities of race struggles in our country and many others. My own experience is a bit different than other white parents of white children, being in a "mixed" relationship, as a white parent with a non-white partner. Talk of race and color and "belonging" is inevitable. I was well aware of my own children's awareness of race and racial identity when they were quite young. They are bi-racial and bi-cultural, as my husband is from and was raised in India, where most of his family still lives, and my second son Nooa, from an early age, began categorizing people based on the color of their skin (I've written about this in the past, so please excuse my repetition): if you were fair or "white," you were Danish (he had heard me saying that his maternal grandfather's family was from Denmark), and if you were brown, you were Indian (that included Latinos, southeast Asians, blacks, etc.). The only other racial category was for "Japanese" people (and this group included anyone from east Asia: Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc.). When we were in New York, prior to Ettu's third birthday, he yelled out at the top of his lungs on a busy street in Chelsea, "Hey, papa, look at that black, black man," with Nalin grabbing him and rushing in the other direction out of pure embarrassment. Another time, while eating a breakfast of pani puri and cholé batura at a local Indian snack shop in Chicago's very own "India Town," Nooa, around age three himself and surrounded by his own Indian family (who were visiting), pointed out the window pronouncing with glee, "Papa, Indians are coming!" Now perhaps you could argue that because my children have a light parent and a dark parent, they saw race earlier than some; however, I don't think this is entirely true.
Current events have done nothing but showcase how race simply has to be at the forefront of our discussions and imaginations, as the inequities and misunderstandings are still so commonplace. A friend of mine who was born in Korea, raised here, and married to a white man considers her kids, who are bi-racial, to be Asian and that's that, because, as she remarked quite astutely (in essence), because this is how our society sees them and categorizes them and this is how they will be known... with all the stereotypes and presuppositions that come with that. Nalin and I often talk about the changing face of America, as we move to a minority majority population in the next twenty to thirty years; however, it is clear that our idealized notion of the browning of America is still so far from being accepted or embraced on many fronts... even in our urban cocoons.
I am fairly idealistic and, yes, even naive about how I would like to see America approach race. Just when I think things are changing for the better, and I'll go days, weeks, even months thinking that my children are the present and the future of this great country, I am reminded how far we have yet to go... how people I know in other parts of the country see what happened in Ferguson, Missouri, for example, as the fault of the people themselves who were killed or hurt in the event itself and the riots to follow. All those adorable black or brown babies I hear everyone absolutely gushing over grow up to be the black and brown youths and adults that those same people still take a double take or even fear when they see on the street, no matter the dress, religion, background, neighborhood, city, what have you. And this isn't just the experience of blacks in this country, but of Muslims, Indians, Native Americans, Arabs, Latinos, the list goes on and on. And even when people perceive their assumptions as compliments (those Chinese kids are so good at math; those Indians so exotic, etc), people, no matter what race or culture, do not want stereotypes to be the sum of who they are, period. The assumptions based on color of skin, religion, or economic status are still mindbogglingly ignorant. Just a few short years ago, my husband and I went to a family reunion in southwest Missouri. On a float trip down one of the many rivers in this area, a group of drunken men yelled "Hey look, there's a Haji!" at our canoe. Now I probably don't have to explain that they most likely were not using this in the honorific term for someone who has completed the Hajj in Mecca, but rather as a derogatory racial slur, given my husbands dark skin and beard. I love the beauty of this part of the country, the Ozarks, and I love so many people from here, and yet, I still feel a bit of nervousness when we travel down there, perhaps not so much anymore, but the wounds are still fresh of this event and earlier of Nalin receiving no eye contact and no service from farmers stands in the rural part of northwest Arkansas when he tried to buy a bottle of local honey. When people ask me why I don't want to live closer to my parents, is it so unfair to admit that it's because I want them to live in a more accepting or tolerant environment with a lot more people that look like them? Where they won't be questioned or exotified? Perhaps. I know things are changing. But after some of the ways in which Missouri approached the events in Ferguson, maybe not enough.
Fifty years ago this very year, one of my favorite authors, James Baldwin, wrote this:
“It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.”
The end of that quote reminds me of something that we often recall with humor from Ettu's earliest years. My parents have an old toy set of plastic "cowboys and indians" from when my siblings and I were young. Ettu sat playing with them when he was quite small and asked Nalin, rather innocently, "which ones are us, papa?" Much has happened since 1965 when Baldwin penned these words, but honestly, I think race is only now really being addressed to the level it was during the civil rights era. Thanks to writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and comedians like Hasan Minhaj from the Daily Show (if you haven't heard this funny and moving piece on his experience as the son of Indian immigrants on NPR's All Things Considered, please do so now — or after you finish this post!), understanding the realities and politics of race is not just relevant, but vital... for all of us.
But I digress a bit, and certainly my children don't quite feel the weight or burden of all of this, as of yet... except for when it comes to the proper way to "look" in your favorite character costume. In the end, all we can do is continue to extoll the virtues of wizards of every race and culture and remind them that Halloween is simply a time to imagine yourself as someone different and that the color of your skin doesn't or shouldn't matter in this equation in the least. But every time something like this comes up in discussion, don't run from it. Embrace it. It's a moment of genuine discovery and intimacy and should not be feared. Even if the answers can be painful or provocative. As James Baldwin also wrote, "Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them." As the saying goes, imitation is the highest form of flattery, but let's hope that imitation is something for which we all can be proud. Harry Potter may himself have a fair face, but the heirs to his magical fortune are in every family on every country throughout the globe. If only there was a spell or magic wand to make it happen.
Great minds think alike. Photo by Beth McNamara.