About 15 years ago I saw an episode of Donohue that I still remember. As I recall, there were three adults on the panel: a white woman, her mother, and her black husband. The woman was crying, telling the story of how her mother called the woman’s biracial child derogatory names. Her mother chimed in, almost singing with self-satisfaction, “I call her my little nigglet.” The woman broke into sobs after that, and Donohue, in his way of furrowing his brow and lunging, leaned on the stage and asked her something provocative. I don’t remember what because at that moment, I felt very angry and betrayed by the man who had not said anything, the black husband.
I spent the rest of the show judging him for marrying a white woman in the first place. And I carried that story in my mind for a long time as evidence that interracial relationships were the wrong thing to do. Black men were marrying white women, leaving black women to fend for ourselves became a story that I took personally. I bought that rhetoric, being the young single black daughter of a single black mother. I didn’t need to know anything about these people’s lives, about their thoughts or responsibilities. They didn’t need to be individuals, or even human beings, with whom I tried to identify, because I was sad that women who looked like me did not have husbands (Nevermind that this is gross over-generalization; plenty of black women have black husbands). I needed to blame somebody for it. So I, like lots of black women, laid my loneliness on black men who married or dated white women.
Then I met a white guy who fell deeply in love with me. We had a baby. And in our excitement over becoming a family and planning for the birth, daycare, and how to feed it, we ignored our families’ buzz over what the baby would look like. When she was born, they behaved like the most simple-minded and ornery people in the world, that’s right, like toddlers. Some people in my family scrutinized her hair, nose, and eyes. They were thrilled with the “good hair” and “pretty eyes”. My husband’s family, nervous from the moment we got married, were relieved that she had blond hair and blue hazel eyes, but her white skin concerned them. Wasn’t she supposed to be darker? The code of “good hair” and “pretty eyes” meant that those features were not Afrocentric because of their color or texture. My sister-in-law, insisting that my husband engage her in conversation over whether my daughter’s skin was getting darker, showed her unwillingness to accept this child as she was because she did not look as “black” as my in-laws had expected.
After one particularly heated conversation with my mother-in-law, I remembered that episode of Donohue and I identified with those parents, this time as a parent myself. My husband and I were very defensive of our baby, but we needed to set some boundaries around racializing her. We had to be confrontational in a way that most families do not welcome, and the push to do so came when I decided to get pregnant with our second. The thought of enduring their ignorance and objectification with two children, and the inevitable comparisons made us miserable. And so we confronted a lot of people close to us, telling them that we absolutely would not allow them to teach our children that they were “different” from their cousins or that they were special or beautiful because of their Eurocentric features. I would not allow family members to pick my babies apart and parse the pieces into “black” and “white” bins.
Decades of research on childhood development tells us that children don’t like to be singled out. It makes them anxious and afraid to have people---even family members--- staring at them, getting too close and being overly familiar. They don’t like to be different, especially in the toddler years. We also know that excessive and early exposure to racializing makes kids exceptionally sensitive to race, so much so that the effect stays with them throughout their lives.
One poignant and very sad example is the “Doll Experiment” that showed how black children routinely assigned positive characteristics to a pink doll and negative ones to a brown doll who they thought looked more like themselves. Just recently, a high school student in NYC replicated the Doll Experiment with some young children, 50 years after the original. The results were astoundingly similar. Color prejudice is taught very young in sometimes very subtle ways. Researchers are apt to study how negative stereotype affect the disadvantaged, but they don’t often write about the lasting impact of privilege. I suspect that it is also harmful because unreasonably high expectations and an inflated sense of self-importance are rarely beneficial.
It’s difficult to make people see that praising curly or blond hair and blue eyes is a form of racism. Once we were in an elevator in the mall with my daughter in the stroller. A little girl with dark skin and brown hair and eyes told her friend, “She has blue eyes, which is beautiful.” I wanted to ask her who taught her that blues eyes were so beautiful, but that would not make a difference. That aesthetic is pervasive in just about every culture. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say, “With that blond hair and those blue eyes, s/he looks like an angel. “ One white woman I know wrote in her Christmas card that her infant twins could not be more different. The girl was “a blond-haired blue-eyed angel.” And the boy was “the only browned-eyed” member of her husband’s extended family. When my husband read that, he said, “Germany won World War II.” Not only are blue eyes beautiful, they are divine. Sounds like racial superiority to me, but challenge people on that notion and they will get offended that you make the connection. The complicating factor for my particular situation was that my in-laws did not want to accept that a child who carried my black blood could be an angel, too. Then the question became whether the next one would be as angelic or not.
My own boundary war with my in-laws regarding race triggered a deep-seated question for me: Who decides who can be a family? My friend who teaches sociology at Yale tells me that marriage and reproduction are social events that society blesses or damns. Certainly everyone has an opinion about who is marriage material. Attractive people who look alike make nice-looking couples. All of this is based on stereotypes and socially acceptable ideals of kinship and friendship. Racism and segregation have played a huge role in shaping what we deem normal and acceptability in family groupings. Laws against interracial marriage effectively ensured that interracial families did not exist. What was legal became normal.
I read a funny account of a light-skinned black/white actor who played the father in a commercial with two biracial black/white children and a Hispanic woman as the mother. These people made a beautiful normal- same-color family sitting together, but their real families included people who looked different from each other. And even though that reality is much less acceptable than the made-for-tv version, social sanctions do not change the reality. Social sanctions, such as rude comments, staring, not allowing real families with different colors to appear together on tv or in magazines, etc. have not deterred interracial couples from forming or stopped them from having kids. I don’t think society has much to say about who can be a family in the United States. We value our individuality too much. We are too willful to allow social constraints on something as personal as romantic love and reproduction. But family is another issue.
My in-laws were acting very much in line with the hostile strangers that we met on the street, who wanted to give us the message that our miscegenation bothered or intrigued them. After I challenged my sister-in-law to examine why the color of my daughter’s skin was so important to her, my mother-in-law called me in defense of her daughter. She told me that my sister-in-law did not care if the kids were white, purple or green. Since kids don’t come in purple or green, she was basically saying that she didn’t care if they were white, but she did seem to have a problem with black and brown.
The answer to my deeper question of who decides what makes a family came rather unexpectedly following a series of stressful events that landed me in the hospital wondering whether my second child, a boy, would be born very prematurely. My husband and I were tired from all the responsibilities of being fully employed adults with a 1-year-old child; we were tired of trying to enlighten people that did not want to be enlightened. We decided that we didn’t care anymore about his mother and sisters’ attitudes regarding our marriage or our children. As he said to me, “Until they get their heads out of their asses, we don’t have to see them.” We decided that we (he , the children, and I) were our family and whoever else wished to support us in our liberal, loving, and tolerant way of raising the kids could join us. All others would fall by the wayside.
Indeed many interracial couples report losing contact with family members over bigotry. But typically, the real issue is being masked by racism. My in-laws felt that their relationship with my husband was threatened when he married me. They used race as a way to divide his loyalties and test whether he would side with them. Asking a father to objectify his daughter on the basis of her skin color is not a good way to curry favor anymore. (It worked in the pre-Civil War Era. But even Strom Thurman made sure that Essie Mae Washington got an education indicating something of a sea change as early as Jim Crow.) My husband’s willingness to walk away from his family of origin made them realize that the only way to stay in his good graces was to get in my good graces. So my mother-in-law started calling me regularly to tell me that she loved me. She started sending me gifts.
I don’t know how that Donohue show ended so many years ago, but I learned some things from the experience. First is that it is much easier to judge people when you do not value or understand their experiences. Second, it doesn’t matter what I think about people’s personal affairs even if I am applying a social argument against their individual choices. Most people, including myself, don’t care enough about the status quo to forfeit the things we hold dear in order to conform to it. Third, family members who choose to enforce social codes tend to be the ones left out. They may feel that they hold the power with centennials of prejudice behind them, but connectedness and love are far more powerful than intolerance and divisiveness.
In November last year, my husband and I welcomed our son, Baby LJ, into the world. He was born gently at home into his father’s waiting hands on a crisp sunny day. He was a big, long near-ten pound baby, and we loved him immediately. At 9 months old, he’s a rowdy brown boy with medium brown hair that has honey undertones just like his dad’s hair. His brown eyes are almond-shaped and full of curiosity. He looks just like his sister, just different colors. His face is a lot like mine. It makes me laugh when I look at us in the mirror together. Then he laughs, and I laugh even more. My love for him is so deep that not even a burning cross on my lawn would have made me stop at one. Hell, now I’m starting to think about number 3.
In the moments when I’m not changing a diaper, chasing a toddler, or pulling the cat’s tail out of the baby’s tight pudgy hands, I reflect on the way the past two and a half years has made me into a mother , a wife, and an activist. I think a lot about my new friend Marney, the white Jewish mother of my biracial friend from grad school. Marney had 3 children with her white Jewish husband before they divorced. She remarried to a black Baptist and had 3 more children. My friend Nik was number 5, I think. She told me stories about her childhood, how black women trying to snatch her away from her mom when they went shopping. I found Marney when I was laying out the pieces of what I now understand a lot better. She listened to my stories and nodded knowingly. She told me with the wisdom of a grandmother, “If someone is rude to you, tell her she’s ugly. Love your children unconditionally. “ I really like her.
Love is a theme that I will thread throughout all of my post because I believe whole-heartedly in its power, but I think that message was, perhaps, too subtle in my first story. I feel that it’s important to make this point stronger. Now with our two children, people really like to look at us. Interestingly, people do not talk as much. Maybe we have changed or we are too busy tussling with the little ones to give an opening. Still, the strain of dealing with difficult strangers and family members has forced us to define our principles and boundaries as the family that we want to be. We practice unconditional love and unconditionally loving discipline with our two. It’s beautiful to see them developing into moral people without fear or force. When people stare at us, we stare back. Baby LJ always wins the staring contests. He makes adults self-conscious. My toddler Asha now makes the intrusive comments on people’s appearance. “Her is tall and her is short, Mommy?” “Yes.” “OK.” “He has yellow hair, Mommy?” “Yes.” “OK.”“She has toes, Mommy?” “Yes.” “OK.” Most people are starting to teach their toddlers not to stare and point by this stage. They whisper to their children to not comment on people’s appearances especially if they are somehow unusual. But for some reason, adults disregard that etiquette when it comes to interracial families. So I let my toddler talk. I matter-of-factly validate what she sees and we move on. Maybe if she knows that the man with the lipstick is ok, then she won’t be so toddlerish about seeing someone like him when she’s adult. Maybe if I acknowledge her observation that she has yellow hair, I have black hair, Daddy has green hair, and LJ has red hair, people with different hair won’t be so intriguing to her as an adult. They will just be people.
The most recent comment on my last post suggested that I stop wasting time on negative energy and look at the positive side. I’m not sure what that commenter meant or that this person understood my first post, but I want to address something in that message. The Secret or the Law of Attraction has become popular in the last year, and I think lots of people like the idea that being positive will change everyone’s reality. It’s a way to take responsibility for the way we live without actually having to do anything to make changes except think good thoughts. There’s certainly some merit to using the power of positive thought to get a job or finish a doctoral program; I’ve done both. But pervasive social injustices are not the fault of individuals who practice negative thought. Well, maybe if you believe in subjective reality, then perhaps they are. I happen to believe that they are the manifestations of institutions that practice negative actions. Silence, no matter how positive the thoughts behind it, is almost always construed as consent. An alternative philosophy asks individuals to make conscious the scary and negative unconscious components of ourselves in order to loosen their grip. By spending time reflecting on the difficult thoughts, being aware of the way they feel in our bodies and the images they bring to light, one can find peace in them, less fear and judgment. I find this blog to be appropriately named because in my understanding of its mission, it is our goal to bring these difficult, nasty, ugly, and hurtful realities to light, into consciousness. It is here that we ask the contributors to think more critically of the elements that define social relations in our environments. It’s here that we entertain solutions to the problems rather than tacitly accepting them as the intractable state of things. Change comes through confronting those things that we bring to our consciousness through active resistance.
That’s my cultural conscious.
