We--my wife and I--adopted a two-week-old boy 7 years ago.
She and I are both white, and he is black. Or, if you prefer,
Caucasian and African-American (well, technically, African-Jamaican-American).
Or, if you follow our son's lexical preferences, white and brown.
Since adopting him, we have been learning
a great deal about race. It all seemed interesting and even fun when our son was very young. I could enjoy some sociologically forbidden
fruit, such as reading the book N--ger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word,
without apology, and, more to the point, have open and earnest
conversations with friends and colleagues about topics of race. The difficulties and distresses--about which
my wife and I would ponder, read, talk, etc.--were still in the future, and we
could delight ourselves that we were so very forward thinking about our son and
his imminent race "issues," etc.
Seven still seems young, and the
distresses still seem ahead--in the future, but that's probably more denial on my part than anything else, for that future intrudes more
readily and more frequently. Years ago, I heard a talk from a biracial
man about the unique identity perspectives and processes that biracial and
multiracial children experience. I told him about our situation, and he
said our son was biracial of a sort, and would have some of the struggles he
detailed in his talk. Specifically, once a child becomes aware of skin
color differences the biracial child has to figure out "which" or
"what" s/he is--a member of which parent's group.
This identification process includes the
child into one set of sociological patterns while it excludes, at least in some
degree, him/her from the patterns of the other group. If the child
identifies "white," s/he then identifies as "not black," or
vice versa. And that has implications for their sense of who they are and
how they live.
For our son, this has taken the twist that
he easily observes his difference from his parents, but does not have one with
whom he can identify. A few years ago, we could tell he had begun to
notice skin color differences. He would look at black (especially) men
with an increased attentiveness--obviously greater than he attended to other
skin colors. This came almost right on schedule with what that seminar
presenter had said. First would come observation of the differences.
Then would follow active mental processing of where/with whom the child
fits, which would instigate a kind of identity confusion and--possibly--anxiety
that a child from a racially homogeneous family would not have.
Our son is supremely self-confident
(sometimes too much so), so I'm not exactly sure how or to what degree this
confusion will play out, but he already thinks about race in ways children from
homogeneous families might not otherwise have to do, especially white parents
and children, who--according to survey research--talk about race much less and much later than do parents of
children from all the groups of "color."
Our son has expressed some interesting
thoughts on the matter--thoughts whose origins we do not fully understand.
For example, when I retold my son and his mother the sequence of a petty
theft that I had witnessed at a local store, his first response was, "Were
they brown?" When I asked him why he would think of that and why it
mattered, he rather nonchalantly said, "Brown people are tougher."
This, and many other race topics, fill up
plenty of my wife's and my conversation. Recent rumors in Seattle (near
which we live) about black teammates supposedly questioning whether Seahawk QB
Russell Wilson is "black enough" (which echoes the same discussion
about Candidate Obama in 2008) reminded me of how central a role race plays in
the self and group identification processes for people from all but the
dominant race group.
When we asked our son's soccer coach--a
30-year-old black man--about this, his uncomfortably (for us) straightforward
reply was "everything is about race." Again, as a member of the
dominant (in terms of social and political power) group, this is an idea I can
think about, and possibly understand, but it is not an experience to which I
can relate. When Bill Clinton was oddly called "the first black
president," white people might have been irritated--politically, but not
racially. But I heard no academic conferences, no media talking heads, no
pundits wondering whether he was "white enough." Perhaps, the comparable aspersion would be to say one is "white trash," but that is a claim about that (white) individual's character. To wonder whether someone is "enough" of something is to question whether he's even part of the group. Obviously, the accuser (if you will) is probably displeased with the target's character, but it's an even more powerful claim to exclude the person from the group.
These questions about color, identity, self-identification, etc., got no clearer when I asked my son about a series of stories I make up. For several months now I've been telling an on-going story about "Ned," well, a series of Neds. The Neds have seen and done almost everything, and it finally occurred to me to ask my son whether he saw Ned as brown or white. He said white. I asked him why, but he didn't really know.
We asked the soccer coach about this and he suggested that Ned is a white name and, besides, our son is being raised around primarily white people, so that's what he'd think of. My wife has been pretty intentional to speak celebratorily about our son's skin, knowing that his observations of color and race would necessarily arise soon, but such discussions apparently cannot transcend the learning that his eyes have been doing these last several years.
I don't really know if the color-branding of names works with 7-year-olds. My son is a big fan of the Seahawk Richard Sherman. When I asked him if he would like Richard Sherman as much if he were white, my son uninhibitedly, and without hesitation, said, "No." His explanation--Richard Sherman seems more like a black name, which is, I assume, his groping for an explanation to something that he really can't explain, but must try, for my benefit.
All this to say, I don't really know where to go from here. We want to be thoughtful and foresightful about our son's life in this regard, but...I don't really know how to do that. Are race issues ultimately insoluble? Individually? Socially? Or, am I missing something?
These questions about color, identity, self-identification, etc., got no clearer when I asked my son about a series of stories I make up. For several months now I've been telling an on-going story about "Ned," well, a series of Neds. The Neds have seen and done almost everything, and it finally occurred to me to ask my son whether he saw Ned as brown or white. He said white. I asked him why, but he didn't really know.
We asked the soccer coach about this and he suggested that Ned is a white name and, besides, our son is being raised around primarily white people, so that's what he'd think of. My wife has been pretty intentional to speak celebratorily about our son's skin, knowing that his observations of color and race would necessarily arise soon, but such discussions apparently cannot transcend the learning that his eyes have been doing these last several years.
I don't really know if the color-branding of names works with 7-year-olds. My son is a big fan of the Seahawk Richard Sherman. When I asked him if he would like Richard Sherman as much if he were white, my son uninhibitedly, and without hesitation, said, "No." His explanation--Richard Sherman seems more like a black name, which is, I assume, his groping for an explanation to something that he really can't explain, but must try, for my benefit.
All this to say, I don't really know where to go from here. We want to be thoughtful and foresightful about our son's life in this regard, but...I don't really know how to do that. Are race issues ultimately insoluble? Individually? Socially? Or, am I missing something?
