On the color of our skin

I've been thinking about race lately, and how we're not supposed to talk about it. And here I am, wanting to talk about it. I went to the zoo this weekend with the girls, my friend Rachel, and her two kids, a just-turned-7-year-old girl, Nadia, and a 1 year old boy, Givenson, who happen to be adopted from Haiti. A zoo volunteer, enjoying all the questions from the older girls, asked us "whose girls are those," and my instinct was to say, "the black ones are hers and the white ones are mine." I did not say this, of course, though it would have been both true and direct. Instead, we each pointed to our kids to claim them. I felt that the volunteer was probably proper (and safe) not to assume any particular combination of family, even though I am told my grils look just like me. We could have been a couple and all four kids could have been both of ours, for all anyone knew. Or we could have each had one biological and one adopted. Or, or, or.


After the volunteer went on our way, I confessed my instinct to Rachel, and told her that when Clio had asked me to remind her who Nadia was before we met up, I hesitated to describe her based on the color of her skin. Rachel said that people are funny this way, that she often hears things like, "Oh, is your daughter the one who loves to read, and carries such-and-such backpack?" In these cases, Rachel DOES say something like, "and her skin is brown? Yes, that's her." It is amazing to me that we go so far out of our way to avoid referring to the color of someone's skin, even in cases where it is the easiest, most obvious differentiation. It makes me think of Stephen Colbert's hilarious recurring gag that he "doesn't see color," which gets right to the heart of the matter: color is visual. It is something that we do see, that we all see, that we can't avoid seeing, period.

I was a little late picking the girls up from school on Thursday, and ended up staying for the music class that happens Thursday afternoons with the extended-day children. In honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, many of the songs were about civil rights. The school is incredibly diverse, and I found it quite wonderful to sit in a room of children of many colors singing "All the colors of the earth," a song that lists the colors children come in, including "chocolate, caramel, cinnamon" and so on. It was meaningful to see that my children will grow up in an environment where they live the truth of that book, rather than a classroom, like some of mine over the years, where a rather sheepish (white) teacher preaches multiculturalism to a room of white faces. It is a great hope that by the time they have kids of their own, we will live in such a mixed-color world that it will simply be a matter of practical description, and not at all loaded, to describe someone by their skin color, the way we might say someone has red hair or blue eyes.



For her part, Eleri colored this MLK crown for the school assembly, and I am told that she marched with the other toddlers across the stage, wearing their crowns and chanting Love, love, love, love, love.