I have a recurring nightmare. In it, my young son approaches me and earnestly asks, “Mom, how come I’m not black?”
I look at him and in my best mama voice I say, “Child, have you looked in the mirror recently?”
“No,” he says.
“Then go look and tell me what you see.” I watch him walk up to the mirror, and when he does, his reflection is not that of an adorable nine-year-old African American boy, but some white kid whom I do not recognize.
“See what I mean?” he says. I stare at my son, then back at the mirror, then I wake up.
As dreams go, or at least as my dreams go, this one’s pretty banal. It’s so transparent I don’t know why my subconscious even bothered. I am afraid that I’m not raising my boys, who were adopted and are black, to be “black,” whatever that means, because I’m white and I don’t know how. My husband, Leo, who is an Indian immigrant from Singapore, doesn’t suffer from the kind of barely suppressed white guilt I have, or the kind of subconscious racial biases that I am discovering I’ve had, much to my horror, for probably most of my life.
A few years back I was having a conversation with my younger son’s paternal birth-grandmother, and I mentioned how much Micah loved to dance (he was four at the time) and what a great dancer he was.
“That’s interesting because Daniel can’t dance to save his life,” she laughed, referring to my son’s birth father. And before I could stop them, these words fell right out of my mouth, “What do you mean, he can’t dance?”
This woman’s first grandchild is being raised by a white person who assumed all black people could dance. Tragic.
And then there’s my discomfort with even the word “black.” Usually I just say African American, but sometimes that sounds stiff and takes too long to say, so I say “black.” As in “I’m raising black children.”
Or am I raising African American children? Is there some kind of cultural distinction between being black and being African American that I don't understand? Does being black mean they’re more racially identified with black culture? Is being African American more mainstream and therefore less threatening to whites? Does sounding white make you less black? So many labels, so many questions.
People—and by people I mean white people—argue with me when I bring up this question; they want to reassure me that all I really need to do is raise my sons to be good men. Sure, and while I’m at it I’ll cure all the world’s diseases and invent a time machine. It’s hard enough for any parent to avoid passing on their own neuroses to their kids. The beauty of being a mixed-race family is that we get a whole new set of challenges that put the normal ones in perspective.
I’ve been living in the whiter parts of Portland, Oregon (and let’s face it, Portland is mostly white) for so long I’m embarrassed to talk to black, or African American, people about whether they themselves even make such a distinction. I’m guessing some will say they do, and others will just look at me like I’m some kind of racist fool. Even with the few black friends I have, the conversation might feel really weird.
From the moment I became a mother of African American children, my relationship with other African Americans changed. I want to say for the better, but it’s complicated. In the beginning, when I went out in the world with my children, I sometimes felt acutely, conspicuously white. People did double takes. We got sidelong glances. When white people gawped or raised eyebrows, I straightened my spine and turned up the corners of my mouth. When black people looked at us, I felt nervous and unsettled. Not afraid or threatened or anything like that. I felt like an imposter, some kind of pretender. Who does she think she is? I imagined them thinking.
That line, that invisible line that separated white from black, that still separates white from black, had been crossed. My brain rebels at the idea of “us” and “them,” but let's be honest: My children are “us,” meaning my family,and they are also “them,” that is, members of the African American minority to which I cannot claim kinship.
A few years ago I was checking out neighborhood daycare centers, hoping to find one for my preschool-aged boys once I started working again. At one bright and seemingly well-managed facility, I looked around at the group of children, all contentedly engaged in games and toys, and I didn’t see any African American kids, or Hispanic kids, either. So I asked, in what I hoped was a friendly, straightforward way, “Do you have any African American kids in your care here? I don’t see any, and my boys are black.”
“Oh, let’s see,” the manager of the center said, looking up into her mental file.
“Yes, we do, there’s a little African American girl about five, and we had a boy for a while, but not anymore. But you know,” and here she smiled and looked at me reassuringly, “I really don’t see color. I just see kids.”
Really? I thought, glancing around at all the bright pastels and vivid reds, blues and yellows in the room, how can you not see color?
I knew what she meant. But I didn’t buy it.
I was a child of the sixties and seventies who grew up with liberal, democratic parents. We lived in a white, middle-class suburb of Baltimore, which has a fairly large black population, and I grew up listening to records by Ella Fitzgerald and to stories my mother told me about Harriet Tubman. She also told me stories about Anne Frank, and she sang along with Frank Sinatra as much as Ella. Black people were a part of our lives in the form of teachers, friends and classmates. We definitely didn’t see as much of them as white people, but they were there, along for the ride.
Throughout my childhood my father had a crush on two women, Gina Lollobrigida and Lola Falana. My mother affectionately indulged this by calling to him whenever either made an appearance on TV. “Earl! It’s your girl, Lola! Come quick,” she would shout. Or, “Honey, they’re showing Trapeze again, with Gina!” Both of them were curvaceous beauties; the fact that Lola was a woman of color was as unremarkable as my mother’s crush on Sidney Poitier and Charlton Heston (before she found out he was a gun-loving Republican).
My siblings and I were raised to respect people—our parents, our teachers, our elders—and especially people of any ethnic group that didn’t include us, whether Jewish, Chinese, or black. My mother’s regard for blacks and Jews might have stemmed from an affinity for marginalized underdogs. She was one generation away from poverty herself and identified with people who struggled.
When I was twelve, in 1972, she gave me a book of poetry called I Am the Darker Brother. It was an anthology that included Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, and I remember being enthralled by the beauty and anger in many of those poems. And yet, years later when we came to adopt our son, my mother—the same woman who will vote for Obama in this election—was very concerned about his name, a name given to him by his birth mother and happily accepted by us: Isaiah.
“It’s so black,” she said. “Are you sure you want to call him that?”
“Good God, Mom, do you hear yourself?”
“I’m just saying, it’s a lovely name, but it’s very black.”
I protested, pointing out that Isaiah was a good name, a biblical name. “I can’t believe you said that,” I told her, indignant.
But truth is, I could. There was the movie in the ’90s, Losing Isaiah, about a black child adopted into a white family who loves him to death but ends up relinquishing him to his recovered crack-addict birth mother. Then there’s Isaiah Washington, and lots of other pro athletes. Many African Americans have the name: so what?
There is no race-based reason why my husband and I adopted first one, and then another, African American baby boy. We just desperately wanted children. We weren’t interested in going to a foreign country; I was too impatient for that. By the time we’d reconciled ourselves to infertility and decided on adoption, if someone had offered me a Cabbage Patch doll wrapped in a soft blanket that fit in my arms I would have swooped it up and clutched it to my breast. We were simply grateful that someone, anyone, trusted us enough to give us a real child.
So now we have two beautiful sons, who happen to be black. African American. Kids of color.
Every February our family celebrates Black History Month. As a family, we talk with our boys, now seven and nine, about the Civil Rights Movement and Rosa Parks. We attend Martin Luther King Day celebrations, and read lots of great books by black authors. My boys are proud of their African American heritage. From the time they were toddlers, they gravitated toward playmates who looked like them. When he was younger, my seven-year-old would point to the U.S flag and say, “Look! It’s the African American flag, Mom!” I didn’t correct him.
And yet, I wonder if I’m doing enough. I wonder if I overstep when I try on African American slang. Even though I take a ridiculous delight in speaking in all kinds of accents and dip into them often—British (both posh and working class), Indian, Southern—I would never do a black dialect in public, even though I love its music and authority.
“Come on over here and give Momma some sugar, little man,” I might croon in the privacy of my home. Yet even there I still feel like I’m trespassing. Like some damn white-ass wannabe. I will never be an African American mother to these boys, and sometimes I wonder what they’re missing by having me for a mom, instead of the kind of strong black matriarch I see in Tyler Perry movies and TV sitcoms. It’s enough to make me want to shout my disclaimer at the world, “Hey, these things happen, people! I’m only white on the outside.” But that wouldn’t make any sense, and it isn’t even true.
The fact that I fret about it just confirms my white guilt, according to my husband. But if I feel guilty about anything, it’s that I can’t track down my sons’ birth mothers. They’ve decided not to maintain contact with us, despite gut-wrenching agreements made at the time of the adoptions to maintain openness and have frequent contact. Which we did—in the beginning. But over the last few years they’ve disappeared. Gone off to grow up, start new lives, start new families.
Even the birth-grandmother of our second son, Micah, has moved away and out of our lives. We entered these open adoptions with heavy trepidation and the typical fears of birth mother reprisals or changes of heart. I never thought I would feel abandoned and afraid that my sons would lose a link to their heritage that I couldn’t provide. Never thought I would pray for them to come back into our lives so that I could ask if they mind when I speak in a musical black dialect and get their advice on how to maintain Isaiah’s dreadlocks.
But mainly I want them in our lives so our boys can ask them the questions I cannot answer, such as“Why didn’t you keep me?” But they are gone, for now, and I am here, struggling privately and publicly with the complicated issues of race and motherhood.
Which brings me to the whole Damali Ayo business. Ayo is an African American writer/performance artist whose work focuses on racism in America. I went to hear her speak in a downtown Portland library not long ago.
Ayo talked about her experiences growing up on the East Coast, not far from where I grew up, and then she read from her book How to Rent a Negro. It was funny, in a disturbing way. I liked her. I thought she was courageous and intelligent. She summed up racism in our city by saying we were “over-enlightened and underexposed.”
For some hopelessly wrong-headed reason, I decided to stand up during the Q&A and tell her who I was and who my children were.
“Good for you,” she said. (Which I did not know how to interpret—and still don’t.)
I went on to ask a question I’d been pondering for a long time: Am I some kind of benign racist because I pick out my children’s library books to ensure that they have faces of color in them? Because I secretly harbor the belief that without black culture, this country would be, well, Europe?
Ayo seemed to appreciate the idea of what I was trying to say, but still couldn’t agree with me. “No, there’s no such thing as ‘benign’ racism,” she said. I could feel her trying not to roll her eyes as she turned to answer someone else’s question.
I sat back down among the crowd of mostly white folks with the same sense of being grossly misunderstood that I felt when I was disqualified from jury duty in Santa Monica many years ago because I couldn’t tell the judge with certaintythat I would not allow race to be an issue. In that case, the defendant was a young black man charged with armed robbery; his defense lawyer was white, the prosecuting attorney was white, and all but one of the other potential jurors was white. All I saw was color, or the lack of it, in that courtroom.
“Dismissed,” said the defense attorney.
As I listened to the rest of her talk, I realized Ayo could not teach me anything I didn’t already know. I was going to have to trust myself to raise these boys without worrying about whether I’m depriving them of some ethnic or cultural identity that I cannot and never will relate to.
As for my well-meaning white friends, well, the “can’t-we-all-just-get-along?” approach to the issue of race isn’t enough, either. I will not dismiss my concerns about how my children will be perceived in the world because of the color of their skin.
Trying to be color-blind seems naive and disingenuous. Shouldn’t we all be color-conscious instead?
I tell my boys, Love the skin you’re in. I sure do—theirs and mine.
My son Isaiah is following this presidential race very closely since he’s biracial like Barack Obama. Maybe with an African American in the White House we can finally move beyond pretending to be color-blind and start to really celebrate the diversity of our nation. If Obama is elected, my children and others like them will have proof that this really can be a country of equal opportunity. The ground Obama breaks will be theirs to walk on, too.
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