September 14th, 2008
Black and Brown; Kids Are So Not P.C.
When I was a Pre-Divorce kid (but soon to become a Post-Divorce kid), I lived in an upscale neighborhood in upstate New York of custom homes on big, forested lots with plenty of square footage. We even had a little pond in the back that would freeze over for great ice skating and impromptu hockey games with the neighborhood boys in winter. I, of course, was Dorothy Hamill, complete with my Dorothy Hamill hair cut and little skating skirt. One of my friends got ice skating lessons so she showed me how to do twirls which I did over and over, wearing a hole in the ice. I pictured my adoring fans on the sidelines, clutching flowers to their bosoms, ready to throw them to me when I was finished. Grim Reality was sitting with them on the sidelines, but I didn’t have time for that kind of boring nonsense. Those were the days!
My best friend in the ‘hood was Rhoda Williams. She lived about a mile away in the same neighborhood, around the corner from me. I have no idea how I met Rhoda, maybe she went to the same private school where I went, although I don’t remember seeing here there. We were too young (ages 7-9) to walk too far from our homes unsupervised, so I must have met her in some other setting other than playing after school on the street.
Where I grew up, I was not exposed to many people from other places or anyone of different color much. There was one Indian girl in my classes named Amani (who I remember never brushed her teeth, but had the most beautiful, long black hair always worn in thick braids) and one black boy named Bill Green (who was skinny and shy). My friend Rhoda was also black, and as far as I can remember, part of the only black family in our entire neighborhood. At the time, I didn’t think anything about it. It’s only looking back that I realize all the people around me, for the most part, looked a lot like me. Whitebread.
I remember one day Rhoda and I were walking from my house to her house, arguing about the color of her skin. She kept trying to tell me she was BLACK, and I kept arguing with her that she wasn’t BLACK, she was BROWN. Even then I thought I was always right (things haven’t changed much since), so I refused to back down. I remember pointing out some soil that had risen above the dried grasses and saying how that was the color black and that the color of her skin certainly was not that color. I told her that her skin was the color of my mom’s coffee, which was BROWN. She stood firm, and asserted that her dad told her she was BLACK, so she was BLACK, and that was that.
I slept over her house that night, and when we went to bed, she had to put a plastic shower cap type thing over her hair before she laid down. I asked her what it was for, and she said it was to protect her pillow. I wanted to know what she was protecting her pillow from, but she didn’t know. That’s just what she had to do every night before bed. I remember thinking that it looked uncomfortable. Now that I’m older, I’m thinking it would make me crazy to have to sleep with a plastic covering over my head every night.
The next morning, at breakfast, we were all eating cereal. She ate the same kind of cereal I did. And then her dad came down. He told her to go get her “things”. She left the table, and I sat there, waiting to see what “things” she was going to bring to her dad. This house was different and yet the same. The food was the same. Rhoda’s bedroom was the same, girly and full of cool toys and books. But she wore different things to bed, and her dad was there at the breakfast table. My dad never was. My friend came back with a brush and a jar. In the jar was some pink goop. Rhoda’s dad unscrewed the top and reached into the jar to get some of the goop out, and then proceeded to smear it all over Rhoda’s hair! And then he used the brush to smooth her hair out.
Ah-ha! my little brain said to itself. Now I see the reason for the plastic hair bag. That gooey stuff would surely ruin a pillowcase, just like the gum I went to sleep with one day did to my pillowcase. I noticed that the gooey stuff made her hair look shiny and smooth. I’d never seen a father play with his daughter’s hair like that. I’d never seen a father brush a daughter’s hair before. I was jealous that she got this kind of attention from her dad every morning.
While Rhoda patiently waited through her dad’s ministrations, she said, “Dad, Elle says that I’m not black. She says that I’m BROWN.” She looked at me, daring me to say differently now. Her dad intimidated the crap out of me. He wasn’t particularly big, and I remember him to be an intellectual sort. But he was a dad, and he didn’t say much to me, so he was naturally kind of scary that way. He looked at me and frowned and reassured his daughter that they were in fact BLACK and not BROWN. He didn’t talk to me, he only talked to her. I remember feeling like I was rude, but I didn’t know what I said to be rude. I remember mumbling back that her skin sure looked BROWN to me. I don’t remember if he dignified this with a response, but I also don’t remember him explaining the whole thing to me either. I wonder today how he might have done that. I wonder because my daughter came home this week telling me she had a new friend at school who is BROWN.
When I figured out who she was talking about (determining that this new friend was of African descent and not Latin American), I told her that her friend is not BROWN but she is BLACK. My daughter screwed her face up in concentration and then said that no, she was not black, she was definitely BROWN. I tried to explain to her that the color black was not just referring to the color of her skin, but of other things too. Of course, being my daughter, she needed to know what other “things”; but I had no answer for her. I’m sitting here thinking and thinking, and I still can’t figure it out. Why are my BROWN friends BLACK? Is it because native African people are so dark they actually don’t look brown anymore, they look black, so it became a blanket description? And now that I think about it, I’m not really white either. I’m more peach or olivey-beige than white. I have only seen a couple of really white folk and they were albinos; but even they were a bit pink.
Can we dispense with trying to identify each other by the color of our skin by saying where we come from? I’m American. My great-grandparents were Italian. My friend Rhoda is American. Maybe her great-great-great grandparents were African. I guess the problem with identifying ourselves by our citizenship means that the color of our skin can no longer be specifically identified to another person. I’m wondering if that’s something that should matter. Does it matter if the person I saw, or met, or interviewed, or dated is white, black, peach, brown, or beige? Is it enough to say, “He was an American,” or “He was Haitian.”?
I know that for a while there, African-American was the politically correct way to refer to someone who I used to call Black. Now it sounds kind of silly, like someone trying way too hard not to offend someone. Does that mean I should be called an Italian-American? Problem with that moniker is my mom’s side of the family is English and Irish. Am I an Italian-English-Irish American? No, that would be ridiculous. And what if a black person has some Italian mixed in there somewhere? Or Haitian? Do they become African-Italian-Haitian American? Some people use “person of color” to describe a person of dark skin. But that sounds silly too. I can imagine the conversations going something like, “Yeah, I met a really cute guy last night. He was tall, about 25, and he’s of color.” What?
The problem with trying to erase the color from our conversations is that it ignores the fact that oftentimes, with different colors come different cultures. Sometimes my kids will be telling me a story about what someone did in class or on the bus or on the sports field, and I’m tempted to ask, “What color is he/she?” Because it’s true that BROWN people and PEACHY-BEIGE people often act differently in similar situations. I find myself giving a kid a “pass” from judgment if they are acting like people of their like color act, even when it’s different than how I want my kids to act. I say to myself, “that’s how They do things.” Is that awful? It sounds bad writing it. But it’s true for me. I don’t think it would be fair for me to expect kids who were raised with different cultural norms to act like I expect my kids to act, and vice versa. And that’s not to say that it’s necessarily a skin-color thing. If you’re raised in a certain culture, you act with those cultural norms, regardless of the color of your skin.
I don’t have any answers for the world’s problems here. This post was borne of my surprise that the questions I faced thirty years ago, are still being asked today by my own children. I guess I haven’t figured it out. I wonder if my kids will before their kids are born. I will say that if I ever do ask one of my kids what color someone is after hearing one of their stories, they seem surprised at the question. Like they never considered that and don’t see its relevance. I see that as a step in the right direction anyway.