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January 20, 2003
The Innocence of (My Own) Children.
my children are not black.
thursday i did my quarterly pennance as a school parent and came to my boy's classroom to help them build animal shelters. i was early and the teacher had them all sitting on the reading rug as she told them the story of mlk.
later that afternoon as we were all in the car discussing the homework assignments for the day, my wife, apropos the mlk discussion asked him who was black in his classroom. he thought edward might be. a couple other mexican kids he guessed might be black. but he didn't think of himself.
my kids are brown, and that's what i've told them they are. yes obviously we are african american but my wife and i are black, the kids are not black like we are and they never will be. that may or may not be a good thing depending on how the world turns, but it's a fact nonetheless. my children face a different society, a more integrated society, a less culturally walled off society than i grew up in. the existentials of black brotherhood are woven throughout, and nobody has to think that 'black is beautiful' is a radical transforming thought. black dap is damned near universal. racial politics is real, but the issues we confront have much more traction than they did when i was a child. we don't face race riots and assassinations. we don't require militants. today, it's about social power.
the language of race, racial conflict and the history of racism is still written by and large in black and white. my children understand very well, especially the eldest two, that they are named after an ancestor who fought for the north in the civil war. i've been keeping a family tree for about 12 years which goes about 7 generations back - on the new orleans free people of color track. the other tracks end, typically in the middle 1800s. so they also understand very well that they are the latest generation of a strong galaxy of family members. but they don't understand black pride, that remains subsumed in the argot of family love. i don't believe they will require quite as much umoja as we did.
the values of my family are not racialized. and while a great deal of my own identity was forged to be the kind of fearless black man the world only used to see in men like robeson (i could spend more time being subtle and more accurate by i'm not worth it), these are not qualities necessary to the survival of my children in america or the world. nor does the world require yet another kind of nouveau negro. we're all fine just the way we are.
my boy felt good about inheriting the black mantle on his first day hearing 'you are the only black kid in class'. i'm not sure that it will get extraordinarily more complicated than that. he knows who he is. he's a good boy, he's a happy boy, he's a friendly boy.
so it took me a moment to think of how i could explain the state of the affairs when i was 8 years old in 1969 in order to underscore the importance of mlk's efforts, and our family's efforts to remake the world. he understood that blacks would get yelled at or beat up for going in the wrong door, but that was just the academic answer. i found the answer in the world the all understand and love, the world of harry potter.
how does malfoy treat hermione granger? imagine that most people were like malfoy and that instead of dumbledore being the headmaster, that it was snape. imagine that everyday somebody called you a mudblood. that's what it was like when i was a kid. i think they got it. and that's about all the analogy i can stand.
Posted by mbowen at January 20, 2003 09:49 AM
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