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I
was in one of those ultra-hip, overstuffed mall stores, checking
out a "Mister T says stay in school" T-shirt. I asked my daughter
if she thought I should get it. She said no. When I asked why
not, I had hoped she would have a good reason, like saving me
from pointless nostalgia. But instead, she offered that she did
not like him. Her friend agreed, and added: "he's brown". "What?"
I asked, thinking I heard wrong. Then they both said: "I don't
like him--he's brown."
I guess
they could have said something much more embarrassing, or they could
have been a lot louder about it. I said, "That's not cool" and left
it at that.
Back
home at the dining room table my daughter offered that a "big brown
kid" had shoved her on the playground. Her friend claimed that his
arms and legs used to be brown, but now they were white.
Since
whiteness had been brought up, I thought I'd point out that they
weren't actually white. Both of them are half Euro-American, and
half Japanese. My daughter pointed out that she was whiter than
I am. Technically, she had me. She has very fair skin--frequently
strangers compare her to a "China doll"--while I am, shall we say,
"ruddy".
I explained
that white, black, and other colors, when applied to people, are
not literal colors. It was a tactic totally lost on kindergartners,
who tend to be highly literal.
So I
adopted the strategy of naming "brown" kids that they knew. "What
about so-and-so in your class? What about what's-his-face who was
at your birthday party?"
"Yeah,
we like them."
"Well,
so you like brown people right?"
"Um.
. .yeah." (A small victory).
But
as I tried to proceed they agreed that "No, they don't like people
just because they're brown."
Touché.
I went after them for a few more rounds, then finally just got them
to agree that it wasn't cool to say that you don't like brown people,
or you don't like white people, or you don't like yellow people,
or whatever.
It turned
out that the instigator behind the color talk was Martin Luther
King, Jr. Or rather, the kids were preparing for assemblies at school
for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. The talk of race was part
of trying to explain his significance. My daughter came home singing
the song her class was going to do for the assembly. Then she told
me that the reason Martin Luther King Jr. got shot was because he
didn't like brown people.
We sat
down for another series of questions and answers, interspersed with
lectures.
A few
days later, my wife was volunteering in my daughter's class when
a student raised her hand and stated that her mother said that everyone
in class was white. The kid who said this was actually of Middle-Eastern
descent. There is only one fully "white" kid in the class. Again,
the literal interpretation of white, versus the racially motivated
concept of white came up. When one of the kids stated that he was
black, many of his classmates offered up that he was not black,
but brown, as if they were consoling him.
Eventually,
my daughter raised her hand to say that her dad told her he didn't
want her to talk about brown people. My wife said nothing, feeling
that it was unfair for her to clarify what I actually said, when
the other kids were saying things that were most likely not clear
representations of anything their parents said. I ended up talking
with my daughter's teacher the next day. As someone who had racially
mixed kids herself, she understood the complexities of trying to
explain race to kids before they could really understand it. We
agreed that the difficulties we were having were an unfortunate
consequence of trying to explain important figures like MLK to students
whose own experiences of race were rather benign. How do you explain
the Civil Rights Movement to a bunch of six-year-olds who are unaccustomed
to thinking about such things?
I talked
to the father of my daughter's Mr. T-disliking friend about this
same thing. He was having problems with the odd form of indoctrination
that was surrounding the MLK holiday. We came to the basic conclusion
that the kids needed to be learning about Martin Luther King, Jr.,
even if it was confusing to them. It would all be sorted out in
time, we hoped, when the kids were more able to understand the issues,
as well as what they were saying themselves.
After
all, encountering some of these hard truths at a young age was probably
better for them than getting the kind of "I cannot tell a lie" cherry-tree
stories we got as history when we were kids--the kind of sanitized
history that results in disillusionment when one finds out it was
all candy-coated B.S. fed to us because we were too young to understand
the larger picture.
History
isn't just harmless fun like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. It's
not something we can pretend now, and then let kids grow out of.
But still, there is a difficult line to walk when giving children
an idea of what is important, without fogging up their heads with
information that just doesn't compute. I am glad that my child is
learning about MLK, but I am getting a headache from trying to explain
things that she cannot possibly understand, particularly when she's
been raised to see people as individuals rather than as representative
colors.
Copyright
© 2001 Jonathan C. Schildbach. All Rights Reserved.
Jonathan C. Schildbach lives.
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