Seven-Year-Old Shows New Racial Awareness

March 6, 2010 · Behavior | Help Pater | Influences | Suburban Survival

How in the world do we deal with this stuff?

Pink backpack with happy flower - illustration by Peter Arkle.

More Innocence Lost, Color Blindness Is Over

Blogged fast, out of need:

Used to be hard to tell if Girl Child really meant what she said or was just goofing, pulling the Old Man's chain, trying to get a rise out of me. Now that she's seven, it's flat damn impossible. As noted before, we got us a mini Meryl Streep.

So she doesn't get much of a reaction when she looks up at breakfast and asks, "Dad, weren't white people the first people?"

Doubtful, I say.

"Yes they were," Girl Child comes back, "Adam and Eve were the first people, and they were white."

She speaks with snot-nose surety, happy to correct her father.

I give her some home school blather about how Adam and Eve, if they did exist, would be Middle Eastern, but that's just a story, and modern humans evolved in Africa and probably were dark, and races diverged later. All based on extremely sketchy Newsweek-level knowledge of human evolution. What I'm really doing, is stalling for time, because -- Oh. My. God. -- the kid is serious.

Disturbing, big-time, on at least a couple counts:

Our girl is a Creationist! She's talking Biblical literalism, man.
Worse, I hear some Red State white supremacy, with scriptural authority.

I have no idea where this crap comes from. Probably some little friend who goes to Sunday school where they have story books with old-time illustrations, all the ancient Hebrews looking Nordic. But it flies in the face of our core beliefs and principles. We are, through and through, Darwinian liberal humanists. But that really is the least of it. There is no room, none, for White First anything in this house.

That last thing goes way beyond your garden variety abhorrence of racism. A little backstory says why: Girl Child has a half-sister, which I birth-fathered way, way back in high school, who disappeared into adoption at birth but then looked me up at age almost 30. She is mixed race and raised by African-American parents and heart and soul not white. But she and her family (two children, husband) are us. We keep in touch and get together now and again and feel 100 percent loving natural family. On the other hand, Grown Woman Child and I connected late, with long separate histories, so the bond sometimes seems, like, notional.And GWC and her family aren't always such a major connected presence in this unit -- Girl Child, Minerva, me -- but still, this is our reality, and there is love. Complicated, but anybody with birth- and adoptive connections gets it.

Funny, after four months online, I finally felt ready to blog the birth-child birth-father thing. But now Caucasian Adam and Eve forces out this nutshell version -- the point being that racism, for us, is not a political or social justice or any kind of issue. It's family, and it's poison, and we're damn well not going to have it.

But then, know what I do this Adam-and-Eve morning? Very little. After the two minutes of half-assed Discovery Channel and a gentle reminder about who areGC's close blood kin, I shut up. Don't want to hot-button the issue until I've thought it through. To this point there has been no need, because Girl Child, like other little kids, was so innocent of prejudice and really, truly color blind, one of the things about little kidhood I'm going to miss. But it's wake-up time for Minerva and me, because we're hearing new stuff about white and brown people -- out girl's term -- that we never did. So far, only observation about differences in clothes style, music, dancing. The sense of Us and Them is unavoidable, but it also feels like a slippery slope. And we need to know what we need to, don't we?

So, what have heard/seen/noticed about racial awareness and attitudes of your kid(s)? What do you do about it?

2 Comments | Post a comment | Permanent Link

Comments

I think you are over reacting because you heard her comment with adult ears. She wasn’t making a judgment but asking to verify what she thought was a fact. Your brain shifted to fifth gear and she smelled the fear in the air and knew she had you.
At this age it’s all about being first. First in line at the water fountain. First to spit a tooth out, etc etc.
If she sees that you are comfortable interacting with shades of a different color then you will be giving her the gift that every racist never received. And thanks for letting us know about Grown Woman Child. Now we especially understand your reaction to Girl Child’s innocent question about caucasian firsts.
She’ll copy what you do. Not what you say.

Comment #1, posted by YaYa on March 6, 2010 at 09:55:25 PM

My anthropology major son tells me that the first anatomically modern humans were most likely a pleasing light brown, like the San, becoming darker or lighter to compensate for greater or lesser insolation as they dispersed throughout the globe. So we have people in Ireland who look like cave fish and people in the Congo who look like black bass. This is clearly a punishment for the sin of Adam and Eve, who set the stage for this diaspora and the adaptations it fostered. If it were not for them we would all look like brown trout.

So I tend to agree with YaYa that GC was engaging in perfectly reasonable speculation about the origins of humankind, and with a brotherly bent. At least the story of Adam and Eve implies that we are all of the same family. If she starts to think that white people are more genteel than others, you could take her to a stock car race in Alabama or a carp derby in upstate New York. That would disabuse her of such notions real quick.

Comment #2, posted by Chuck the Duck on March 10, 2010 at 11:38:20 AM

Pater’s Plays

O mio babbino caro (from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi) by Renée Fleming

Pops of love-struck teenagers will relate. A daughter works “dear little daddy” so he’ll let her marry a guy she’s crazy for. She gets cute, begs, threatens to throw herself in river, howls how it hurts. But very, very beautifully, no?

See Daddy of all Playlists