Living In Color

The summer before I started college, I wrote to the person I was to live with for the next year to say hi and introduce myself. She wrote back with a very nice note on pink ballerina stationery, and mentioned that she used to live only two hours away from me before her family moved to Brooklyn when she was seven.

When we arrived on campus and were getting settled in, I asked why her family had moved to New York City.

“Well, I came home from school one day and asked my mom when I would turn white like my teachers and my friends’ parents,” she told me in a very matter-of-fact way. “That’s when my parents decided that growing up as a Black kid in a mostly-white town wasn’t good for me.”

She wasn’t adopted, and at the time, I mostly wondered why a young Black child with Black parents would think that her skin would “turn white” when she got older. Hadn’t she noticed that her parents’ skin never turned white? I mean, I had white parents, and I never thought that I would become white at a certain age. (Although there certainly were, and are, many times when I wished that I would.) Needless to say, I have since learned that kids’ minds don’t always work in the ways we might think.

But her story has stayed with me, and usually resurfaces when I think about people of color living in predominantly white communities. Such as yesterday, when I read a story in the New York Times about racism in Maine, which is referred to as “the Whitest State”: Threat in Maine, the Whitest State, Shakes Local N.A.A.C.P.

Last year, a white man shouted racial slurs at a pregnant black woman in Hancock, near Bangor, and kicked her in the abdomen, according to Mr. Harnett’s [assistant attorney general for civil rights education and enforcement] office. And in March, Assata Sherrill, a black resident of Bangor, told the police that three white boys had thrown stones and shouted racial epithets at her as she walked her dog near the city’s waterfront.

Ms. Sherrill — who lives here with her teenage daughter, a high school senior who “hates every minute of it” and wants to attend historically black Spelman College in Atlanta — says she moved to Maine from Detroit in search of tranquility.

I’m curious about the kind of “tranquility” that Ms. Sherrill mentions, and the price that she is willing to pay for it. I’m not necessarily criticizing her decision to move, although it sounds like her daughter is. I’m just curious about decisions that people of color, and white parents with children of color, make about why they live where they do.

It is important to note that Ms. Sherill is not standing by and suffering in silence, and is actively working to fight the kinds of racism that she has experienced:

After the attack on her, she organized a series of community forums to discuss race issues in Maine. This month she held an alternative Kwanzaa celebration after Mr. Sawyer’s threat led the N.A.A.C.P. to cancel its larger version.

“I’m not about to stop living and holding celebrations because somebody else is sick,” Ms. Sherrill said. “As long as your skin is black and you live in the United States of America, you are going to be confronted.”

I applaud her efforts and think her last statement is definitely true, and for other races as well as Blacks. But I also think there is a difference between being “confronted” within the context of a diverse community surrounded by people who face similar problems, and being “confronted” in a community where less than one percent of the population looks like you. Throw in the fact that for most transracially adopted kids, their own parents neither look like them nor face the same level of personal attacks, and I have to think that the importance of growing up in a diverse community is even more important for these kinds of families.

Ji In (formerly of Twice The Rice and now blogging at Sixth Sister) wrote a spot-on post recently about those kids who stick out like “sore thumbs” in their communities based on race:

I can’t help but feel a pang of grief when I see a kid in his or her class picture, Christmas pageant, Sunday school class or whatever, and s/he is the only one.

Alone in a sea of whiteness, the only Asian one. The only black one. The only brown one.

It shouldn’t have to be — and, I dare say, shouldn’t be — that way. Not when parents have a choice to place their kids’ ethnic identity development and self-esteem over their own comfort and convenience.

Indeed. (Be sure to read the rest of Ji In’s great post as well.)

My former roommate’s situation was a bit different than that of most transracially adoptive families, since her parents were also minorities. It may even have been in the interest of their own comfort and convenience to move to a more diverse community, and there may have been other factors involved besides race.

But there is something that has the potential to be similar to transracially adoptive families: the explanation that my roommate remembers, and tells others, as an adult. She knows that her parents believe that issues of race and racial identity are important. She understands the impact of community, and the diversity/lack of diversity in communities, on how children view themselves.

And mostly she knows that she, and her younger brother, were important enough for their parents to make a big, life-changing decision.