What Price, Peace?

Last weekend I overheard part of a conversation about race between two white adults, a father and son. The son was trying to explain to his father why a recent family dinner table conversation had been racist and offensive, largely due to comments made by several extended family members (aunts, uncles, and cousins).  Neither the father nor the son knew that I was eavesdropping.  Sensing that I might want to remember the details in the future, I grabbed my little notebook and started scribbling.

The son valiantly tried to keep the conversation on track, but was met with intent (though unstudied) defensiveness from his father the entire time.  In general, the father’s remarks seemed to fall into one of three categories:

1)  Other people (including minorities) are prejudiced, so it’s not just me. Also in this category was the observation that even Abraham Lincoln held views that today would be considered racist.  Because you know, if Honest Abe was a racist, so what if the rest of us are too? *snort*

2)  Everyone has different beliefs about things, and each of these beliefs is equally valid. The father made numerous comments that fell into this category.  The central theme was that racist views are simply a matter of opinion, and that everyone has a right not only to her or his opinion, but to hold those opinions unchallenged. This tolerance-of-intolerance allows people to think they are being open-minded and accepting, while in reality they are sheltering close-minded racism.

3)  The “family” card trumps everything else.

It’s this last category that I am especially interested in right now.  The father seemed to take painstaking care to mention the word “family” at every opportunity — “we’re all family,” “we were having a family get-together,” etc. — and repeatedly emphasized the need “to keep peace in the family.”  Confronting other family members about their racist remarks would clearly destroy this illusion of family peace, and it seemed this illusion needed to be maintained at all costs.

But what exactly are those costs?  And who is paying them?

Although he never stated this explicitly, the underlying message that I kept hearing from this father was that nothing was more important than family loyalty — nothing. Not standing up for what you believe in; not speaking truth to prejudice and racism; and certainly not loving people enough to gently point out to them the errors of their thinking.

This last point is an important one, because unlike with random strangers we might run into on the subway or at the post office, we have ongoing relationships with our family.  These relationships wind all through our past and stretch into the future, and are precisely what this father saw as being threatened if some members of the family were called out on their racist comments. Family peace, family harmony, family relationships — these were all seen to be “at risk” if anyone dared to stand up and rock the boat.

However, I want to suggest to this father that the real threat to family peace comes from keeping silent. Continually paying the very real costs of suppression and silence  will eventually take its toll, and people may wake up one morning and decide that they don’t want to do it anymore.  I’ve seen a lot of stories about folks who have severed ties with certain people in their family due to racism and bigotry, including this post at Anti-Racist Parent.  We can’t pick the families we grow up in, but we are starting to realize as adults that we can pick which relationships we want to nourish in the future.  And if this man’s son chooses to distance himself from the hostile environment created by repeated racist comments?

That’s an awfully high price to pay for family peace.

Beyond Black and White

When I was in high school and looking at colleges, I recall being invited to several minority recruiting events. I rarely went, mostly because I wasn’t interested in the schools that were hosting them. However, I did receive an invitation to attend a “diversity outreach” event at a small, predominantly white liberal arts college that seemed similar to a few other schools that I was considering. It looked interesting and my parents agreed to take me, so I signed up.

As soon as we got there I realized my mistake, and wanted nothing more than to

“Where Are All The White Babies?”

These, apparently, were the words spoken by a mother shopping for a doll for her daughter at an FAO Schwarz Newborn Adoption Center. All of the white doll-babies available for sale adoption had already been sold adopted, leaving only cribs full of less desirable waiting minority doll-babies.

This is according to a story that aired on This American Life, which you can listen to here (click on “full episode” and fast forward to 41 minutes in).

Also, be sure and read this post (“Out of the Cabbage Patch and Into the Fire“) by Chris at Ingrata, in which he writes:

Ostensibly a story about prejudice toward racial minorities and people with disabilities with only a slight nod toward the adoption industry’s commidification of children (a supervisor instructs staff never to mention the word”sell” in its “adoption interview” before it collects the “adoption fee”), the storyteller, in this case a sales associate (“nurse”) recounts her experience of customer reactions when all the white babies sell out, leaving row upon row of minority babies lying unadopted in their “incubators.”

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A couple of things struck me about this story. According to the narrator, it seemed that more often than not it was the parents (the child’s parents, not the 7-year-old prospective adoptive “mommy”) who were insisting on white babies. What kinds of messages were these parents sending to their children about the relative value of different races? Does the insatiable desire for healthy white infants (and the resultant devaluation of anything else as “less than”) begin at home?

Also, after the white babies were all sold out, guess which babies were the next highest in demand? That’s right, the Asian babies — the “honorary” whites, the “next best thing” to being white. (See Jae Ran’s post explaining why in fact Asians are not “the other white meat”.) After that? The Latino/a (“Hispanic”) babies. Part of the “horror” of this story is that not only were the Black babies the last to be sold, but the display-only defective special needs baby (whose fingers melted together in a manufacturing error) was sold first. (I’m not sure who is supposed to be more insulted here.)

As Chris writes in his post, the entire Newborn Adoption Center scenario is “callously accurate” in its depiction of the adoption industry. He points out that babies are viewed as commodities to be bought and sold. Birth certificates are falsified to perpetuate the “as-if born to” myth. The whole concept is targeted and marketed to little girls, reinforcing the gender stereotype that they are the Future Nurturers of America.

I would add that the same hierarchy of race that exists in the “Newborn Adoption Centers” exists for real, living, breathing, children who are emphatically not dolls. The adoptive “parents” appear to be overwhelmingly white. The high cost of adoption precludes people who want to be parents and who might be good parents (including prospective parents of color) from adopting. Issues of class intersect with issues of race. And nobody is talking about first parents, or why these babies are “available” for adoption in the first place.

Hmm.

Seems like the only things missing are the race-based differential prices adoption fees, and perhaps a baby-dump Safe Haven receptacle next door.

But give the toy companies and retailers time, and I’m sure they’ll come up with those things soon enough.

Just like we did in real life.

Hat tip to Chris at Ingrata.

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.

“I Think We’re the Only White People Here!”

Yup, this was actually a statement that went through my mind at a wedding that we went to several years ago, and I must admit that more than a few minutes went by before I realized what was wrong with it, at least at the surface level.

But let me back up.

The posts at Racialicious and Resist Racism got me thinking about my own interracial friendships. (Actually, Mona’s reactions to Hurricane Katrina got me thinking more about my own family, but that’s a whole other post.) More specifically, they got me thinking about a Black friend whose wedding we attended about seven years ago–she is Black, the guy she was marrying is Black, as are their families.

And so were all of the guests, except for us, which led to my matter-of-fact observation that “I think we’re [LB and I] the only white people here!” (And yes, I’m ashamed to admit that if anything, I was congratulating myself on how open-minded and diverse and politically correct I was–as in, look at me everybody! I have Black friends! I’m not afraid to be one of only two white people in a room!)

Except I’m not white.

Part of my point is that, as Frank H. Wu points out in his book Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, as a society we tend to think of race in terms of Black and white. Things that are “not Black” are assumed to be white, and vice versa, with little thought given to any other races that might exist. And clearly I am not above falling into this trap.

But the other part of my point is that even as an adult, my unconsidered inclination was to think of myself as white rather than Asian. Culture camp, a semester of trying to learn Korean, countless college culture shows–for what?

Yes, folks, the effects of growing up in a predominantly white family and going to predominantly white schools in predominantly white towns are hard to erase.