Ask ARP: Does my child wish our family were different?
Dear Anti-Racist Parent,
I’m writing to ask for any insight or similar experience or simply your perspectives.
This last weekend, we were reading bell hooks’ Homemade Love, and my nearly four-year-old daughter remarked that she wanted to look like Girlpie, and she wanted me to look like Girlpie’s mama and her papa to look like Girlpie’s papa. As you may know, the family members in Homemade Love are all of a clear, obvious African-diasporic phenotype. In our family, I’m a mixed blood who could pass for white; my daughter is a mixed blood who could pass for not-Black and possibly for white, depending on the context, and her father, my partner, is a Black Indian who most folks see as Black.
I’m not sure if my daughter was expressing a desire to look more typically Black, to have a “matching” family, to have a mama who “matched”, or all of the above. My uncertainty is increased by her
specification that she wanted her papa to look like Girlpie’s papa given that they both appear Black, though Girlpie’s papa is of a lighter skin tone. Nonetheless, I’m trying to understand what she was
expressing and to address that in the most helpful way going forward, and I could use some feedback, please.
At the time, I asked her why she wanted to look like Girlpie and have parents who looked like Girlpie’s parents, and she said she just did. I didn’t press the issue, and we finished reading the book. She has
several books with obviously mixed families, and she has in the past expressed a desire to have more obviously mixed families in our lives. We responded to that by taking her to the mixed/transracially
adoptive local playgroup and asking that the queer parents group we attend {which has a lot of mixed families} have more scheduled time when the families were interacting all together instead of the kids
and parents separate most of the time. She hasn’t remarked again on “wanting more families like that”, so I’m hopeful that what she was looking for with that request is being provided.
This is rambling and unfocused, but I’m just asking for any insight/perspective/experience ya’ll might share that might help us navigate this particular aspect of the anti-racist parenting journey . . . thank you.
Janine D.
Oakland, CA
From the Editor:
Ah, four year olds. Sometimes what they say means everything, sometimes nothing at all. Makes it tough on those of us who love them. We’ve got to decipher which comments can be safely ignored and which require action.
With the context you’ve given, I tend to think your daughter’s comment was a moment of passing whimsy. Girlpie’s family does look fun. Perhaps they simply charmed your little one. I would file this one away in your memory bank. If, in your daughter’s behavior, you see consistent evidence of her wanting to be different or wanting her family to be different, then you can find more ways to help her celebrate the skin she’s in and her family’s diversity. Until then, I recommend taking it easy.
Four year olds are smart little folks, but they are early in their development. I think parents have to guard against too quickly reacting or overreacting to the things little ones say, thus creating problems and hang-ups where there were none.
Readers, what do you say?
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
slackermom wrote:
i can relate. my newly-minted five year old said just last weekend, as i was hugging her before bed, “i love you mom, but why are you white?”.
she was looking at her her brown arm hugging my very tan, but not the same dark sepia as her arm, and it was what popped out of her mouth. i don’t think it was weighing heavily on her soul, but it was a similar, why don’t we match question.
we too read all sorts of books about all sorts of families and have similar experiences with families of varying hues. we discussed how her birthparents had similar skin color to her and how nana and pop pop have similar skin color to mine and that helped make our skin the color they are (we also discuss how her big brother’s skin is a mixture of his black/white birthparents). we discuss race and adoption openly in our family, but it’s definitely a journey.
we’re at the beach for the month, and our beach isn’t exactly known for its diversity if you take our family out of the census. but amazingly this week, there are four families (yes, i counted) who look more like ours, so it was a great opportunity for me to point out other families with different hues. i’d have been out of luck last week.
as tami said, preschoolers are so smart. it’s always tough to figure out what is a passing comment and what is a weighing comment that needs a thorough discussion. they can say these heavy things that seem earth shattering to us, and then run outside and blow bubbles the next minute. it sounds like you provide lots of opportunities for discussions and thinking through these notions with your daughter. i think that’s a great place to start.
Posted 09 Jul 2008 at 9:21 am ¶
Elizabeth wrote:
My daughter (6) makes comments like this from time to time.
A while ago she said she wanted to be darker like her dad. When I asked her why she said it’s because she likes how (the palm of) his hands look gold (against his dark skin).
I usually act casual when she says stuff like that, but I always check in. Whenever I push her I am met with a wall of silence or an “I don’t know.” I see this as age appropriate and that color talk is still a bit much for her.
She’s a very confident kid. I think she’s exploring and testing the waters. She likes her color and recognizes and comments on the wide variety of color tones in her observations of others.
We spend a lot of time with people of different colors, ethnicities, and cultural backgrounds. She has always been told that’s she’s beautiful; and she likes it a lot. In fact, sometimes I worry more about her depending on those compliments and growing into an emphasis on external beauty.
Posted 09 Jul 2008 at 9:46 pm ¶
Aimee Blackham wrote:
We have had these talks, too. I am waiting until my AA daughters are older, but I am going to share the story of the parents, each of various mixed race, that had twin girls, one very clearly “white” and the other very clearly “black”, whatever that means in this context.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-377839/Black-white-twins.HTML
I wrote a letter to Adoptive Families Magazine once, and they said not to be afraid of talking about how our mixed race families will be treated differently, or how our black kids will experience racism more than we white parents. that is still a hard one for me, I just wish it wasn’t an issue! I like to say to my daughter I don’t want her any other color because she wouldn’t be her!!
Posted 10 Jul 2008 at 1:13 pm ¶
Gillian wrote:
I have a child who has a lot of issues, for which she has therapy. One of the most important things I learned from the therapist was, never ask your kid why. Because they don’t know.
Of course, this doesn’t stop me doing so in moments of exasperation, but when we’re on a subject that relates to identity, I always offer a possible explanation or two. If they are way off the mark, my child will tell me before moving on to blowing bubbles or whatever. If they make things clearer for her, it can help with her thought processes for the next time she wants to bring up the subject.
I don’t believe that any comment our children make is anodine, I just believe that the way we see it isn’t necessarily the way they see it. You sound you’re doing an A1 job, though so if I were you, I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.
Posted 10 Jul 2008 at 11:38 pm ¶
Stephanie W wrote:
This could be just a whimsical fantasy for your daughter. My daughter (6) is always saying she wants to be part of this or that family or live in another house or have something change. When I ask why, the answer usually seems to be that she would like to mix things up a bit. She has played with our toys and lived in our house and seen us these colors and wouldn’t it be great if we could change for a while.
I used to be upset by these musings, but now play along and come up with other interesting changes and it seems fun for us to imagine ourselves different. But in the end I always say how much I like what we have and why.
Posted 11 Jul 2008 at 8:22 am ¶
Deanna wrote:
My husband was devastated when our 7 year old son Lucca (6 at the time) said something to the effect that he didn’t like when his dad read to him because his accent made him hard to understand. My husband is Brazilian, and it felt like a xenophobic slap in the face from his own child. A friend of mine pointed out that sometimes kids that age say things more as an observation of fact, rather than intending to be evaluative…it’s a fact that my husband has an accent when he speaks English (something he is proud of!). It gave us a platform to talk about how people come from different countries, and we did talk about compassion, and why that might have hurt his dad’s feelings–but other than that isolated comment it’s never come up in such a personal way again, and of course they have continued to bond over reading together, both in English and Portuguese. But, the one thing all of these instances do point out, is the fact that conversations about race and ethnicity with children start really young–I keep thinking I can wait until he’s older, but he’s getting so many images and words from peers at camp, school, cartoons, etc. that I realize it’s important now to at least try to give him language at his level that embraces our philosophy of anti-racism.
Posted 11 Jul 2008 at 2:09 pm ¶
gm wrote:
My daughter has started to say things like “I’m too light or I wish I was darker or I wish I was the color of my cousin.” It bothered me because I grew up feeling similar. I became concerned because I knew she had started to internalize things others must have said to her, as I had as a child. She confirmed my suspicions by telling me something a classmate had said to her. I don’t want her feeling this way. No one is too light or too dark we just are.
Posted 11 Jul 2008 at 5:07 pm ¶
Meera Bowman-Johnson wrote:
My almond-complexioned but daughter has expressed a desire to look like Girlpie as well (what kid wouldn’t - the illustrator is amazing!). Not so much now (she’s 6), but a couple of years ago when I read her Happy to Be Nappy. We’d open the book and she’d say “which one is me?” and scan the illustrations for one that “looked like” her. This proved to be no easy task…but eventually she found one whose hairstyle she liked, or outfit she loved and would point to it - “that’s me!”.
I won’t lie - at first I felt strange like “does this kid know what she even looks like?”. But I never got upset about it, regardless of the fact that her skin was different shade, her loosely-kinked hair a different texture. (Although you’d think that Hooks would have the illustrator paint some of these characters in different shades, considering the spectrum of colors that we people of color of African ancestry come in, but I digress…). I am just happy that my daughter associates the African-diasporic phenotype as something desirable, when the larger society/images in the media so clearly deems it something to be ashamed of.
I don’t think she’s confused or wishes that she looked different. When she says things that cause me to wonder, I usually mention that people in our family come in a wide range of colors (no really - her siblings are “B&W twins” and my husband could pass for white if he wanted to)…and end it with an emphatic “isn’t that cool!?” - because when you actually think about it, it really is.:)
Posted 13 Jul 2008 at 10:28 pm ¶
Meera Bowman-Johnson wrote:
Sorry - here’s the corrected link to my blog!
Posted 13 Jul 2008 at 10:44 pm ¶
Janine deManda wrote:
Thank you all for your responses. We have been away from home visiting family, and I’m just getting to read this. A friend of mine suggested perhaps my daughter was just a budding bibliophile like her mama and was so taken with the story she wanted us to be part of it. She also suggested that I might be a tad oversensitive in my concerns. I think both are likely true. I’m a joyful witness to my daughter’s growing love of books and stories and her own imagination. As someone whose family of origin chose to engage in all sorts of contortions to avoid direct conversations about raced identity, I’d rather err on the side of oversensitive as long as I can manage it well enough so my daughter feels comfortable with these conversations instead of burdened by my preoccupation.
Thank you all for your feedback, and thanks especially to Gillian for this - “when we’re on a subject that relates to identity, I always offer a possible explanation or two.” I’ve tended not to offer possible explanations because I don’t want her to feel like I’m dictating her experience, but this remark and a moment of epiphany with her the other day reminded me that part of my job as her mother is to help her learn to understand and interpret her experience - to give her the tools. As usual, I’m glad ARP is here to help me with that daunting task.
Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 12:56 pm ¶
Juba Kalamka wrote:
RE: Janine’s initial post:
Thank you all for sharing your experiences with your children and your insightful comments. Janine do a lot of talking back and forth about how to handle our daughter’s questions and its good to know that there are others working on these issues in similar contexts. Your suggestions and insights are greatly appreciated.
I’ve been particularly concerned about how to approach these issues given my own context as an sometimes uncomfortably mixed-race identified but culturally and phenotypically “black” man coming from a familial context (1970s Africentrist education and theatre community) of strident monoracial identity with few spaces of in-depth dialogue around race as a social construction.
My son (who lives with his mother, who is African American) turns 14 this weekend,and I’ve been very fortunate to begin having these conversations with him as I have acquired the tools to engage them.
The varied responses the posters children had to Girlpie got me to thinking about talking to my son around his 8th birthday about both positive and negative stuff he’d heard people say about dark skin vs. light skin in African American community.
He’d had several African American friends who were concurrently identified as mixed, and was aware of our passably light-skinned Afro-German second cousins , so I was curious to see where he might becoming from given that his social context was radically different from mine at a similar age.
As we talked about different people we knew, and about what he thought “white”,”black” and “mixed” represented to him (mostly a “people come in a lot of nice colors” kinda thing..he often referred to himself as “brown” as opposed to “black”) I asked “what about Janine?” and he said “she’s not white - I can see her color.”
Given some of the stuff I heard about mixed or racially ambiguous folks growing up in the Midwest (he has grown up there as well) to say I was surprised -and impressed would be an understatement.
Still, it got me to thinking…did he respond as he did because he was looking at a picture of his father’s partner and the subject therefore _had_ to be a non-white person? Was this something he’d picked up in conversation or socialization with peers? Was it something he felt sure in asserting because he’d become comfortably “monoracial” by that age and understood, or was at least comfortable enough with the concept that he could understand “not white , but maybe not black like me”?
I began to realize that it was probably a combination of factors, and that I was way more concerned that he was, particular because my family’s positions on race have consisted of either a) alternate loathing and fetishziation of light skinned and/or mixed race people or b) narrow,virulent nationalist purity mythologizing about “the race” and “blackness”.
In both instances, I’ve been hyper conscious of both of my children’s needs to be both protected and encouraged to dialogue with us and others about their identities and self concepts and what shapes them in and ongoing fashion. I feel plenty comfortable with my academic handle on things, but the teenager and the three year old always manage to hit me with something that leaves me stuck. Go figure.
All that said, I’m really glad ARP exists and that all of you here are taking the time to share your opinions and working on these complicated and often uncomfortable conversations with your children and families. Thanks a bunch, for real.
Posted 17 Jul 2008 at 6:39 pm ¶