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I’ve mentioned that our homeschooling schedule becomes slightly more relaxed during the summer months. We tend to lots of reading for the various summer reading programs. For one such program, my oldest son read The Jacket, by Andrew Clements. The book centers on a Caucasian boy who accuses an African-American boy of stealing a jacket. When it’s revealed this accusation is in error, it causes the boy to rethink his beliefs about race and color, and examine his own prejudices.
I asked my son about this book. He was able to summarize the plot for me, and give me basic information about the book. However, when I asked him more detailed questions about the meaning of the book, he gave technically correct answers, but didn’t seem to think any more about it than that.
I have often talked to the kids about how their dad’s parents faced discrimination because of the color of their skin. The kids are fascinated by these stories and how Martin Luther King sparked a movement for “people with brown skin.” My oldest has never really used the terms “African-American” or “Black” to identify race, but rather, “brown skin.”
My bi-racial daughter, in stark contrast, came from a Southern state where there are pockets of Black people and pockets of White people, and very few pockets where these two races that make up her ethnicity ever mix.
Last year, before we met her, but after we began our long-distance phone calls with her, we found out that she was really having a difficult time with Black History Month. She was constantly raising her hand, and piping in with “that’s me!” She was feeling isolated culturally, because she didn’t see many people who were “like her.” I sent her a big box full of multi-cultural crayons with real “people colors” so she could finally make a picture of herself. The box had stickers of famous African-Americans, and construction paper with culturally correct skin tones. When we finally met her, for the occasion of her graduation from Kindergarten, we discovered that she was one of only a handful of children of color in the school.
The other night, the issue of race came up (I’m not sure how, because I wasn’t in the room at the time, and just heard about it later from my husband). She was so excited to be “African-American, woo hoo!” and danced around the living room singing about being African-American.
Two bi-racial children with different world views: my oldest, who seems to take it all in stride and not see race as anything special or different; and my daughter who craves a racial identity and to see people “like” her. Why so different?
We think it’s because our son has grown up in a very ethnically diverse area. Race is really never mentioned as a descriptor unless needed to differentiate someone (i.e. he might say the store clerk with brown skin, if there are two workers of the same sex and age). As mentioned, my daughter lived in a very homogenous region with few who looked like her, thus, when she saw someone, it was a big deal.
With the release of the recent Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute Report on race, more and more attention is being focused on the need to validate a child’s racial identity needs. If a child is adopted by same-race parents, the need still exists provide the child access to culturally competent literature and resources. If adopted trans-racially, the adoptive parents must work that much harder to provide role models and materials that re-affirm the child’s racial identity.
During a recent medical exam, I struck up a conversation the technician, who was adopted. She said it really irked her when people talked about her “real” parents, because she considered her adoptive parents to be her “real” parents. She said the only downside to her upbringing was feeling isolated in terms of “being different” from her Caucasian family as a child adopted from South Korea.
Hopefully, this new report helps these tough conversations to continue, so that children of color have a say in what is meaningful for them in terms of validating their experiences.
