Category: race
Drowning in Fear
Today was our first day of swimming lessons. While Ahmir, my 4 year old, was like a fish out of water – scared, timid, shaky – at least he resembled a fish. I was amazed at what the instructor got my notoriously skittish little one to do – let go of the side (while holding him, of course), straighten out his arms like an airplane, kick, put his chin and eventually his mouth in the water. My daughter Amina, on the other hand, at almost 3, actually cried and wouldn’t get into the big pool. She did eventually walk in the baby pool, with much prodding by me, but she did not live up to what I expected for my $24 half-hour lesson.
But we are going to stick with it, as ridiculously expensive the lessons are, because I want my children to know how to swim. Black children drown at a rate of almost 3 times that of white children, and mostly that is because they don’t know how to swim. I can understand, because embarrissingly enough, I also don’t know how to swim. Many black adults, epecially those that I know were raised in the Northeast region of the country, don’t know how to swim. And while the reasons run the gamut from lack of access to pools (the public pools in Philly during the summer were so jam packed there was no room to swim!), to the expense of lessons, one of the most troubling reasons is a fear of water.
Again, I can understand. I’m terrified of water. Really, I’m terrified of drowning. But isn’t that ironic – I’m scared to drown, so I don’t learn to swim?
Fear is drowning us adults and our children, and honestly robbing them of a sport and a exercise that does not need to be held back from them. Granted, the lessons are hella expensive, and my checkbook is hurting right now, but I know that I am giving my children a skill that lasts a lifetime. Furthermore, water is one of the most precious things we have on this earth, and one of the most beautiful. When I hear of people diving off cliffs in St. Lucia into pristine waters, or exploring underwater caves, I want my children to be able to experience this wonderful natural resource and engage with it, not be in fear of it.
And you are probably asking – well, what about you, LaToya? Are you going to get over your fear and learn to swim? As soon as a recreation class in beginning swimming fits into my schedule, I’m there. I don’t want my life ruled by fear of anything.
P.S. And while we’re talking summer health, don’t forget the sunscreen. Brown folks do get skin cancer.
Little Women
So apparently there is a lot of “outrage” surrounding this video, which features 7 and 8 year old girls performing in a dance competition, dancing to Beyonce’s Single Ladies. If you haven’t seen it, here it is:
And while I have my own personal views on whether little girls should be doing such dances, I am more than a little annoyed at the national press this “story” is getting. For I cannot help but notice the color of these little girls. Or more to the point, the color they are not. Because of course they are White.
My thing is this: Where was the national outrage when Drake and Lil Wayne had little girls – including Wayne’s daughter – on the stage at the BET awards while they sang about wanting to f*ck every girl in the world?? Do y’all remember the Juvenile video for Back That Ass Up when you knew it was 13 year old girls up in this video? Where was the national outrage when this was a summertime hit across the country, when it was OUR girls dancing inappropriately for their age?
How many times have you been at a talent show or dance competition and seen Black little girls doing all kinds of dances that you feel like you want to cover your eyes cause it just don’t seem right? Where is the national outrage any time OUR girls are treated like little women, instead of the children they are? Why does it take little White girls to gyrate for someone to say that there is a problem? There has BEEN a problem. It just must not have been the right color.
But of course, the media hasn’t even identified the problem correctly. They are blaming the parents – what’s wrong with these parents, they are asking. And perhaps some blame belongs there, perhaps. But like one of the parents said, this is an extremely popular song, with an extremely popular video. And Beyonce has every right to make it – she’s a grown ass woman.
But has anyone asked, why is this video on in the middle of the day? Is it appropriate for children? And the answer that is clear, judging by the media coverage, is that its okay for OUR kids, for OUR girls. As long as they thought only our girls were mimicking these videos, dressing like prostitutes and shaking what they mamas gave ’em, everything was all good. But as soon as it soils the lily-white purity of THEIR girls – oh no, we have a problem. A national problem worthy of morning news while two wars are being fought, bombs are being set, the economy is being tripped by computer glitches, and so on.
This is some bull-ish. But who am I to complain – we got a black President. Hallelujah.
For the Children
“Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.”
http://abovethelaw.com/2010/04/hls-3ls-racist-email-goes-national/
This statement comes from a minor controversy that was brewing among law students (and perhaps others) about two weeks ago. As a law and sociology student, of course I saw all the flaws in the thinking, and crafted what I thought to be a perfectly rational response, aided by some other perfectly rational people, and we sent something to our law students that amounted to a big debunking of her incorrect thoughts on race, biology, and intelligence.
But when I was thinking about what I was going to write for my post here tonight, I really started thinking about the little excerpt above, and it made me feel something different than the outrage that I felt two weeks ago. I felt something different than indignant, or embarrassed that a fellow law student didn’t know how ignorant she sounded.
I feel sad.
I feel sad that there continues to be people out there that will look at my little boy and my little girl and really believe that just because his and her skin is a different color that that fact has anything to do with their intelligence. I feel sad that there are people who are so simple minded that they really believe that it would be “settled” if they could just take 100 white babies and 100 black babies and raise them on an island and then “test” to see if they are equal. I feel so sad that even with Barack Obama in the White House, a man we all know has a “white” mother yet we still call him “black,” meaning that we all do have some sense that race is socially determined, not biologically determined, we fail to apply that knowledge to our children, who deserve the benefit of that knowledge the most. I feel so sad that a woman like the one who wrote the little thought experiment above might be an important cog in the wheel of deciding the law in one of the most influential courts in this country.
It just reminds me that we have to keep fighting the good fight, wherever and whenever it comes our way. We do it for ourselves. We do it for our children.
“It’s Racial!”
So while I was trying to not thrust my own oft-radical racial views upon my son (until he was at least 5 lol), he has figured things out on his own thus far. It’s rather amazing how this works.
I’ve mulled over this entry for the past week. I realize that the subject could turn into a dissertation, so I’m going to do my best to keep it simple.
My son is Black.
And he knows it.
My son, in my opinion, has been racially conscious since before he was 1-year-old. Maybe not conscious, but he definitely showed cultural/racial affinity at that time.
Meet Quincy. He is the trumpet-blowing pre-schooler on Disney’s show, Little Einsteins. He is also the first character my son developed an attachment to, or rather, showed preference towards. I, in my say-it-loud ways, was excited that my beautiful Black baby boy immediately connected with the only Black character on the show before he was able to walk. When he became able to talk and walk, he made it clear that Quincy was not his friend or best buddy. He made it clear that he WAS Quincy. “Mommy, I’m Quincy!” “Mommy, look at ME on TV!!”
According to this Newsweek article, babies as young as 6 months old judge others based on race. Of course, further exploration suggests that babies are drawn to people who look like them and the people they are around the most in their formative months and years. It would make sense, then, for a White baby to prefer White characters or toys that remind him of his parents or his own reflection. So then, it isn’t simply about “racist babies” as some have called this phenomenon. It is more about understanding the differences in people’s appearances and developing a certain level of familiarity and comfort in these differences.
I realized, or thought I did, that it wasn’t about Quincy looking like him. Clearly, he is a different skin tone from Quincy. It wasn’t about Quincy playing the trumpet; Garvey prefers the keyboard and drums. Garvey could have just as easily identified with the lighter skin-toned White male lead character, Leo, if it were simply about the character who looked like him. So I figured maybe it was because Quincy has brown skin like Mommy and Daddy (his father is dark chocolate skin and I’m on the caramel side). I basically brushed it off and enjoyed the fact that he had a vivid imagination where he saw himself as a character on a TV show.
Over time, however, I began noticing that he continued to show preference for Black male characters. His newest favorite is Shout, the Black male from the Fresh Beat Band, a group of musicians on Nickelodeon (along with Kiki, the Latina, Twist, the White male, and Marina, the White female). He exclaims, with confident certainty, that he IS Shout. It has gone so far that he assigns characters to his family (I’m Kiki, Daddy is Twist, Janniyah is Marina). I had to think, why didn’t he make Daddy Shout, since they are the closest in resemblance? So I asked him. He says, “No no no Mommy, IIII’M Shout, not Daddy!”
I think that’s the most I will get out of him. Despite the tests run on 3-year-olds in the article, they are not exactly scientific in their own explanations of why they show racial affinity at such early ages.
Another example is gymnastics class. He has two primary coaches: Coach Phil (Black male) and Coach Jonah (White male). Initially, Garvey was not very responsive to Coach Jonah, but if Coach Phil got a hold of him, he was compliant and responsive. Over time, he grew warmer to Coach Jonah and I realized that this was the first significant White figure in Garvey’s life thus far (he’s had almost zero contact with my maternal family). It took three years for my son to come in close contact with a White person. This was not anything intentional, but rather the circumstances of where we live and the types of contacts he’s had with the outside world.
When I found out I was with child, I made a very conscious decision about two things: One, my son would be raised with an appreciation for his African heritage and he would learn everything I could teach him about the greatness and struggles of his people in this country and the world; Two, my son would be exposed to people of all races, cultures, and ethnicities and I would do the best I could to not enforce any ideas of supremacy or prejudice.
The article says that parents, mostly White parents, do their children a disservice by taking the “colorblind” approach to race issues. It suggests that kids basically figure it out on their own if we don’t intervene and teach them in our ways and beliefs. “In reporting her findings, Katz concluded: “I think it is fair to say that at no point in the study did the children exhibit the Rousseau type of color-blindness that many adults expect.”” Citation
So while I was trying to not thrust my own oft-radical racial views upon my son (until he was at least 5 lol), he has figured things out on his own thus far. It’s rather amazing how this works. Why is this on my mind now?
My son is about to start pre-school and the discussions about education and socialization are very important. In his gymnastics class, he befriended not any of the White or Latino children, but one little Black boy named Max and a Black girl named Chloe. He gravitated to them on his own, with no encouragement or bias from either of his parents. Fascinating, isn’t it?
Now, as we begin making schooling decisions, we have to take into considerations how environment can shape his racial views. As a mother who went to a predominantly Black and Latino private middle school, a predominantly White boarding school, and then a predominantly White Ivy League university (but stayed almost completely isolated within the small Black community there), I understand how much of an impact schools can have on the shaping of one’s racial consciousness and experiences. I want my son to have as much exposure to other races and cultures as possible to develop understanding and embrace diversity, but I’m not sure how that desire meshes with my desire for him to be a strong, culturally conscious, heritage-loving, say-it-loud Black man.
For now, he seems to be carving his own path. I’ve begun teaching him about his namesakes, Kwanzaa, and among his diverse library of books, there are beautiful characters of every shade of Brown in stories from Africa and Black America. I don’t want my son to be bigoted, prejudiced, or God-forbid racist, but I have to admit that I’m secretly loving his preference and his identification with his own Blackness.
Is that bad?
CocoaMamas 