| Mulling it
over in the weeks that followed, I could see that Celeste was in the
process of learning race, learning racism. Little kids are astute
students of the world around them. She had practiced the catechism
of gender difference as a toddler. Now, as a preschooler, she was
moving on to race. Which is a little harder, because the people she
is around aren't as clear about what race means as they are about
what gender is.
We live in a mostly white world within an integrated neighborhood.
One day, Celeste and I were playing in her friend Milo's yard. Celeste
and Milo wanted to go for a walk around the block, so we started
down the street. Milo's father, Drake, accompanied us down the block
a while, and then turned for home.
"I'm going
to go home now, Milo," he said. "Eric is working in the
house, and I know he would be uncomfortable if I left him
there alone for too long." He winked broadly at us. While I
was used to Drake's basic, sexist assumption that I'd take up his
slack in childcare without his having to ask, the coded racial politics
of that wink astonished me. It isn't that I don't share some of
his ambivalence about Eric. Maybe I was shocked by his confidence,
by his sharing that ambivalence in front of our kids.
The white adults in this neighborhood rarely talk about race explicitly.
There are certain assumptions made, so that we can talk about race
without mentioning anything about people or color. People leave
the neighborhood because they are "just tired of putting up
with it", despite the sweeping avenues, the friendships,
and the grand but inexpensive homes. "It" stands
in for the property crimes associated with life in the city, whether
we have experienced them or just fear them, and the substandard,
majority Black schools. "It" is also a broader,
related feeling of somehow being under siege. Even though white
families generally move here with more financial resources than
our African-American neighbors have, even though we live in a culture
that is strongly white supremacist, there is a feeling of being
a minority in the Old West End.
Some white neighbors voiced this feeling of being under siege during
a campaign to build a playground at the local elementary school.
One woman, a mother of two, was afraid that the playground would
become a place for children and adolescents to hang out. She testified
about the noise she endured already as a result of living across
the street from the school. Later, she organized opposition to the
playground on the grounds that it would create crime in the area,
and subsequently moved to an exclusively white neighborhood when
it was built. As it happened, she moved across the street from good
friends of ours. Having spent a lot of time in our friends' front
yard with packs of yelling children, I can say with confidence that
her new neighborhood is, in fact, much noisier than the one she
left. What she was really talking about, of course, was her feelings
about Black people. But I don't remember her ever broaching the
topic during the long campaign over whether to build that playground.
Celeste didn't accompany me to those meetings. But she has grown
up around adults, who talk about race all the time without mentioning
it. And, like all kids, she is a careful student of what adults
say, even when we are not saying it.
When kids learn about gender, they learn the intricate system of
differences that gives anatomy meaning in our culture. But, even
though there are people in our lives that I consider sexist, even
fairly misogynistic, Celeste she is consistently exposed to both
men and women, and consistently told that many of these individuals
are valuable, loveable, and important.
Her education about race has been different. We have a few friends
of color in Toledo, a couple more who live far away and visit. I'm
talking about six or seven people, total. And while she is definitely
told that those friends are valuable, loveable, and important, they
are few and far between. Almost all of the adults we know would
say, if asked, something like what I said the day she told me she
did not like brown people: "race doesn't matter." And
yet, in our daily choices, race matters very much. I began to think that Celeste's talking about "brown people"
was part of her articulating, in a characteristically uncensored
four-year-old way, a widespread, white common sense about race that
she was in the process of learning. Her backseat racism was the
tip of an iceberg that, I was confident, she would learn to bury
under polite speech. But I was afraid that she would not unlearn
the feelings of fear and dislike for people of color. If Celeste
was in the process of imbibing a racism that surrounded her, anchored
by strong historical and local roots, how could she unlearn it. |
