Don't be black on my account

March 5, 2007 | Out of the blue last week my son, who is 5, asked me if I'd ever been "burned." I thought he was referring to the tattoos that I always tell him and his sister are boo-boos (how else to justify voluntary scarring when I won't even let them use a butter knife?), so I repeated my usual lie and added that "Mommy would never play with fire." I thought this was a safety discussion. He looked confused.

"Oh. I thought that was why you were brown."

My biracial, white-looking baby is discovering race. Granted, both of my children think my nappy, unprocessed, Sideshow Bob hair looks that way simply to entertain them, and never understand why everyone asks if I'm their nanny. I can't say I wasn't on notice. But I'd envied them their racial innocence. Too bad them days are over.

My son first brought up the subject of race two months ago. I took him and his 3-year-old sister to a concert at an inner-city elementary school right before Christmas. There were lots of cornrowed kids singing "Jingle Bells." My own child, as he sat fidgeting in my lap, stared at the crowd around him goggle-eyed and perplexed.

"Mommy," he said, craning his neck to scan the room, just so he could be certain, "everybody's brown. Really, look! They're all brown."

We live in snow-white upstate New York, but was he really so clueless?

"Why is everybody brown, Mommy?"

Yup. He was. Caught unawares, I just gulped for air. But he was waiting for an answer.

"Really, Mom. Everyone's brown. Everyone. Why?"

Finally, I responded. "Mommy's brown, honey," I said, and I covered his hand with my own. "See?"

This did not compute. He blinked at me a few times and went back to squirming around and checking out all the brown people in the room.

The music was playing but his questions continued. I talked about how, like Mommy, these people had two brown parents while he and his sister had a brown mom and a ... "not brown" dad. (My kids are not brown at all; homie's blond and his sister has waist-length ringlets with natural blond highlights.) I told him that he and his sister would likely get "browner" as they got older and talked about variety being the spice of life. I analogized from the many colors in his paint box and reminded him that his Grandma Johnnie was brown but that his Grandma Ruth was ... not brown. Then, I took a deep breath and laid it on him.

"Honey. You're black. Did you know that?"

And even as the words left my mouth, I knew they made no sense. He was talking skin color, I was talking politics.

Hopelessly lost now, he just gaped up at me. Then he pulled his black clip-on tie from his sweater and said, helpfully, "My tie is black." Still wriggling on his brown mommy's lap, he went back to staring in confused wonderment at all the Negroes.

Now, two months later, he has come up with an explanation. "They" are all brown because "they" are irresponsible with flammables. I know I need to nip this in the bud. But how on earth do you explain things as complicated as race and blackness to creatures who believe that the police will know when we need help because they all have baby monitors in their cars? They're so young; I'm still in the gooey, overprotective stage of motherhood wherein I shield them from knowing about crime, homelessness, war, rape, pedophilia and the horrors of capitalism. But I'm supposed to tell them that white people, their father's people, enslaved, raped, sold and Jim Crow'd us simply because we look burned all over? And I'm supposed to tell them now, when my 3-year-old daughter is still oblivious to the whole subject of race, that racism is far, far from over? Even if I wanted to tell them all this, I'm not sure where I'd start.

And then, last night, while still meditating on my son's burn theory, I located the true source of my ambivalence about helping my children discover their blackness.

Like most kids, mine love to "give me five" to signal any sort of triumph. Last night, I realized that I'd stifled a reflexive impulse to teach them part of the high-five -- "on the black hand side." Back in the militant '60s and early '70s when I was a kid, black men would often slap each other five, then flip their hands over and do it again on "the black hand side" or "the black man's side." Now it's rarely done and only then as kitsch, but what explains my hesitance, my refusal, to initiate my children into the club when this relic of my identity formation naturally surfaced? As I thought about that, all at once it hit me that I never "talk black" with my kids either. None of the "used ta coulds" and "mighta woulds" and "he be's" that I slip into so comfortably with my Miss'ippi mama and relatives back home. Without realizing it, I had made Chez Debra Ebonics-free when the kids were in earshot, even though my bilingualism has been the key to my mainstream success. So why wasn't I teaching them to be bilingual? Why was I refusing them their ghetto pass?

If I'm honest, I know why. It's because I know they're not black. I am but they're not. They're biracial.

I lived blackness. All they can do is study and perform blackness. My parents were Mississippi sharecroppers who became part of the Great Migration north. My great-grandfather, who lived well past 100 and was still kicking when I was a child, had been born a slave. His son, my grandfather, got a "Klan escort" out of Mississippi. I saw "Whites only" signs when we went visiting down south and remembered white cops coming to my A'int Mazelle's to "urge" her to teach her kin from up north in St. Louis "how to behave." Clueless, I hadn't yielded my place in line to whites at the country store. At my own home in Missouri I knew not to enter South St. Louis after dark, and I grew up sharing my World War II combat veteran father's bitterness at the racism of the Marine Corps. Segregation made black culture pervasive in our lives; the same oppression that so limited our options gave us all a common frame of reference. My kids can only study that in books.

Next page: I don't want to force experiences on my son and daughter just to make them feel black