Race Lesson Number One

Well, folks, the day has come. My PDG has made the inevitable discovery that he's black. I thought I might have another year before I'd start this complex peeling back of the layers of race with him, but alas it's started coming into focus over the past few weeks and just keeps on popping up.

In some ways it's cute. He thinks it's so weird that people would call him black when he clearly isn't. In fact, he's figured out just which brown crayon in the big box we each are. MDG and I share the same one. His own is one shade lighter and J-Man's the lightest. He has no color words yet to describe our white friends and neighbors. As for the preposterous black/white binary system, he is slowly conceding that we are dark enough to fall into "black" but still thinks his dad is more "blackish whitish." It's all the cute naivete of every kid ever saying "But no one is really black or white, Mommy!"

Tragically pairing his recent realization of race with the news the past month has been devastating. How do you look at your beautiful black son with bright brown eyes and a smile that stretches across his whole face and then hear about more unnecessary killing of black men at the hands of scared police officers? How do you decide when to start mentioning that the policemen we love to point out as "being helpers" or "keeping people safe" might decide that their own presumed lack of safety is someone else's death sentence? Especially if that someone else has skin like ours. Worse if it's darker like their grandfathers' or Big Bro's.

It's been weeks since those terrible two days in a row of Alton Sterling and Philandro Castile and I'm still tearing up about it. It's like the weeks after watching Eyes on the Prize in 8th grade and trying to rid my brain of the horrific images. Beatings. Lynchings. Emmett Till.

Let's step back from those horrors though, because understanding race is gradual and nuanced. First there are going to be the additional questions he'll start to have. We live in a white neighborhood. We go to a mostly white church. We have friends of color, but live a comfortable middle-class life which can make that line of identifying as "black enough" feel out of reach, even when almost every day he will look and feel much blacker than the majority of the people around him. How can we explain how deep blackness penetrates despite how light the surface of his skin might be?

I remember figuring out my blackness. (Ha! I just wrote that, as if I've actually figured out my blackness. Yeah, right.) Better said, I remember starting to figure out my blackness. Some years I was the only black kid at my 180-student private school. Definitely the only black Mormon family in my childhood congregation. I've spent my own life wondering if I'm just the token. How many people name me as their one black friend? How many times have I been in photos like this one, where even the camera doesn't know what to do with me?

I want to tell my sweet boy how being black is not anything to ever feel ashamed of or annoyed by. How he is beautiful, and not because he's light-skinned and stuck with that baggage of being fetishized by all the people who love caramel complexions (because they aren't too dark or sound delicious or whatever?). I want him to find pride in himself and his family without the burden of anger when he begins to understand the circumstances his ancestors endured. I don't want anyone to call him the n-word and have that be a defining moment of his life. I don't want the feeling of otherness to shadow his childhood. I don't want him to wonder if his accomplishments shouldn't be valued because someone quoted anti-affirmative action propaganda and the words "reverse racism" when he succeeded. I don't want him to decide over and over again how hard to defend his right to be smart or articulate or creative or promoted, or not to be athletic or a great dancer or the end-all expert on African American studies.

I want all of that and yet, I don't know what that life could possibly look like because I've spent the past thirty-two years wanting the exact same things for myself.

My greatest solace is that I have years to help him understand this all. He doesn't have to know tomorrow how race is a construct. We can wait until elementary school to flush out the words slavery and segregation. And maybe by the time we delineate between stereotypes, prejudice, and racism the world will be a little kinder, the policies a little more reasonable, and the news stories of inhumanely treated black men a rarity met with honest to goodness justice for all.