A few nights ago, I read an article written by a black mother of biracial children, who doesn't feel comfortable when her kids make white friends. While I respect opinions that differ from my own, this one was a little hard to swallow. I'm white. My child is white but is often mistaken for biracial, especially after a long summer out in the sun. The idea that this mother is teaching her children separatism, if not racism, just because the other parents aren't having regular discussions about white privilege, bothers me a little.
Some people say they don't see color. We've been guilty of this statement. In many cases, as in our own, it's meant to say they don't judge someone based on the color of their skin. We don't stereotype or assume based on prejudice. If someone's a jerk, you call them out for being a jerk. It has nothing to do with that person's gender, sexual orientation, skin color, religion, etc. That person is simply a jerk.
I grew up in the melting pot that is Jacksonville, FL, which is the first major city snowbirds see when traveling to Florida. It's also a port town, Navy town, transportation hub, and the largest, most sprawled out city in the country. I met a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds. My high school was a melting pot within a melting pot, a great example of this diversity. We had kids of all races and nationalities; everyone was statistically a minority. I'm not going to say that racial tensions didn't happen, but they weren't a prominent feature in my teenage years. I certainly didn't feel privileged based on the color of my skin. I felt like I was just like everyone else, not better or worse.
When I was 25 and pregnant, my then-fiance-now-exhusband and I moved to rural Missouri for his work. The first culture shock I experienced was that the only Walmart in town closed every night at 9:00pm, but I soon started to realize what else I was - or wasn't - seeing when I went shopping. Everyone in the town was white, with the occasional darker skinned individual. I learned these migrant workers and their families would come in waves, based on farm season. They didn't speak English, but they also didn't stay long. I also found out that the Ku Klux Klan is headquartered in Missouri, with a major branch located only 20 miles away from where we were living. This is its own story, which will be posted more in detail another time. In short, this was the extent of the diversity in the small, rural town in which I now called home, and I didn't like it. I met some of my best friends in rural Missouri, but I will never regret the decision to work our way back to a city in which my child could experience other races and cultures.
We do talk about race in our household. My child attended a magnet elementary school, which is located in a primarily black neighborhood. She felt what it's like to be on the other side of prejudice because she was one of a handful of non-black students in this school. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, she has good friends of all colors, religions, and nationalities. We talk about race, when the issue comes up, which it does occasionally. However, it's never been a deciding factor in who gets to be a friend. Without any outside influences, kids truly don't see color. I don't mean that it's not visible to them; of course, it is. However, they couldn't care less about skin color or anything else. My child pays attention to the much more important things, like whether the Hogwarts Sorting Hat would place someone into Ravenclaw or Slytherin.
