Some Great Talks about Race and Identity, Started off by Politics

My mother and I are very political -- so is Guy, although he doesn't join groups and do stuff as much as we do -- and we talk about politics freely in front of Sunny. It's the way I was raised.

I tone down the sarcasm and dark humor a bit in front of Sunny, but other than that, the conversation stays at an adult level. Sometimes he's bored by it. Other times he's fascinated, and asks us to stop and explain something further.

He has a very active political imagination. During the election, he told me he had a nightmare where Barack Obama and Sarah Palin got in a fight, and Sarah Palin jumped out of a helicopter with a machine gun trying to kill Obama. And when we heard about the Australian fire tragedy that happened last year, killing hundreds, and I mentioned what a terrible thing it was, and that someone must have set the first fire on purpose, Sunny asked, "Was it John McCain?"

I periodically take things down to his very literal level and explain that the people we disagree with aren't bad people... it's just that we think they have bad ideas. And we also talk about the importance of getting along with people when they like different things than you, or believe different things than you.

Right now there's a lot of stuff about race in the news, and we've talked about it. The other night, he asked us "what color am I?" It's a question he's asked several times before, in different variations. I told him, "you're café." This means brown in Spanish, and it's a word he feels very positive about... he loves to say that café is his favorite color. Guy said, "your color is... beautiful!" Then I talked with Sunny and told him that if he was asking about race, race wasn't really the same thing as the color of your skin... for example, Guy and I have skin that's almost the same color, but I'm a different race than he is. I told him that race is a very complicated thing, and its hard for adults to understand, and REALLY hard for kids to understand, and sometimes people are scared to talk about it, but whenever he has any more questions, just ask us. He said, "yes, it's really complicated, and I don't understand it." He often learns by repeating something he just heard; it's like he's thinking through it out loud.

Then this morning in the car, we were listening to a Rachel Maddow podcast. She talked about the hate mail that Rep. David Scott received and how it was full of "the n-word". Of course Sunny asked, "what's the n-word?" I told him that it was a very bad insult that was sometimes used to describe black people. He asked again, "Am I black?" This time I had a better answer. I told him that much of "race" is what other people look at you and see. So you don't get to choose your race. And going by that, people would look at him as black. I told him most of his friends at school were also black.

"Is my friend [Ali] black?"
"Yes."
"Is my other friend [Ali] black?"
"Yes. And you know who else is black? Miss [K] across the street. Even though she has very light skin almost the same color as mine."
"Wow! I didn't know that. What about my friend [J], is he black"?
"Well, he looks sort of black, but he has a white mother and black father, just like your Mommy __ is white and your bio father is black, so he's also biracial. That's a word for people whose parents have different races."

I also told him that although people don't really get to choose their race, they do choose their identity. And all the different people that have loved and cared for him can be part of his identity as he grows up, so he did have some power to choose. He repeated thoughtfully, "I have the power to choose my identity."

This went so much better than last time. I think we're moving slowly along the path I outlined in the post earlier this week.

When it comes to racial identity, he has a very limited choice. He can think of himself as biracial/multiracial first and black second, or he can think of himself as black first and biracial/multiracial second. It might sound like a tiny distinction, but it can be huge. I want him to be able to decide on his own.

I made a subconscious choice, at some point when I understood my range of choices and how narrow they were, that I was Asian first, multiracial second. It's just the way the genetic dice rolled: my face looks more Asian than white, so I've always been treated as some kind of Asian. I happen to have enormous white people feet (10.5 women's, a size that few men in Japan even wear) but people look at my face first, not my feet. I'm aware that some people with the same ancestry, who look like me, have made different choices; other people with the same ancestry, who look much more white, have a different set of choices. I'm OK with my own choice.

Among all this, saying "I don't have a race," and trying to live by that statement... I don't think this is a healthy choice. Yes, race is a totally fictitious, weird concept. But if you're not white, and you reject it entirely, you make yourself psychically and socially vulnerable. Many white people won't believe you and will laugh at you and think you hate yourself. Many people of color won't believe you, and will laugh at you and think you hate yourself, and think that your choice insults them.

I've read accounts from a lot of Asian transracial adoptees who were raised along that "race-less" path, not being taught any other choices, and they're generally not too happy about it.

If you choose it freely as an adult, I think that's fine... it's just insanely difficult, and only the most eccentric and strong-willed people can manage to pull it off without being insulting.