<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve twice had the most profound and awe-inspiring life experience: giving birth to a child. Now ages 3 and 5, my bizarre, amusing, remarkable daughters have spent their entire lives teaching me innumerable lessons on patience, love, deep breathing, and truth-telling. Their father and I do our best to speak honestly with our girls about life (in developmentally appropriate ways, of course), believing our task is not simply to nurture children but also to raise adults whose personal and social compasses will serve them well in the world.<\/p>\n

More than a decade of anti-racism activism combined with a nearly 4 year journey to the conception of my first child gave me a lot of time to mentally flip flop through the acrobatics of combining parenting and critical race consciousness. I cooked up all kinds of plans for keeping it racially real with my half-White, half-Asian kid. I bought children\u2019s books<\/a> with characters of color in every shade, speaking myriad languages, rocking all body shapes, and sporting various hair textures. I swore off \u00a0Disney<\/a> and amassed a cache of Hayao Miyazaki<\/a> films peppered with videos of talking animals free of racially suggestive attributes. I pored over eBay auctions for baby dolls of color that seemed \u201cethnic,\u201d but not so much that they\u2019d come with a miniature wardrobe of nothing but kimonos or dashikis. (Because, c\u2019mon \u2013 people of color also occasionally wear jeans and tee shirts.) And in a deliberate effort to combat the effects of \u201cpregnancy brain,\u201d I kept my racial analysis razor sharp by framing my natural, drug-free labor and delivery as a revolutionary act<\/a> \u2013 the ultimate opportunity to huff, puff, and push my child to liberation.<\/p>\n

As our girls grow, my husband and I are choosing to talk about race head-on because if we don\u2019t do it the world will do it for us<\/a> \u2013 and probably in a way we don\u2019t like. Sure, my girls have a white daddy, but both my spouse and I know that the racial construct is unforgiving and uncompromising in its categorization. Self-definition, while perfectly lovely in our mixed-race home, ain\u2019t the name of the game when race is concerned: you\u2019re either white or you\u2019re not \u2013 and our mixed kids are not. We\u2019ve spent a lot of time openly observing and commenting on our own family\u2019s coloring: us girls are light brown, Dad is pink. (Interestingly, this color consciousness has evolved quickly into racial consciousness, with \u201clight brown\u201d becoming \u201cAsian,\u201d and \u201cpink\u201d changing to \u201cWhite.\u201d) Our older daughter\u2019s racial identity formation grew relative to our parental coaching, and by 2 \u00bd years old she made plans to start a \u201cbrown skin girls\u201d soccer team and gleefully claimed her \u201cHapa POWER!\u201d<\/a> with tiny raised fists and a loud, squeaky voice.<\/p>\n

[youtube_sc url=”http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=1VF7M_29Nt8&feature=youtu.be” color=”white”]<\/p>\n

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I was feeling pretty good about the caliber of my racially-focused child rearing until one run-of-the-mill spring day at the park when my child announced loudly for all to hear, \u201cMommy! There are A LOT of Black people here!\u201d I froze. I looked around and caught the stone-faced stare of an African American mom, lips pursed and awaiting my response to this loud-mouthed Asian kid.<\/p>\n

\u201cShit!\u201d I thought to myself. My knee jerked and I had a silent, rapid fire mental throwdown: \u201cBe quiet, child! Why do you have to be so damn loud? All of the Black people are going to think we\u2019re racist because, well \u2026 because you noticed that they\u2019re Black! <\/i>And then we\u2019ll be seen as the Asians perpetuating anti-Black racism! Gaaahhh! Why me??? Why now???\u201d<\/p>\n

Thankfully, none of those deliberations escaped my lips. Instead, I paused and took a second to dig deeper. In that moment, I realized that my daughter\u2019s observation was less about the Black people there and more about the absence of all the white people who usually frequent this particular park. The lack of Whites at a playground where they generally make up about 75% of the families was so stark that it made our presence as People of Color that much more pronounced. This was what my child saw, and I heartbreakingly realized that her tiny world is already forming around the normativity of whiteness.<\/p>\n

I also stumbled upon something else in this contemplative moment. I discovered that inside of me lurks the powerful, deeply socialized desire to meet race \u2013 even in the most harmless of observations \u2013 with silence, especially the liberal silence rooted in the fear of being called racist simply for commenting on racial difference. As a Person of Color, this ingrained silence is made all the more complicated by internalized oppression and my battle to prove to other People of Color that I may be Asian, but I’m not White.<\/p>\n

So on that sunny spring day at the park \u2013\u00a0after I dragged my own racial socialization through the gauntlet and sweat bullets over my fear of having Black people assume I was “just like white folk” \u2013\u00a0I turned to my daughter and said, “You’re right, honey, there are Black families here. And we’re brown and we’re here, too. And it looks like Daddy is the only white guy here today.” She turned to me, smiled, and simply replied, “Yup! Will you push me on the swing now?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve twice had the most profound and awe-inspiring life experience: giving birth to a child. Now ages 3 and 5, my bizarre, amusing, remarkable daughters have spent their entire lives teaching me innumerable lessons on patience, love, deep breathing, and truth-telling. Their father and I do our best to speak honestly with our girls about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,829],"tags":[922,923,921,920],"coauthors":[1424],"class_list":["post-6689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-guest-bloggers","tag-identity-development","tag-internalized-oppression","tag-kids","tag-parenting"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6689"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11333,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6689\/revisions\/11333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6689"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racefiles.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=6689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}