I hope converting Madison does the trick
Aug 11, 2006 Race
“There are many days … when I wish they’d have more aspects of Jewish and Asian culture. I wish they’d get up earlier in the morning, I wish they would work harder and in many respects that’s what we do see out of many of the Asian and the Jewish culture. My kids are all Anglo, they’re Irish, English and they’re wonderful kids and I wish they’d work a little harder sometimes. Sometimes, I wish that I had some more of those traits.
What prompted this celebration of model minorities? According to the Denver Post it was, “Ex-Gov. Dick Lamm’s lament that Latinos and African-Americans don’t have the ‘Jewish or Japanese love of learning and upward mobility’.”
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Getting help
Aug 10, 2006 Race
I was watching this documentary (it’s only seven minutes long) today: A Girl Like Me. It’s about the way African American girls see themselves. (Thanks be to Tayari Jones for bringing it to my attention.)
Our new baby sitter is black and she is part of the Friedman Household Affirmative Action rally, which was inspired by reading Morning By Morning in which the homeschool mom talks about choosing to hire only black male tutors for her three sons. I wish I had the book here so I could quote her about it. She says that some people argued that she was being racist in choosing to hire black men first and black women second but she says, basically, that she wanted to hire people who looked like her sons so that her sons would have a vision of what they could be and because her sons would grow to be black men, she felt they needed black men to be role models.
This was a lightbulb moment for me. Not that Madison would need black women to be her role models but that I needed to be specific in my outreach to find them for her and that I had to be willing to put myself in a position that might sometimes jar my liberal, white comfort level.
So I kinda have this plan in my head. First part was to find black childcare for Madison when we looked for childcare. Second part was to start looking for homeschool resources at libraries and rec centers in predominantly black neighborhoods. (Fall schedules are just coming out now.) Third part is that when we need tutors, we will also look specifically for black tutors, even for Noah. (Because Noah has plenty of white male role models already and diversity is good for our whole family.)
The part about the dolls in the documentary? The Kenneth Clark-inspired experiment? Made me cry.
“And can you show me the doll that looks bad?” asks the narrator.
Little girl holds up the brown-skinned doll.
“And can you … why does that look bad?”
“Because it’s black.”
“And why do you think that’s a nice doll?”
“Because she’s white.” (note the pronoun change)
“And can you give me the doll that looks like you?”
Little girl looks at the brown-skinned doll and then slowly slides it over towards the camera.
“15 out of 21 children,” intones the narrator. “Preferred the white doll.”
Whatever I can do to make that different for my girl, I’m going to try to do it. And I think a big part of it is to give her a range of women who can teach her pride in her beauty and strength in a way that I simply can’t.
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Tags: Erica, homeschool, Madison, Noah
Warning: spoilers in the link
Jul 14, 2006 Race
Did you know there was a boycott against the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie? Ayup.
I wasn’t going to see it anyway (I didn’t much like the first one) so I’d be boycotting it any old way.
edited to fix link! Thanks DD!!
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Internalizing Racism
Jul 13, 2006 Race
In April, Susan L. Taylor, the iconic editorial director of Essence magazine, canceled a campus speech when she discovered the college forbids its students to wear “unusual” hairstyles  including braids, which are Taylor’s signature look. This was noteworthy because the college was Hampton University, one of the nation’s oldest historically black campuses. Then it was discovered that Black Enterprise magazine had a similar ban for student interns.
…
What’s troubling is that, by being forced to change their hair, black people once again are being forced to shoulder the burden of proof: We’re not as fearsome as we look. It’s up to us to mitigate our dark skin and ethnic features by framing them with hair that’s as neat and unethnic as possible.
Read it all here.
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Tags: racism
Forgot to say
I have an essay in this month’s Adoptive Families on not changing Madison’s birth name. (As it turns out, Jessica gave Madison our family name as Madison’s last name on her birth certificate so her name has always — all three names — been her name.)
I pitched this to them awhile ago and they were interested but I couldn’t figure out how to write it (it’s for their “In My Opinion” column) without making people who didn’t make the same choice defensive. Naming kids is complicated; it carries with it a whole lotta baggage. Keeping a child’s birth name after an adoption is just one option.
So check it out, if you’re so inclined. (On news stands now!)
Another thing about Madison’s name. A few people made some noise about how fortunate we were that she doesn’t have “one of those black names.” Or as one person put it (and this person is African American) one of those “ghetto” names. But I like a lot of those so-called ghetto names. Our only issue was the kids’ last name has a big old SH in it, which would make a name like Tanisha not really work so well. But there are a lot of beautiful names in the black community — some with African roots and some made up. I can think of a lot of names I’d feel lucky to have in our family. Figure it this way — if we welcomed having a Black child in our family then why wouldn’t we welcome a child with a name that celebrates strong ties to the Black community?
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Tags: adoptees, adoptive-parenting, Erica, essay, Madison, transracial