Race and the Moon

I'm in the back yard with my baby girl and my oldest son. He's chatting with me because he's joined his class in going "television free" this week. It's about to kill him.

He says, "Mom, why are all the black kids at school mean?"

I say, "They are all mean? Like how?"

He says, "They just say mean stuff to me. They think they are all cool and everything."

I really don't know what to say. I tell him that being mean to other people makes some people feel better about themselves. I tell him to ignore them. I think to myself that if you are a minority, you sometimes have a greater responsibility to be kind. My kid has encountered only a few black kids at school (maybe ten percent of the school population) and they are all mean. He will obviously extrapolate that finding to the greater population. What's a mother to do about the mean kids?

I have noticed black boys sauntering down the hallways like they are starring in a rap video. These are suburban boys raised by middle-class parents. What's up with that? The influence of the media, I guess. My boys just don't understand it. They are sheltered from so much of the media. If it's not on Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel, they don't see it.

When I went to high school, there was exactly one black family. The two black siblings were exemplary students. He was the homecoming king. She was in my P.E. class and was such a friendly, kind girl. I saw that these two kids were just like me, only with dark skin.

I honestly never understood racism, never, ever saw racism until I lived in North Carolina. Then one day I unwittingly ventured into a black area of town. I needed to do laundry and looked in the yellow pages for a laundrymat. Found one close by, drove over there. Put my clothes in washing machines. Then it dawned on me. Everyone was staring at me. I was the only white face in the laundrymat. The only white face in the parking lot. Oh. I wasn't welcome there, in the black section of town. It never occurred to me that towns might be divided racially.

I like our little town now because the schools are diverse. We have white students, black students, mixed-races of all kinds, Hispanic students, Asian students, Native American students. I like my kids to sit side by side with a variety of children, to learn with them, and work with them and play with them. I think it's healthy.

When we lived in Michigan, the racism was glaring to me, yet invisible to the natives. Nearly everyone was white, and one woman boasted to me about leaving Detroit way back when they started busing in minority students. She left her fancy home and came up north to get away from the minorities in the schools. She thought of that as a sacrifice. I thought of it as prejudice.

One day, I was standing in line at the bank when a tall, black man came in to cash a check. This was a remarkable moment. He was the first tall, black man I'd ever seen in town. He presented his check to be cashed and the teller said, "Oh, we can't cash that here." He said, "But the company I worked for in town told me I could." She said, "No, you'll have to go to the other bank down the road." Off he went.

Another teller came out and asked what happened. The original teller explained and the second teller (the manager, perhaps?) said, "That check was written on an account at this bank! We should have cashed it." The first teller shrugged. I knew she had been suspicious of him and sent him on a wild-goose chase because he was different. Different, tall and black, which is practically a crime in northern Michigan.

The racism was one reason why I was glad to leave northern Michigan for Western Washington. And now, here I am, trying to raise kids who are not prejudiced and the black kids in school are mean. Sigh.

Now, on a completely unrelated note, when DaycareKid left this afternoon, I took Babygirl out for a quick stroll around the circle. She has memorized each yard that has patches of stones and asks for a rock at each place. She says, "Rock!" And then she says, "Thank you." There are four or five yards with stones and so she exchanges her rock at each place for a new one. We had almost completed our second circle and I was daydreaming about the flowering tree in Sleeping Beauty's yard which is about to burst into riotous bloom when Babygirl said something. I looked at her and said, "What?" And she pointed straight above her head and said, "Moon!" I craned my head back and sure enough, hanging directly above us in the blue sky was a half-moon. I said, "Yes! That is the moon!" And she said, "Moon, moon" a few more times.