With the passing of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday last week, there was a bit of a surprising milestone in our family: it was the first time I had ever heard my son use the word "black" in reference to someone's ethnicity.
To most folks, this wouldn't sound like a big deal. I'm not sure whether the fact that I'm even discussing this is a sign of how far we've all come or how far we have to go, but it threw me a little, and here's why: I don't use the words "black" and "white" to describe people to my kids.
And here's the kicker - I don't think you should, either.
So, you ask, is this out of some misplaced sense of political correctness, a Utopian fantasy of everyone sitting around, holding hands and singing "Kumbaya?" Is it white guilt held over from my childhood growing up in the South of the 1970s, where racial epithets were still an everyday occurrence? Well, the answer is no to the first and maybe a little to the second.
If anything, it comes down to the peculiarities of my life spent as a journalist - specifically as a copy editor, where the accuracy of the words we used in print was of the utmost importance, and nuances of terms could be discussed into the night long after deadline.
Honestly, I can go on here for hundreds of words about why the ethnic designations we use are completely bogus from the perspective of accurate language (and I originally intended to), but I won't.
Instead, I'll say that I avoid the words as ethnic designations simply because they are weighted too heavily with the baggage of history, of oppression, racism, prejudice and, honestly, easy, inaccurate generalizations.
You'll also notice I didn't say "racial designations" above. That's because I also dislike "race" as a term, for reasons any anthropologist will tell you - there is only one race of humans and it's homo sapiens. There are many ethnic and cultural subsets of humankind, but we all share the same basic DNA.
So how do my nearly 7-year-old and I discuss issues of ethnicity? It is as simple as this: Lots of people came from lots of different places, where they evolved to look different based on lots of factors. Our cultures are diverse, we observe various beliefs and traditions and speak different languages. Otherwise people are pretty similar, and we should treat them as such.
The roots of the civil rights movement, meanwhile, break down like this between my son and I:
People from Europe kidnapped people from Africa to be slaves because the Europeans (and later their American descendants) believed - incorrectly - that based on the color of their skin Africans were inferior and enslaving them was OK. Once the slaves were freed, the mistreatment continued until brave people like Martin Luther King Jr. and his contemporaries forced it to stop through peaceful protest.
But what about skin color, you ask? Can't you break it down that way?
Well, no, and here's why. Unless you establish in a child's mind that terms like "black" and "white" have meaning beyond the colors the represent on the visible spectrum, you throw them into utter confusion. Suddenly, skin tone carries a whole new - and occasionally inaccurate - meaning.
A great example is how during the civil rights movement discussions at my son's school, he assumed that a classmate of Indian decent - who does indeed have very dark skin - was "black." The same went for his classmates representative of other darker-skinned ethnicities who don't share an African heritage.
As for "white," its only bearing on ethnicity is to suggest that one's ancestors didn't originally come from an area where folks have darker skin. At one point, this was a big deal, because it was supposed to suggest dominance and superiority. Now, except for a few on the radical fringe, what does it really matter?
So instead of just saying "we're white," I prefer to talk about where and who we come from. Our ancestors long ago were European. Dad's came from England and Wales and Scotland, and Mom's came from Germany and Italy. It takes the discussion out of the realm of light skin vs. dark skin and puts it firmly into an appropriate context.
This also solves the old "what are you?" problem that seemed so pervasive among folks who grew up prior to the era of civil rights. Rather than breaking down everyone along some antebellum algorithm that calculates -nths of a degree of blackness of whiteness, it allows us to be very specific. We don't have to parse everyone down to the Jim Crow formulas of mulatto and octaroon or have that discussion on whether a friend of various ethnicities is really this or that. They are, like everyone, the sum of their many parts.
And the best part is that this approach frees us from the tyranny of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Those of us who were born in the last century still carry in the backs of our heads and in our hearts the dingy remnants of our grandparents' attitudes - their lingering suspicions, stereotypes and misunderstandings - that were and still are attached to the use of "black" and "white."
But my children, who were conceived and born in the 21st century, deserve more. They deserve an outlook that will carry them into a bold future where it's just a little easier for people to get along with each other - or they can at least choose to disagree over something else.
They deserve to be unshackled from that looming need to classify and immediately characterize those with whom they'll come into contact. They deserve instead, as I suspect Dr. King would have wanted, to see people as people - as children of God, nature or the universe, fallible and flawed, but not as colors or ethnicities bound up in what we think they should represent.
And should more people consider this approach and raise their children accordingly, then gradually the shades of our complexions will not just be overlooked, they simply won't matter.
Then, perhaps, we will all be free at last.
************************************
A postscript regarding Dr. King - Last week PBS aired an episode of its excellent Pioneers of Television series featuring the groundbreaking science fiction programs of the 1960s.
One moment that was particularly poignant was Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed Lt. Uhura on Star Trek, recounting her personal audience with the civil rights leader just after she had decided to quit the show. Read the Web transcript here.
And here's the kicker - I don't think you should, either.
So, you ask, is this out of some misplaced sense of political correctness, a Utopian fantasy of everyone sitting around, holding hands and singing "Kumbaya?" Is it white guilt held over from my childhood growing up in the South of the 1970s, where racial epithets were still an everyday occurrence? Well, the answer is no to the first and maybe a little to the second.
If anything, it comes down to the peculiarities of my life spent as a journalist - specifically as a copy editor, where the accuracy of the words we used in print was of the utmost importance, and nuances of terms could be discussed into the night long after deadline.
Honestly, I can go on here for hundreds of words about why the ethnic designations we use are completely bogus from the perspective of accurate language (and I originally intended to), but I won't.
Instead, I'll say that I avoid the words as ethnic designations simply because they are weighted too heavily with the baggage of history, of oppression, racism, prejudice and, honestly, easy, inaccurate generalizations.
You'll also notice I didn't say "racial designations" above. That's because I also dislike "race" as a term, for reasons any anthropologist will tell you - there is only one race of humans and it's homo sapiens. There are many ethnic and cultural subsets of humankind, but we all share the same basic DNA.
So how do my nearly 7-year-old and I discuss issues of ethnicity? It is as simple as this: Lots of people came from lots of different places, where they evolved to look different based on lots of factors. Our cultures are diverse, we observe various beliefs and traditions and speak different languages. Otherwise people are pretty similar, and we should treat them as such.
The roots of the civil rights movement, meanwhile, break down like this between my son and I:
People from Europe kidnapped people from Africa to be slaves because the Europeans (and later their American descendants) believed - incorrectly - that based on the color of their skin Africans were inferior and enslaving them was OK. Once the slaves were freed, the mistreatment continued until brave people like Martin Luther King Jr. and his contemporaries forced it to stop through peaceful protest.
But what about skin color, you ask? Can't you break it down that way?
Well, no, and here's why. Unless you establish in a child's mind that terms like "black" and "white" have meaning beyond the colors the represent on the visible spectrum, you throw them into utter confusion. Suddenly, skin tone carries a whole new - and occasionally inaccurate - meaning.
A great example is how during the civil rights movement discussions at my son's school, he assumed that a classmate of Indian decent - who does indeed have very dark skin - was "black." The same went for his classmates representative of other darker-skinned ethnicities who don't share an African heritage.
As for "white," its only bearing on ethnicity is to suggest that one's ancestors didn't originally come from an area where folks have darker skin. At one point, this was a big deal, because it was supposed to suggest dominance and superiority. Now, except for a few on the radical fringe, what does it really matter?
So instead of just saying "we're white," I prefer to talk about where and who we come from. Our ancestors long ago were European. Dad's came from England and Wales and Scotland, and Mom's came from Germany and Italy. It takes the discussion out of the realm of light skin vs. dark skin and puts it firmly into an appropriate context.
This also solves the old "what are you?" problem that seemed so pervasive among folks who grew up prior to the era of civil rights. Rather than breaking down everyone along some antebellum algorithm that calculates -nths of a degree of blackness of whiteness, it allows us to be very specific. We don't have to parse everyone down to the Jim Crow formulas of mulatto and octaroon or have that discussion on whether a friend of various ethnicities is really this or that. They are, like everyone, the sum of their many parts.
And the best part is that this approach frees us from the tyranny of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Those of us who were born in the last century still carry in the backs of our heads and in our hearts the dingy remnants of our grandparents' attitudes - their lingering suspicions, stereotypes and misunderstandings - that were and still are attached to the use of "black" and "white."
But my children, who were conceived and born in the 21st century, deserve more. They deserve an outlook that will carry them into a bold future where it's just a little easier for people to get along with each other - or they can at least choose to disagree over something else.
They deserve to be unshackled from that looming need to classify and immediately characterize those with whom they'll come into contact. They deserve instead, as I suspect Dr. King would have wanted, to see people as people - as children of God, nature or the universe, fallible and flawed, but not as colors or ethnicities bound up in what we think they should represent.
And should more people consider this approach and raise their children accordingly, then gradually the shades of our complexions will not just be overlooked, they simply won't matter.
Then, perhaps, we will all be free at last.
************************************
One moment that was particularly poignant was Nichelle Nichols, who portrayed Lt. Uhura on Star Trek, recounting her personal audience with the civil rights leader just after she had decided to quit the show. Read the Web transcript here.
