My Light Brown Daughters

by Aaron Freeman

My skin is brown. My nine-year-old daughter dreams of a blonde boyfriend with skin pale enough to show the veins beneath and that’s a good thing… really.

My twin daughters are half American Negro and half Scott-Irish. Or is that half Negro, one quarter Scotch and one quarter Irish; or is it – no, I can’t even think of what African tribes may swirl in their genes.

Their skin color meets mine and their mother’s half way. They are coffee with a lot of cream.

One of my main parental goals, after persuading my daughters that they are loved beyond all reason, remains to raise them relatively unburdened by racist culture. At home we battle racism syllable by syllable. We don’t speak of people’s “races” but of their “skin colors.” Not black and white, chromatically inaccurate, but “brown” and “pale.”

All Americans, from Jesse Jackson to Hideo Nomo to me hold anti-Negro prejudices. Racism is literally in our air, it's certainly broadcast over our airwaves. One of my strategies for fighting it is to raise kids for whom “African American” is not their primary identity; to raise roses by other internal names.

So far the plan is working.

My skin color is only a part of who my daughters think they are, smushed in there with Jew, triathlete, scholar, Chicagoan. They have internalized little of the self-hating, self-destructive, knee-jerk insecurity suffered by so many African American baby boomers like myself.

The problem is, so far the plan is working. My daughters have a completely different psycho/social outlook. They are of a different “race” than me.

In her third grade ML King essay my then 8-year-old daughter asked “Has Martin Luther King’s dream of a world without racism come true?” Her answer was “yes.”

I read the essay, then, after being revived, I was tempted to remind her of how hard it remains for her dad to get a cab; how former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Birdsong was shot to death walking with his children in their own neighborhood; how James Byrd was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck. But I finally decided no, don’t burden her with tales of a world in which she may not live. Racism is much less oppressive than it was forty years ago when I was eight. And it’s reasonable to assume that in another decade things will be better still.

But holding my tongue was not easy.

Some self-hating, knee-jerkily insecure part of me wants them to suffer racism as I know it. My misery wants familial company. More nobly (or at least lest neurotically) I want them to know racism continues, so that they wont be, like so many Americans, in abject denial of present-day skin color bias.

Racism is a great, snarling enemy rhetorically reviled by all. The struggle against it has defined so much of my life that it’s spooky I won’t share that big life chunk with my daughters. But to be racism’s victim you have to define yourself by racism’s terms; which, as planned, my daughters do not. They view racism as a really bad thing, terrible even. But they don’t take personally. They identify no more with Rosa Parks than Britney Spears. My aunt Birtie used to tell me that all I had to do in life is be black and die. My daughters have only to die. And that’s what the whole civil rights movement and I wanted, wants, really.

G-d has a twisted sense of humor. By the time my children get into college they will probably have grown Afros the size of planets and changed their names to from Artemis and Diana to Chautauqua and Imoja Steakley Freeman X. They will have abandoned Judaism for Yoruba ancestor veneration and they will eat hominy grits with every meal.

But American culture being what it is, they will probably still dream of blonde boyfriends.

© 2002 Aaron Freeman