so, i’m wondering

vruz:

—via minorjive:lowendtheory:

never having my been a white parent, i’m wondering what do you do when you are a white parent and you happen to also have a white child who also happens to be in the throes of a serious and intense “look, a negro!” moment in public space? kids—especially young ones—have these moments around me all the time, but their parents seem especially inept at figuring out how to respond. they typically just pretend it’s not happening and/or look sheepishly.

the parents seem like they’re in some bizarre double (triple? quadruple?) bind with the weirdness and messiness of their kid’s fascination/revulsion/preoccupation with my body. when they do acknowledge to me that their child is staring at and/or talking about me, their response is usually to displace their child’s fascination to some part, characteristic, or extension of my body that is not the color of my skin—my dreads, my skin, my height—that allow them both to acknowledge and dismiss the awkwardness of the encounter at the same time.

and i really don’t know what to do, or if there’s anything worth saying in response, to the kid or to the parent.

vruz sez: I grew up in a home where a black lady helped us doing housekeeping work whilst my white mother worked at a hospital and my white dad at a bank. as a kid I never questioned myself about the colour of the skin of Mrs Alba, her name meaning both ‘dawn’ and ‘white’ in spanish, that didn’t seem to be a problem when referring to her, just like it never bothered me my dad thought Barry White’s name was an interesting pun or oxymoron of sorts he could repeat beyond what’s reasonable and appropriate. Alba had a black son a little older than me and he played the same games I played, only better, he would kick my ass every time. for some reason that escapes me now as an agnostic grown up, the boy’s name was Jesus. Alba would take good care of me and never bother me when I was simulating my very own Apollo 11 spacecraft drawing the control panels underneath the surface of the dining room table. I was very little, this must have been around 1975 and the memory of the white man of the moon was still fresh and of course every little kid wanted to be an astronaut. even if part time, like me, because I also wanted to be a veterinarian. I don’t recall which was Jesus’ vocational aspiration at the time, but I’m sure he must have wanted to be an astronaut too, and we sure had a lot of fun driving a fictional Speed Racer’s Mark V (the Mark V is a white car, with a big red M), we would also hang together watching anime: Kimba The White Lion King of Africa (no pun there) and playing football (the proper kind) when we weren’t focused on our interplanetary matters . Alba also had two black daughters, one of them was a student who wanted to become a school teacher, and the other -Yvette- had a french name and a boyfriend who was white and was in the military, a big tall guy in a olive green uniform. I thought that the uniform of Yvette’s boyfriend was odd, I never understood why people would do that, and I still don’t understand today.

my own experience is that black people can be quite smart when you let them, and they will be able to tell that the white boy never intended to offend them nor cause them harm in any way.

your politically correct and flabbergasted need of doing something special about it is really the only inadecuate thing.

how about saying ‘hello’ ?

“my own experience is that black people can be quite smart when you let them [my emphasis], and they will be able to tell that the white boy never intended to offend them nor cause them harm in any way.”

lol. thank goodness that all these white folks are around to let me show and prove to them that i’m smart and talented. and in sports, especially. don’t really know what i’d do without them.