Apparently, the President of the United States has been walking
out of Wyeth’s closet. I just found this
out yesterday. I am told that he comes
out of the closet door, the one I painted with chalkboard paint … the black
one. The President only comes out when
the stuffed turtle nightlight goes out.
He only stays until he hears my footsteps on the stairs. Once the turtle
is again illuminating the ceiling with assorted constellations, he is nowhere
to be found. I suppose I should be
worried that my son needs a night light to keep a black man out of his
room. But I’m not. Parenting isn’t an exact science. You can seldom predict the exact results of
your efforts, efforts which are more trial and error than anything else. If you get close, you call it a victory. My son is thinking about race, so I think
President Obama is really showing up in my son’s room to drop off my parenting
award.
Our approach to teaching our children about race has been a
sort of consciously assembled collage made from a mixed assortment of magazines
that just happened to be lying about the house.
The biggest picture, the one in the middle kind of anchoring the whole
enterprise, came from a story my wife heard on NPR. The basic idea was that liberal whites who
think their children will pick up their attitudes about race by osmosis are
wrong. That was all I needed to
hear. I was done with osmosis. I slapped that sucker in the middle with a
little too much paste and started building.
We’ve been to Africa. I studied
African history and politics, not to mention Islamic law, in graduate
school. So, we cut out pictures of the
continent, kente cloth, Chinua Achebe, and a mosque in Zanzibar and threw them
together in the top right corner. I love
jazz, blues, and hip hop … so Billie Holiday and Tupac, among others, got
pasted in. We were both moved by the
history of the civil rights movement, so pictures of water hoses and lunch
counters have been fitted in and under. Our time in California brought more than just
an appreciation of authentic Chinese food, so Ellis Island was joined by Angel
Island. You get the idea. We’ve talked about skin color … and we’ve
taught them the African National Anthem, led them in recitations of the I Have
A Dream speech, taken them on imaginary African adventures, told them about
slavery, talked about the destruction of the American Indians, etc. etc. We have a lot of stuff stuck on our collage.
I suppose from a four year olds perspective, this collage we have going is
pretty messy. But messy is kind of a
good thing with children, kind of a necessary thing. So is a bit of confusion. So is a little bit if scary. If Pocahontas ends up with Lewis and Clark or
even on a wagon train or at Ellis Island, I’m ok with that. If the Indians were marching in Selma, I can
deal with that. If every Indian has to
be dead and that fact loudly declared in the middle of a Native American Museum
staffed by Native Americans who are very much alive, we can all get over
it. If water cannons and whippings
invade our thoughts, well they happened and without them the accomplishments
that came after don’t seem as important as they are. If President Obama is hanging out in his
closet, I’m just going to have to be OK with that.
Obama
might be in the closet, but its easier to let him out than to get him in. While he is in there, my son is asking about
his black and brown friends at school.
He tells me he is thankful for what Dr. King has done for his
friend. He asks about slavery, cholera,
and fasting before Ramadan. So, the
collage we’ve got going might be messy, scary, a bit rumpled around the edges,
and maybe every so often a bit full. But,
if Obama can fit in with the matchbox cars and kid camping equipment, we can
figure it all out.
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