- submitted by L. Keenan on 08/14/2008
The Cost of Choosing the All-White Picket Fence
By Linda Keenan
My decision to live in a nearly all-white suburb has smacked me square in the face. I deluded myself into believing that I could raise a child to accept all races as equal in a monochrome town. That rainbow fantasy all came to a crashing end in the shallow end of our local watering hole.
My son Frank was playing near a few black children (the first I've ever seen at this beach, something that became apparent to me just then) and a small toddler tiff ensued. I could tell that my boy was both angry and scared.
As I watched the handful of them mutually antagonizing each other (the normal state, of course, for all young boys), I started to realize, to this liberal's horror, that my son has very likely never played with black children.
When we got home, I mentioned the toddler tiff to my husband Steve, not mentioning the races of the kids, because why would I?
Frank, with no prompting, said this: "they had different faces from me." He said "different faces" several times, and it was not to sing Kumbaya, and celebrate the awesome diversity of life, but to angrily demark them from him.
Steve and I were both taken aback, but tried to stifle it, as TV's most beloved bigot Archie Bunker might say. Steve immediately said, "there is nothing wrong with having a different face from yours. Maybe you look different to them. They are boys just like you."
We both were sort of groping around for ways to instantly reprogram his little mind, to make him look for commonality rather than difference when things go wrong. But we also sensed making too much of it was probably a mistake as well. In short, we were flummoxed.
I grew up in Albany New York, where there's a substantial black population, and while my urban high school honors program was mostly white, I had known black people all my life.
I have three nephews who live there and go to the same schools I did, and as I can see on Facebook, they have friends of all different colors. When the oldest of these nephews went to a university in the South, he was shocked that there were no black people there. It was a sign of a school culture that wasn't right for him; he eventually transferred.
My husband, who grew up in Maine, knew just one black family there, a fact that still shocks me. Now I'm actually taking comfort in it; while it's surely true that "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist," as they sing in "Avenue Q," the satirical send-up of Sesame Street, my husband's lack of exposure to other races growing up didn't stop him from becoming a kind, open-minded man.
But that's mostly cold comfort. I now see clearly what I was warned about by my husband's whip-smart ex-boss Seth. Years ago, when we were choosing among various towns, he said, "prepare to abandon some of your liberal principles like we did."
He meant that few parents are so diversity-minded that they're willing to make a sociology experiment of their child, that when you go out seeking superior schools and a clean, safe environment, it will inevitably be majority white.
I'm typing this right now in a booth at the great leveler of the races, Chuck E. Cheese. And what does it say about me, my town, and our nation's priorities when I realize that Chuck E. Cheese, not his local beach or playground or school, is the single most diverse place he may ever know as a young boy?
A while back, I wrote about my son helping me place a political sign on the lawn, and his innocent belief that this sign was meant to welcome the new President to our house, like balloons for a birthday party. That sign, as you might have guessed, is for Barack Obama, and now I think to myself, would Frank be afraid of him too, the man he's so excited to meet and greet? Maybe, and it's one of the few ironies in my life I don't savor.
Linda Keenan is a contributing writer at Burbia. Linda worked 7 years as a head writer/senior producer for various programs on CNN. Before that she worked as a writer/producer for Bloomberg TV. She now writes satire, primarily about parenting culture, at Thoroughly Modern Mommy ...read more rants
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