The Queen's Rambles

I am completely at a loss. I don’t know what to do or say. I need a good parenting book that deals with race.

Erik says he doesn’t like school because some of the kids in his class won’t play with him because he’s not “brownish” enough.

I thought we were having a good day. Despite claiming to need to puke last night, which was clearly a ploy to avoid school today (yes, I was impressed with his thinking ahead skills. I could practically see the wheels turning in his little brain last night) he didn’t say anything negative about going to school this morning. He didn’t have a meltdown when he got home. He didn’t even have a meltdown at bed time. A real victory!

I’ve been asking probing questions to get a sense of what goes on at school. As I’ve mentioned before, I generally have no luck.

“What was your favorite part of the day?”

“Your head!”

“What do you like best about your teacher?

“Banana!”

And so it goes.

Tonight he suddenly opened up and said he wanted to play with the kids, but he isn’t brownish enough to play with them. He then detailed the varying degrees of brown in several of the children’s pedigrees. Some of them just have brown hair. Most of them have brown skin. Some of them have one white parent and one brown parent. Erik seems to be the only blond in the bunch.

I tried to tell him that skin color doesn’t matter–you should be friendly to everyone and have fun with everyone. The problem, of course, is that he already knows that. He plays with kids of various colors every single day. This isn’t about him needing to be more open, so what can I do?

I don’t know how to make him feel better about being left out because he’s blond. I told him the other kids are not good friends if they only care about how brown a person is, but that didn’t make him feel any better.

I am so clueless.

I didn’t expect this to happen to soon. I knew we would have to deal with race issues. We live in an extremely diverse area and have friends and neighbors from all sorts of cultures. I thought that would make things easy for a few years.

When I was subbing in Alexandria before Erik was born I noticed that there was not a lot of color separation in the primary grades. They didn’t seem to be as aware of color differences. Sadly, as the kids got older they started separating into groups according to race. Some groups would mix more than others. Some particular types of kids (nerds) would mix better than others. But in general, if I walked into a middle school or high school I would find groups separated by race. I thought I had more time to figure all this out. He’s only in kindergarten. This isn’t supposed to be happening yet.

He even told me that our president is half black and half white, which means if he wants to live in America he needs to be “more brownish.”

This is so beyond me.

I am going to e-mail the teacher tomorrow to see if she can shed any light on this problem. If she’s a good teacher she already knows it is happening. She probably has to deal with this every year, given our diverse population. I’m told the school breaks down into 30% African-American, 25% white, 25% Asian and 20% Hispanic. The faculty and staff should be a lot more experienced with race issues than I am.

This is totally not the post I was planning on writing tonight. I am not fond of such seriousness. Now I have knots in my stomach and don’t know what to do about it.