“Daddy, am I peach or white?”
I was drying my 5 year-old daughter off after a swim lesson, when she hit me with the above question.
“Peach or white?” I repeated, not quite sure what she was asking me.
“Is my skin peach color, or white color?”
“Closer to peach, I think.” I’d never really thought of adjectives to describe her skin tone before. Maybe a pale peach? If I were to get obnoxiously technical about it, if “straight peach” would be hex code #FFD3AC she might be more of a #FDE0C5.
“I am peach!” she said emphatically. “At school, someone said I was white. But that’s white,” she pointed at the line art on my t-shirt. “I don’t look like that.”
She’s absolutely right.
What is “race” anyway?
We don’t talk about “race” in our household. And that’s not because we have, or have any intention, to ignore all the horrors committed by one human against another in the name of “race.” We don’t talk about race, to put it bluntly, because the concept that there are multiple “races” of humans is dumb.
Scientifically, living organisms are given seven categorizations: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. Notice that “race” doesn’t appear. All human beings are the same species of animal: homo sapien sapiens. Any variation between individuals is not enough to be considered a different species. (There have been other species of homo sapien, such as homo sapien neanderthalis but right now, there’s only one).
So to find a definition of race, you have to venture outside science, to “popular cultural definitions”—and unlike scientific definitions, those tend to vary depending on how the speaker wants to use the term. According to Wikipedia, the broad definition of race is “a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society.” Terms like “social qualities,” “generally” and “a given society” are moving targets.
Here’s a very personal example of how race means different things to different groups: if a German had run into my grandfather on the streets of Bochum in 1938, they would have seen just another “white” German. And yet, in 1938, on Kristalnacht, he was arrested and transported to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp 21 miles north of Berlin. Why? Because to the Nazis, my grandfather wasn’t white; or at least, not white enough. The Nazis believed the “aryan” white people were the “master race” and all the other subdivisions of “white” —semites, Middle Easterners, Mediterranean, etc—were all lesser peoples that should be eliminated. My grandfather looked German. He felt German. He loved Germany. But that didn’t matter to the Nazis.
My answer to my daughter
The last thing I wanted to do while trying to get my daughter into dry clothes was begin a complicated, nuanced discussion about how humans divide people into categories that are pointless at best and murderous at worst.
And it wouldn’t make any sense to her. She loves characters of all nationalities, genders, colors, you name it. She has dolls of Moana (Polynesian), Spin (Miles Morales, the half-Dominican, half Puerto Rican Spider-Man from Spidey and His Amazing Friends), Aisha (North African hero of the Disney movie Wish), Rapunzel (Northern European), and so on. To her, they’re all awesome, and what distinguishes them is their stories. Her friends circle consists of boys and girls of Hispanic, Asian, and European heritage. She is actively learning the language and holidays of multiple cultures. She never hears racial categorization or racism from her parents. Her idea of categorizing people is simple: “nice people” and “mean people.” I don’t want to spoil that.
“It’s true, sometimes people categorize all light-skinned people as ‘white.’ But you’re peach.”
She was happy with that answer, and we got her into her dry clothes.
Living with racism
I didn’t want to pursue with my daughter if it was an older child or a fellow kindergartener that called her “white.” And I don’t necessarily think it was done in malice. My daughter attends a majority Hispanic public school. A student of color may simply have been pointing out what to them, given their life experience, was something obvious. When my daughter asked the above, she didn’t seem hurt or upset, just confused as to why someone would look at her skin and pick the wrong hex code.
In fact, I immediately felt sympathy toward whomever may have pointed that out to my daughter. The cruel reality is that children of color have been forced to deal with race in ways that a light-skinned child doesn’t have to. My daughter does not have to worry, at least yet, that ICE will pick her up on the way to school, throw her in a concentration camp, and deport her to some country she’s never been to. She’s never been demeaned by a racial stereotype. Yet it is very likely that whomever called my daughter “white” has either seen their parents, or have themselves, become the victim of some kind of racism, racial profiling, or racial stereotype. My daughter doesn’t even know it, but her obliviousness to the concept of racism is a privilege that her fellow student may not have had.
Sadly, there may very well come a day that my daughter does come face-to-face with racism directed against her. At least, a variety of racism. As I pointed out above, while most light-skinned people consider us “white,” to others, we are not white, we are semites. That doesn’t matter to most people. It shouldn’t matter to anyone. But to antisemites it is worthy of attack and derision. I hope that my daughter never has to experience that in her life…but my grandparents have, my parents have, I have, and the odds are, my children will too. As much as I wish I could shelter my children, even with our privilege, I know I can’t.
Unlearning what we have learned
As my children become older, I know the questions will become more serious than ‘am I peach colored.’ They may hear racist jokes that don’t make sense to them. They may hear people called names they don’t understand. They will learn about slavery, racial violence, antisemitism, and the United States government’s very patchy and continually evolving positions on equality.
While I will always use age-appropriate language and depth, I will never shy away from describing the evils of treating people differently based on what are arbitrary, ultimately meaningless categories. We will teach them that diversity is a strength, and when people from different cultures share their experiences, and we all gain from those exchanges. We’ll teach our children to never deny or diminish the racial and racist experiences others have endured. We will teach our kids not just that everyone is equal, but that it is our job to use our privilege to change things that aren’t equal yet, to make them equal for everyone. (And for bonus lessons, I’ll make sure our children realize that racial strife is both fostered by and only serves the wealthy and powerful, who use racism as a method of keeping the masses divided and under their thumb). I hope my children always stick to only two categories of human: nice people and mean people, because that is what matters.
Racism is learned. Babies aren’t born thinking that one category of human is worse or lesser than another category. They have to hear it from their parents, their family, their friends. My wife and I can’t shelter our children from the history and current impact of racism, but we can do everything in our power to make sure they are not raised to be racist. There is only one “race” of homo sapien sapiens—the human race. And the sooner we act like it, the sooner we can start to become the species that we aspire to be.
And it starts with a realization so simple, even a 5 year-old understands it: the racial and cultural categories used to divide us are silly.