After all the hype, I was disappointed in Chris Rock’s Good Hair. I expected to be entertained and was instead assaulted by a whole bunch of nonsense. I think if the movie had been a solid documentary or a nonstop stand up routine, it would have been fine. But the movie just couldn’t be both.
Forget what I said earlier. I am not offended Rock sidestepped the natural hair issue. The natural hair story has no place in Rock’s movie. I am glad I went to see it. I mean, you can’t fuss about the movie if you didn’t actually see it. I just didn’t like it and look forward to seeing what others have to say about it.
“Daddy, what’s this one?” Simone wanted to know about a song playing on the radio.
“Love Will Keep Us Together,” Daddy replied.
Simone turned to her sister. “Nadia, will love keep us together?”
“No,” Nadia replied.
A recent conversation in Daddy’s car.
This is what happened when I picked up three small pumpkins and some craft supplies.
“I want blue eyes.”
“I want pink eyes.”
“Let me do it.”
“More hair, please.”
“Where is my nose?”
“It’s not sticking”
“I can’t see.”
“That’s my hat.”
“Can you put the arm back on?”
“I need more hair.”
“That’s mine, not hers.”
“The hat fell off.”
“Mommy, I need more hair!”
Last week I was a bad mommy. What did I do? I put Simone’s lunch in Nadia’s lunchbox.
Nadia, the easygoing child, happily ate Simone’s peanut butter and jelly lunch, but Simone, the intense child, threw an F-I-T when she saw Nadia’s ham and cheese lunch and did not eat. That’s not all. Simone’s teacher sent a note home, documenting the incident. There was discussion throughout the preschool about the lunch swap. Teachers were consulted; a plan developed. Should I make such a grave mistake ever again, they will check Nadia’s lunchbox for Simone’s lunch.
Days after the scandal at lunchtime, preschool teachers were still chiding me about the mistake. I will forever be known as the parent who mixed up the lunches.
Note to self: Don’t ever mix up the lunches again.
Beyond Black
By Kerry Ann Rockquemore and David L. Brunsma
The authors conducted extensive research and document how biracial children develop racial identities and how racial identities are obtained from several areas, including historical, contemporary social and cultural methods.
I recently interviewed Kerry Ann Rockquemore. We talked about her research, her biracial identity and how parents raising biracial or multiracial children can do to help their children form healthy identities.
***
While conducting research for Beyond Black, Kerry Ann Rockquemore heard one comment over and over again from biracial children.
“They wished their parents had given them the tools to deal with racism,” said Rockquemore, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and African American Studies at University of Illinois in Chicago.
Rejection, they told her, came from every angle. For example, children were teased about the color of their skin. They couldn’t spend the night at a friend’s home, and they felt constant pressure to choose a race.
“Ultimately, we all want to belong,” Rockquemore said. “Whenever we have rejection experiences, whether from whites or blacks, it’s really hard not to internalize it.”
Parents can help their children by keeping an open dialogue in their homes and “creating an environment where kids can talk about anything that happens to them.”
If children’s questions are met with silence, a part of their identity is not resolved. As a result, “a piece of the identity is forged out of being excluded.”
Parents also have to ask themselves some tough questions.
“What do we believe and how are we going to explain our world to our child?“ Rockquemore said.
“Are you going to intervene in the creation of racial understanding? If you are going to intervene, what messages are you going to convey? There is no right or wrong here.”
There’s also no right or wrong when it comes to identity. Rockquemore, 37, is biracial and identifies herself as black. Initially, she thought most of those she interviewed would do the same. What she found, though, is biracial children chose from several identities.
There were those who didn’t choose a race and considered themselves human. Some identified as black, while others identified as white. Some considered themselves “mixed,” while others shifted their race depending on the situation.
Rockquemore has three siblings and each one of them identifies his or her race differently.
All of the choices reveal the complexity of race.
“It’s messy. It’s complicated, and it’s not going away,” Rockquemore said. “We’re at this historical moment. What has worked in the past doesn’t work anymore, and it’s not clear how we’re going to move forward.”
There is hope, though. As the number of interracial marriages increase and more biracial and multiracial children are born, society will change.
“I think because there is so much more acceptance (than when Rockquemore was growing up) it will be easier to construct a racial identity. My hope is that things are changing in a positive direction. It’s just I don’t think we’re quite there yet.”
I am stating the obvious because at least one Justice of the Peace in Louisana thinks it is 1954 or something. Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace for Tangipahoa Parish’s 8th Ward, refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple because he is concerned for the children.
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws 42 years ago. Chief Justice Warren delivered the opinion in Loving v. Virginia on June 12, 1967. Here is the last paragraph.
Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
I hold up this world.
Nadia’s affirmation as I read Jada Pinkett Smith’s, “Girls Hold Up This World,” to her.
