Yesterday my daughter asked me one of those questions
OK, not the one “so how does a baby get in Mommy’s belly, but one almost as bad: Am I black or am I white?. You wonder why this question is so bad? I have no idea really how to answer it.
Am I black?
No Dear, you are sort of an orangy-peachy colour.
It may seem like I am being purposefully facetious, but growing up mixed (black and white), and then marrying mixed (Hispanic) these questions make less and less sense. They seem to hold no purpose within our family structure and are labels we need only to fit into the outside world.
Since my daughter asked me this just yesterday, I thought from the Village Voice in Davey’s Mommy’s blog sort of ironic.
As I get older I have a hard time one wondering why we care so much. Racial lines are increasingly not so black and white (no pun intended) and are getting harder to label. Perhaps it is a small sign that they are truly arbitrary.
I know it is wishful thinking on my part that we will throw them all out and view people as, um, “people”. But it makes sense when we have to bend over backwards to make people fit into some category or another, like sticking square pegs into round holes. How do we really benefit from these labels anyway?