Brown White Black Read online

  To be treated like a puzzle is to be reminded that you don’t belong. When you are forced to account for your life during even the most mundane interactions, you can’t help being reminded of how the rest of the world sees you. In contrast, when the world you occupy is built to accommodate you, you fit inside the boxes. You make sense. You are expected. Your existence is accounted for in paperwork, in pop culture, in legislature. I, on the other hand, grew up checking “Other” on the State of Tennessee forms for years, because the only categories under “Race/Ethnicity” were “Black,” “White,” “Hispanic,” and “Other.” I have had to remind more than one nurse practitioner that women who sleep with other women can be sexually active without having to account for birth control. I have written in my own relationship category because “Single,” “Married,” and “Divorced” didn’t apply to me.

  When I was younger, I struggled with the entitlement of strangers who brazenly asked about my ethnic background, as though my coloring and features were deliberately designed to infuriate them.

  “Where are you from?”

  “You have the most beautiful skin!”

  “Where are you from— I mean, where were you born?”

  The problem is that when asked where I’m from, I will truthfully respond, “Memphis,” the city where I was born and raised. But this, of course, is not the answer people seek or expect from me, not what they really want to know.

  “Uh, but where is your family from?”

  “You’re from Memphis?”

  “No, where are you really from?”

  As if someone who looks like me couldn’t possibly be from Memphis. As if, even though I was conceived in and born on American soil, I won’t ever fully be “from” here. Now my child still has to field the same entitled questioning that I did. But yeah, we totally live in a post-racial society.

  Growing up brown in the South, I learned that politeness was the priority. Sure, my family would acknowledge, you have the right to be angry; your hostility is justified. But to act on it risks ruining things for all of us. Your immigrant parents teach you to be patient, to gently laugh off offensive comments and calmly explain that your family is from India, but you were born in the States. Everything around you—news stories, sitcoms, comments made in line at BBQ shops—teaches that while others project their assumptions, this is not something you can reciprocate because you must remain polite and well mannered. All it takes is one mistake, and it will be counted against you forever.

  You are told not to add more fuel to the fire, which ends up adding more fuel to your fire, until one day you find that you are in your thirties and you have a black son and you’re a lot less willing to give people the benefit of the doubt.

  * * *

  Our family, as perceived by folks at the grocery store and dentist’s office and so forth:

  JILL: white, Louisiana born and raised

  NISHTA: brown, Tennessee born and raised

  Yes, we are a couple. No, by “partner,” we do not mean the business kind.

  SHIV: black, native Texan, placed with us by his birth mother at birth

  Yes, he is our son. No, he did not come out of either one of our vaginas.

  Shiv calls me “Mama,” while in his eyes, Jill is “Gigi.” Jill picked the name before he was born; I was much more attached to the idea of having a “traditional” mom title than she was, and we wanted to avoid having overly similar parent names, as it seemed potentially confusing for everyone. So she picked “Gigi” because it sounds like Jill. My mom, who lives nearby and speaks to Shiv exclusively in Hindi, is “Nani,” the Hindi word for maternal grandmother.

  Sometimes I marvel at the convergences my son embodies. The other night, he was tucking his dinosaur toys into the basket he keeps them in, and he started to sing the Hindi lullaby that my mom sings to him and sang to me as a child. Here he is, this black kid with two moms, one white and one brown, who turns the heads of Indian families we encounter at the zoo when he calls out “Hathi!” instead of “Elephant!”

  Our family doesn’t fit well into boxes. We don’t fit at all. Often, I sense this really sweet and completely awkward desire that some folks have to express that they see and support our family. This is not to say that they “approve,” per se, but demonstrates something along the lines of I think your family is great and I want to convey that, but I’m not really sure how.

  Which I understand. I’ve felt that way, too. I’ve told strangers in the park, “You have a beautiful family” without having any earthly idea how that particular group of individuals was linked together, but it being clear to me that they were, in fact, a family, in the truest sense of that word.

  Most of us don’t have the right language for these situations. Maybe the right language doesn’t exist, no way around the weirdness of saying How awesome that you adopted a black baby! and, We are not assholes and we think your same-sex relationship is lovely. Maybe it seems ridiculous that such statements should even be necessary or notable, except that we know they are and so that’s why we say them.

  Once, a black male cashier at Whole Foods asked skeptically, “You’re his mom?” and I was reminded that what people see when they look at us really has more to do with them than us, a Rorschach test of sorts. When Jill is out with Shiv, it’s fairly obvious to most people that she is a white woman with an adopted son. We’ve noticed that people tend to be particularly affirmative of that pairing, in a way that expresses How great of you for doing that! More than once, Jill has been thanked—by black women exclusively—for adopting Shiv. I wear a ring and am dark skinned enough that Shiv could presumably be my biological child if my husband were black; I’ve never been thanked.

  As is well documented, children of color are considered “difficult to place” by the adoption industry, and “difficult to place” children come with a slightly lower price tag. Do I want to use this kind of language to discuss how my beloved son came into my life? Of course not. But, beautiful as it can be, adoption is an industry, with not a small amount of money at stake. My son cost less to adopt because he is black.

  Non-white children, particularly African American children, are harder to place in adoptive homes, according to a 2013 NPR article. The majority of adoptive parents, particularly for private adoption, are white, but only twenty-one percent of private adoptions are transracial (the exception being international adoption, where the vast majority of children are adopted from Asia by white American parents). Though not commonly known, many adoption agencies offer different “fee schedules” based on the race of the adoptive child; sometimes, the financial incentive can nudge adoptive parents to consider adopting a child of color.

  * * *

  When Jill, Shiv, and I are all out together, the opportunity for presumption increases exponentially. People do not naturally assume that my family is a family and that Jill and I are his moms. “Who is she?” a fellow parent, also of Indian descent, in Shiv’s music class asked me when Jill accompanied us for the first time. “She’s his mom,” I said. I received a puzzled look before adding, “He has two moms.”

  I will freely, though not at all proudly, admit that I have been cagey, defensive even, when we interact as a family with black strangers. We had been told by our adoption agency that it was unlikely we would be picked by a black birth mother; their anecdotal experience reinforced the stereotypical ideas I had about widespread homophobia in the black community. I worried that black strangers would disapprove of us being Shiv’s parents, that they might carry personal views about who should raise whom that would implicate me.

  Despite this, nearly all our reactions have been positive, though at times they’ve been charged. Over time, I grew more aware that I was, in part if not altogether, creating that charge with my defensiveness; I am guilty of being relieved whenever it doesn’t seem to be a problem that our child has two moms, neither of whom look like him. And I know that I am guilty of thinking of Shiv like a badge, like a human “pass” that gets me into som
e kind of club, even though it doesn’t, of course. I would find it undignified to say I have a black son because it seems to imply that his blackness is essential to me, but when someone asks about Shiv and I move to pull out my phone and show a picture, is it because I want a special prize for being the mother of a black son?

  All social interaction is, on some level or to some extent, performative. We are always performing, always reading social cues and dancing in between them, deciding what we can and can’t say, anticipating how others will respond, putting up walls when we anticipate an attack. Judging, perceiving, performing—at least that’s what the adults and big kids are doing, anyway. My kid, for now, he’s just being: he sits in the grocery cart and is himself no matter where we go, no matter who’s around, while all of this troubling and problematic stuff swirls about him.

  My mom is very conscious about wanting everyone to know that she is Shiv’s grandmother. Her skin is much lighter than mine, which has raised issues ever since she was pushing me around in a grocery cart. When someone stops to say hi or speaks to Shiv in the way that people always do, addressing the baby instead of the grown-up with the baby—because it’s safer? because my kid is a giant flirt who likes to smile at strangers?—my mom will drop a comment like “Oh yes, he loves going shopping with his granny.”

  Part of me sees this as a helpful gesture she’s worked out, a way of letting people know how to think about what they’re seeing and to respond accordingly. But another, itchier part of me feels Why do people need to know the nature of their relationship? Why does my mom feel compelled to tell them? What does it matter if strangers assume she is someone other than who she is?

  One of many examples that I remember distinctly: Mom, Shiv, and I out for Mexican food with our friends Greg and Sharon. It was Christmastime, and we were seated by a dazzling, shiny tree, which competed with a giant bowl of guacamole for Shiv’s attention. He sat in Sharon’s lap, across the table from me and Mom, and flirted with the (white) folks he could see on the other side of the tree. “He is adorable,” they told Greg and Sharon, clearly assuming Shiv was their son. I did not correct them—indeed, given the way we have intentionally designed Shiv’s “village,” he is, to a certain extent, theirs—but I could feel my mom’s visceral desire to say something.

  I vacillate back and forth: On the one hand, it is hurtful to be othered, especially after a lifetime of othering. I don’t want to stand out from the other moms; I don’t want to think about my family being different in any essential ways. But I also don’t want to be ugly, to assume the worst of people, to create a rift where it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Shiv’s pediatrician’s office is warm and welcoming, and we are far from the only same-sex family there, but their forms still say “Mother” and “Father” instead of “Parent” and “Parent.” Every time I’m there, I think, Should I say something? How much does it matter? Because it isn’t just my little family that this affects, or even just the other LGBTQ families; our forms haven’t caught up with what many of our families look like now: with stepparents and single parents and grandparents and foster parents and the dozens of other possible configurations we fail to make room for.

  The older I get, the angrier I’m willing to allow myself to be. We limit and harm people when we affirm these categories over and over and over again.

  PART TWO: WELL-MEANING WHITE PEOPLE

  They truly are color-blind. My former primary care physician is the kind of doctor lots of people dream about having: personal and warm, but also professional, kind, and genuinely connected to her patients, with a well-run practice full of people who are wonderful to interact with. Laura is smart. Laura is thoughtful. Laura is educated and well read.

  So I was flummoxed in our recent conversation during which she related to me a story from a mother-daughter book club meeting she had attended. The moms and girls had read a book set in the antebellum South, where race was obviously a topic of the discussion. All the book club members in attendance that day (including my doctor) were white, save for one young girl who is Latinx and was adopted by white parents.

  “The kids didn’t even think about the fact that Maria isn’t white! It was amazing,” Laura said. Indeed, it is amazing. It is amazing that anyone could convince themselves that it is even possible—let alone preferable—to raise a child to the age of ten without any consciousness of their own or anyone else’s color. It is amazing that these adults saw it as positive that it did not occur to their children that this conversation about race might feel different for their friend of color. I wanted so badly to ask what it had felt like to Maria.

  There are certainly by-products of color blindness in modern society and friendship that are fairly harmless; in college, my very pale friend Elizabeth once asked to borrow my concealer before a dance, unthinkingly. “You can borrow it, Liz, but I don’t think it’s going to be very good at concealing anything.” But this, of course, was a betrayal of her privilege—she didn’t think about it because she doesn’t have to think about it. She doesn’t have to choose carefully which drugstores or Target she walks into, for fear that makeup matching her skin or products for her hair won’t be available.

  These are the things that I think should be obvious by now—the ones that I feel like enough people know that I forget not everyone knows them. There are still hordes of well-meaning white people who like to trot out the line “Oh, I don’t see color!” or the less well-meaning ones who argue that I am making “too big of a deal” out of this conversation about my family and race.

  “Not seeing” color is, of course, a form of privilege; it means that things are oriented around you and others like you. It means that you can walk into almost any bookstore in any neighborhood in America and see pictures of people who look like you on the cover of magazines, find books for your child with families who look like yours. Indeed, it means that you would never know not to expect this or to mark it as noteworthy. The ability to “not see” color comes only when the society you live in is not constantly shoving your color down your throat, reminding you of your otherness through benign or not so benign ways. For the rest of us, even if we wanted to, not seeing is never an option.

  PART THREE: ALL OF THE THINGS WE DIDN’T THINK ABOUT

  I’m sitting across from Jill in a coffee shop that used to be a gay bar. “The last time I was in this space, there was very different music playing,” Jill muses over her mug of single-origin, responsibly sourced beans. Just across the street from where we sit is a four-star restaurant that used to be a lesbian bar—another sign of gentrification. With mainstream visibility comes a loss of separate, safe spaces. For some, this is positive, a sign of acceptance and arrival. But I wonder what we lose by getting lumped in with everyone else—always this question of assimilation. To be fair, Jill and I like—and frequent—the restaurant a lot more than we did the bar, which was kind of a dump. We are old and past our bar days anyway. Today we’re here to debrief from our first tour of a preschool we’re considering for our son.

  We’re looking for a place where our child can learn and grow and be safe: eat snacks, play, get dirty, make friends. Because of our background as educators, we’re looking for a school, not a day care, and furthermore for a school where our family will be a welcome addition and not an anomaly. Add to this our financial constraints and the fact that we’re looking for a partial-day, two-or three-day-a-week option, and the choices grow even narrower.

  Then there’s the diversity concern, which is what we’re discussing in this coffee shop. There are lots of things we love about the school we just toured: location is great, accreditation is top-notch, and the teachers and programs are very high quality. But there aren’t any black kids. Okay, there are maybe six. Out of several hundred students, there are six black children. Is this a deal breaker? We don’t know. We know it moves the school down in our rankings as we weigh the options. “I mean, the only way they’re going to get more black kids is if parents of black children send their kids there,
right?”

  I grew up in the minority—one of a few children of color in a majority-white school—but even that seems different, since the demographics and serious lack of integration in my hometown would seem to lend itself to such a scenario. But Houston? The fourth-largest city in the country? Then the question arises, would this matter to us if our child were white? We feel like it would, but it’s so hard to say now—not only is it hypothetical, but we are also raising a black son, an experience that has forever changed the way we see the world.

  It’s hard trying to figure out how not to be an essentialist and also how to be mindful, aware, in reality: to see the world for how it really is. And so sometimes we struggle, as we are in this conversation about where to send Shiv for preschool. “I don’t want to make his color into some determining fact about him,” I say. And it’s tricky to imply that race or the absence of racial diversity necessarily means any one thing in particular, though it tends to coexist with certain things I don’t want. Visibility matters. I want my son to see others who look like him and see them as his equals, not only as maintenance or security staff. Am I trying to create a false world for my child, a world that doesn’t exist? Does that make me just as guilty as the white families who are doing the same?

  My father died unexpectedly when I was twenty-three, and for a long time I divided the world into two kinds of people: those who had dealt with grief and those who had not. If you lost someone very close to you—best friend, parent, sibling—and at a relatively early age, there are certain things I knew you would “get,” that I wouldn’t have to explain to you. Jill and I have learned that the same holds true with this: there are two kinds of people, people who have black sons and people who don’t. For Jill, this distinction has been especially world altering. Her sense of her own white privilege used to be furious and intellectual but now is blood-boilingly visceral. It has been a shock and a revelation and has drawn her closer to the black people in her life as she seeks them out for guidance, asking questions and trying to understand. For their part, these friends have generously welcomed Jill as a newly baptized ally, sometimes with even a literal arm around the shoulder and a “Welcome to our world.”