So I'm sitting here with Anya, reading the news while she's looking at her penny collection, and out of the blue she says "Well, I guess the Obama family is more white than McCain, anyway."
I said: "What?"
She continued on to explain that the Bushes are definitely a black family, but in her opinion, Lincoln was "mostly white".
Thankfully my brain kicked into gear and I remembered yesterday's dinner conversation, during which Anya got really mad at Seth for criticizing Lincoln. This led to a discussion about how these things are not black and white, and most things fall into a gray area. And then we got into what "black and white" means, and that the color white is equated with "good" and the color black with "evil". Thus, the Bushes are a black family.
On top of that confusion, Anya doesn't know that "black" people are called black, because when talking about race I only use the actual skin color and geographic origin. American slaves weren't black, they were brown-skinned people from Africa. (The term "black" is itself racist if you think of how this word was used 200 years ago, as in "blackguard," an evil person.)
When Anya was about 3 she once said that a friend of ours was black, and he is African American, but I was shocked that she was using the term. She had never before shown any awareness of race. As it turned out, she wasn't talking about race after all. This friend was "black and brown," while his Irish heritage wife was "orange and white". She was just mentioning his hair.
Recently I've begun talking about race with Anya, but I never use the word "race," I just put it in really simple language. Pale-skinned people took brown- and black-skinned slaves from across an ocean, but a few hundred years before that, other brown-skinned people (Persians) were taking pale-skinned people as slaves. It's an unfortunate human trait that we dehumanize those who look different than us and live differently than we do.
I'm leery of much of what people teach their kids about race because they tend to focus on recent US and British history, in which light-skinned people have constantly victimized darker-skinned people. That's dangerous, no matter how sensitive and left-wing you are, because children will often come to either of these conclusions: 1) light-skinned people are evil, or 2) dark-skinned people are weak. You can get around this problem by taking the broader historical view and explaining that a few hundred years earlier, the light-skinned people in northern Europe were the backwater of the whole planet, constantly being pillaged and enslaved. And around that time or a little earlier, Baghdad was the center of the civilized world, whereas now it is a bombed out hell-hole. In fact, every color of skin and every part of Earth has had its own Empire, at some point in history, and with few exceptions (usually mountain peoples) every part of the planet has at one time been decimated by foreign enemies. The center of power moves. And as it moves, those who have been colonized, pillaged, and then abandoned by a Major Power are doomed to internecine warfare, famine, and plague for centuries afterward. (See Europe, post-Romans; or Africa, post-British/French.)
I actually object to the terms "black" and "white" when they indicate race, although I use the terms like anyone else because it's a losing battle. But I've never used those terms to indicate race when talking to Anya, and I'm annoyed to have to explain them now. I guess I have to, though, to prevent some spectacular misunderstandings!
