Barbara Beckwith

Looking at Our Lives Through the Lens of Race Project

A Cambridge (MA) Writer’s story

Here’s my earliest race story, which is told affectionately in my family, but which I recently came to see differently. When I was in kindergarten or first grade, about 1965, my parents agreed to invite my little classmate Eugenio home for dinner. There were a few boys in the school (this was in suburban Long Island, NY) – Eugenio, Giorgio, and a few others whose names I forget — who lived in some kind of orphanage (although I’m not sure their parents were actually dead) run by nuns. As far as I can remember, they were the only black kids in the school and I realize now that they were probably Puerto Rican or Dominican or other Caribbean-Latino and not exactly what we later called “black” at all, only in comparison with the rest of the school, which was the typical Long Island Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, WASP mix.

Anyway, the story is that the principal, whom I remember as the kindly Mrs. Kass, called me in to tell me how nice it was to invite Eugenio and what a treat it would be for him, and by the way, would it be any problem that his skin was so dark? To which I answered, “Oh no, my Daddy’s skin is much darker than his.” Which was certainly true in the summer.

My parents like this story because it shows them in a good light (that they hadn’t raised a racist; and truthfully, for their generation, my parents are among the least racist people I’ve met, which has a lot to do with their own perceptions of themselves as having been outsiders as well and so identifying with outsiders) but also, a little bit, I think, because, ha ha, of course Daddy isn’t black, what a funny idea.

Only recently, though, have I begun to wonder why I was called in to talk to the principal at all. I had always assumed that it was because we couldn’t ask Eugenio’s parents or the nuns directly (although why not or whether this was true I never thought about again), so Mrs. Kass was the go-between. But if that was all that was going on she didn’t need to ask me about his skin. So I have no idea whether she was trying to protect him from my parents or my parents from him.

More Memories Relating to Race

My brother and I (my sister is more light-skinned) were more than once asked at the town pool whether we were Fresh Air kids. This was up in Westchester in the late 1960s and early 1970s, where there actually were a few more blacks living in town than in Long Island and where relations weren’t so bad (of course, you might get a very different story if you asked the black kids about this).

There was interracial dating, for instance, with no obvious consequences. The splits (usually amicable splits) between kids were socioeconomic rather than racial per se (although the socioeconomic disparities definitely had racial roots; with only one or two exceptions, the black kids came from working class families in a town that ran from working class up through millionaire class, but there were white working class families as well, from all ethnic backgrounds).

I remember always being taken aback at being asked if we were Fresh Air kids, not being sure how to react. I knew enough from my parents that if I were black I shouldn’t be ashamed of it, but at the same time my first gut reaction was always that I was insulted. And yet the kids asking usually seemed more curious than aggressive. So why were they asking? And should I say anything other than “no”? And why was I insulted if they maybe didn’t mean to insult me? So was there something wrong with my way of thinking? Or not?

But it never occurred to me to talk about this with anyone. Nationally, this was all following on the assassination of Martin Luther King, the race riots, the beginning of busing, everything, but we lived in another world where this kind of thing all happened on the TV or in the newspaper. We were an apolitical family living in a quiet place.

Later, in junior high, one of my three best friends was a black girl whose father was an IBM executive and whose mother had been a teacher. She was the only black kid I can remember who had executive-level parents, and this definitely caused her a lot of disjointedness with both blacks and whites, although, again, because it was a small school where everyone knew everyone and she was a good student and a friendly kid, this wasn’t apparent unless you knew her well. But still, I don’t remember talking about race–hers personally, mine personally, or in general–it just seemed off limits.

We whites basically pretended the issue didn’t exist, even though you never forgot it was there. I have no idea what the black kids thought about race in that town or their relationships with the white kids. Because of the growth of IBM and Pepsico in the area (which both have decent reputations, relatively speaking, for hiring and retaining black execs), there are now a number of black executive families in the area; it would be interesting to know what it’s like there now.

My Daughters and Race

Growing up in Cambridge and having friends and classmates of various backgrounds since infancy, my daughters have had a completely different experience. They’ve been talking about race one way and another off and on almost since they could talk. At first, I thought this was a mistake–I thought it was not such a good idea for the preschool teachers to talk about Martin Luther King and why he had had to fight for his rights to four year olds. Two of my older daughter’s preschool teachers were black, so I didn’t feel comfortable bringing up my reservations. I saw the kids as innocents who would start to see the world in terms of race before they needed to. Why couldn’t they just enjoy each other before they began to think of differences?

But it turned out that the teachers were absolutely right that this was exactly the right time to start talking about this because they knew exactly how to talk with kids this age, before they had any embarrassment about the issues involved.

One of the most interesting developments for me was that, for a fairly long time, both my kids thought that I’m black. This is a complicated story having to do with each kid’s individual preschool friends and teachers, but, in simple terms, when they became aware of the Martin Luther King story and realized that there were labels attached to skin color and also realized that I have considerably darker skin than they or my husband do, they put me in the “black” category.

From a kid’s perspective, this makes perfect sense: more than one of their teachers who are very proudly African-American have lighter skin and hair than I do. Also, the idea that I was the only “black” one in three generations of the family was no obstacle to this line of thought because they knew families where there were “black” children who had one or more “white” parents and “white” children who had one or more “black” parents. I started to think that some of what they were “misapprehending” actually made more sense than some of my own supposed knowledge.

At first I didn’t know whether to set them “right” or not (because they had biracial friends and they were being taught that there is no such thing as “black” skin and “white” skin and that everybody’s an individual mix and there’s no doubt that with our Sicilian roots there’s African ancestry (Moorish) in there somewhere) and so I dithered.

This was both amusing and confusing for me, bringing up memories of Mrs. Kass and my days at the town pool and not knowing exactly how to handle all the nuances in a way that wouldn’t make my kids think that I wouldn’t want to be black. Amusing, because it revealed how sharp little brains operating without preconceptions follow interesting logical lines, and these lines often caught me flat-footed–there often seemed no good way at particular moments to put them “right” without actually causing damage.

At the same time, I had both guilt and doubt about how I was handling the situation because they were learning about discrimination and I didn’t want them to start getting the idea that I had ever suffered anything like or even approaching anything like what they were learning about–I had a great fear that I might be seen by black parents or teachers as a “pretender” if this story got around without all the nuances of childish and feeling-my-way parental thought attached to it.

So this culturally (if not entirely genetically) wrong “knowledge” about me and my race floated amongst me and my kids for a few years, popping up every so often long after I would think that it had died out. In the long run, I think it turned out to be a good thing: boy, did they take the civil rights discussions to heart because they imagined that under Jim Crow they wouldn’t be able to live with me.

Eventually, I think in kindergarten or first grade, my daughters realized that by modern standards I fall into the white category, but their passion about civil rights remains. I still am often not sure how to talk about race with them because I’m still tied up myself.

But they have learned, directly and by osmosis, so much from their black teachers and from their white teachers who have crafted a “multicultural” curriculum in partnership with their black colleagues, a curriculum that has all the kids teaching each other about their own backgrounds, that we end up talking about the subject a lot, mainly just asking questions rather than finding answers.

It’s still not perfect–it’s still too “black” and “white” and not enough Asian or Latino or everything else–but it’s light years beyond anything I experienced right up until they were in school. And it’s all real to them, not something on the TV or in the newspapers.

Tags: anti-racism