Color is the new black

How many blogs have this title this week?

It does seem like we have reached that tipping point (catchphrase brought to us, apropos of our topic o' the day, by Malcolm Gladwell) in this moment, seeing Obama shine on the convention floor on Thursday night, like what happened when gays finally Arrived in mainstream American popular culture. Music paved the way: think Bowie and then Jagger in lipstick and tights, and then the surgence (no resurgence here!) of gays (Rosie O'Donnell, Will and Grace, Queer Eye, Ellen) on TV in the 1990s.

For once I am looking up and noticing that we are part of a new multiculti phenom within this country: the mixed-race family. Perhaps we've never been so hip (as if!) as in this moment. Perhaps we never will be again.

But it seems to me any attempts at passing an immigration policy keeping people out of the U.S. won't go far, because as it is in my hometown, almost everyone is from somewhere else, originally. And never has that been more true on more levels.

For us, it's great. It means there are mixed-race kids and families from many countries all around us. It was like that where I went to elementary school for a while, and then there were fewer and fewer People of Color as we called them in the oh-so-politically-correct 1990s as property values soared because of tight growth limits. We sneaked in under the wire and now live in an elitist Disneyland to hear some people tell it, and to some degree they are right. But now families have sprouted up with all of these kids of different colors and cultures, and this town is transformed from within forever by this. Boulderites have always been interested in those beyond our own borders (which is what makes the New Rudeness so appalling [are we going to call these the Rude Oughts one day, looking back?]).

A couple of days ago, my daughter came home from school and reported that she and her new friends in her class had been comparing their skin colors. "I'm about the same color as Tracie, but Anya is a little darker brown than me," she said (names changed to protect the little). They are discovering the entire spectrum of color between them, and also that you can be exactly the same color as someone who does not share your origins.

During the Olympics, I wondered what the spectacle looked like to all of the children from China, the kids of adoptive parents here in the U.S. and perhaps around the world. Did they say to themselves, How does such a well-organized society not have room for me? Or did they say, I'm so very proud|ashamed|indifferent| [choose one or fill in your choice] to have this heritage? Some day, they will decide to have an Olympics in India, and my daughter will be of the It Culture. How will that feel to her?

It may be as Sunil said in his talk at camp in 2006: kids from India who are here will always feel a little outside things, wherever they go. Here, they sometimes get mistaken for Hispanic or Mestizo and presumed to speak Spanish. In India, they are clearly Americans. (All of which just makes the fact that camp is a couple of hours away an absolute miracle to me. Amazing to me that when we chose to live here and adopt that we wound up this near the marvelous resource that is the Colorado Heritage Camps.)

I've been on both sides: shunned for my differences (still happens -- I'm just not like some of the other moms!), and celebrated for my luck at being in the "right" place at the "right" time, so I have some empathy and compassion for my daughter on all counts. I look forward to seeing what she makes of her origins, how she relates to her identity through her skin.

The power to change

I threw the newsletter down in disgust when I read, reviewing last week's class newsletter from my daughter's teacher, "we will have a relaxing time sharing books," at the end of a paragraph in which she invited all the kids to bring a favorite book and small blanket from home.

The thing was, I had asked my daughter about that day and she said, "We all read our books to ourselves."

Huh. So much for the sharing.

What can I do? Whip out my laptop and blog, for one. Vent some steam.

This is just an example of what this year has been like. At every turn, my kid's teacher, her primary role model besides me and her dad, just seems like someone who wants to retire already. She's often snappish and fed up with the kids, especially the ones like mine who aren't easy and confident already. We all know those ones will be fine. The beautiful, articulate, confident ones already know how to charm, how to love and be loved. But then there are the other ones, the dreamers and the ESL kids and the differently-abled learners, whom Ol' Teach seems to think are just a pain and if they'd just behave better all these other problems would just go away. I had that mistaken belief until I realized my kid couldn't "see" in any sense what I was trying to explain or describe or write. She's just starting to now, but she certainly couldn't then. And for a brief time, I kept approaching it as some kind of behavioral issue, because she just wouldn't even try, and I backed off of helping with homework because we always ended up mad at each other.

Now she's starting to be able to perceive and read and write and compute, and I can see just how difficult it was for her to do any of that before all these interventions and just naturally growing into being able to learn to read. Part of me wants to just change my kid's chronological age for school records, but that would be too weird. It has just felt like my daughter's chronological age is not her developmental age. And the educational system tries, but hasn't until recently been allowed do her many favors. She was tested at school to see if she qualified for special education services and when the team of specialists gathered to announce the results to us, some of them were just about throwing off sparks in their excitement because she is so strong in certain areas (verbally, and with a near-freakish ability to remember and repeat back a string of letters or numbers), and so impaired in others (visually, motor skills of all stripes). To them, her problems are identifiable and therefore solvable, which helps us see the possibilities as well. We have been encouraged to enrich our daughter's sensory inputs, her "sensory diet," as the occupational therapists like to say. We're good about it in some ways yet lazy in others, farming it out to others to some degree but also taking on more at home. Her strengths are getting more and more evident every day, too.

But at school, nothing has changed in her classroom. And it would take more than both of my hands to count the times I have come into the classroom and found a certain bright, curious, and Latino kid at a desk by himself. I volunteer in the classroom every week and see how it is, especially under the militaristic glare of my kid's teacher. There is no accounting for cultural differences and learning-style differences on some fundamental level in our school, if people like my kid's teacher get to keep on treating the ones who don't get it as miscreants. We need cultural cross-training. Often I think it's not fair the way some of these kids are expected to behave at school, when home life is nothing like this weirdly careful, quiet atmosphere.

The worst thing is I see how I exert some of this kind of pressure on my own kid, too. I'm middle-aged. It's a fact of life, and my kid is only a few years old. I'm one of those women who didn't have babies early, and now I have a much lower threshold than I did even before my kid for high noise levels (especially if it's noisy). And I'm a middle-to-upper-middle class white lady, right? I was raised with certain expectations about how a parent relates to their child and how kids are supposed to "behave." I find those same sets of expectations spilling out of my own head and mouth at my daughter, even though she's rarely done anything to deserve all those antiquated ideas.

So we all -- I include myself -- need some cultural sensitivity training. I live with a kid who is much louder than I am, and I suspect she came from people louder than ourselves. (Certainly she got used to more noise and tumult in the orphanage than she experiences here.) I came from quiet parents -- when one in particular wasn't drunk and picking fights, anyway. I think about the families who walk over to our school from the trailer park, where they share their 400 square feet with the rest of their family, however large or small, and I think you'd probably have a lot more noise if you lived so close to everyone, cheek-by-jowl as we old WASPs like to say. Then you'd go to school and everyone would be telling you to be quiet all the time, even though you were just starting to understand it all and were so curious you had a million questions. Wouldn't you just be in shock? Wouldn't school feel like a long, excruciating game of "freeze" most of the time?