Date: 2008-03-22 15:52 Subject: The Problem of Race in Esmeland Security: Public

Recently, Esme and my mother were at Noodles & Co. having lunch, when Esme announced out of the blue, in a loud voice, that she didn't like the way people look who have dark skin, and she thinks they aren't nice. There were some African-Americans in the restaurant who very likely heard her, and Esme's outburst caused my mom quite a bit of embarrassment. Separately from the embarrassment, the remark also (understandably) upset her, and she let Esme know it. Among other things, she told Esme about a black friend she'd had when she was younger and living in New York City who was the most beautiful woman she has ever known in her life. "When you say something like that," my mom said, "you're saying that my friend wasn't beautiful, and that hurts my feelings." Esme got teary and said, "Grandma Ellen, don't worry. I would like whoever you liked."

I have full confidence that, as sensitive as she is to other people's feelings, Esme's views on this matter will change over time. I recently unearthed a class photo from my first school year, when I was exactly Esme's age, and was surprised to see how many of the kids were African-American; I remembered only one of them with any specificity, whereas most of the white kids in the class I could remember quite well. The fact that my brain erased the kids with dark skin from my memory makes me think that I must have harbored feelings similar to Esme's, although if so, I think I was far less conscious of them--certainly, I don't remember expressing anything along the lines of, "I don't like the way they look." But I gravitated to the kids who looked like me.

While I would never claim to have become color-blind in subsequent years, not by a long shot, I think I'm probably squarely in the mainstream of progressive America on race matters, which is to say I work hard to stay conscious of and overcome my own prejudices. Esme is growing up in an environment where she'll be continually prodded to do the same. I hope she learns to do a far better job of it than I do. In any event, if her family has anything to do with it, I think it's very unlikely we're going to wind up with a racist daughter on our hands. Besides, Ann Arbor is not exactly the kind of place that breeds racists.

But the question remains: where is her anti-black sentiment coming from?

Esme has a book called A Princess Primer which has a chapter featuring a good prince and a bad prince. The good prince is fair-haired and fair-skinned. The bad prince, while not black per se, has dark hair and what might be termed "swarthy" features. Could this be influencing her? Of course.

There are the Disney princesses as well. There isn't a princess with dark skin, at least not until The Frog Princess comes out in 2009. And it is clear in all the materials Disney produces that the blond princesses, Cinderella and Aurora/Sleeping Beauty, are, so to speak, more equal than the others; they are the only ones, for example, whose stories conform to the traditional princess fantasy (marry prince, live in castle, etc.). (Interesting, too, that the strawberry blond hair of the actual movie character of Cinderella is now golden.)

There are racial overtones in a lot of her favorite stories as well. Darth Vader wears all black, his mask scans as a grotesque parody of the African masks that inspired Picasso, and he's voiced by James Earl Jones. In "The Dark is Rising" series, the heroes are fair-complexioned or white-haired and the villains have dark features. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series shies away from physical descriptions of villains that have racial overtones, but the main heroic characters are noted to be blond or red-haired and blue-eyed. We are in the midst of reading the Narnia series right now, and the traditional enemies of Narnia, the Calormen, are invariably and repeatedly described as dark-skinned (to the point where I have been skipping over physical descriptions of them wherever possible). The pattern is so deeply embedded in the contours of our popular mythology that it is hard to think of a single notable example of a story for kids where a dark-complexioned hero squares off against a fair-complexioned villain.

Oddly enough, I think it's possible that the Democratic presidential race has something to do with Esme's feelings as well. Esme has often lamented the fact that everyone in her family is for Obama except her. She does not like to see video of him speaking, and she gets angry when we talk about his charisma. Maybe her anger at us has fed her negative feelings about blacks, or maybe her resistance to Obama is another example of her prejudice. (Or maybe she just really, really wants there to be a woman president--I don't want to read too much into it.)

It's possible, too, that she's had some negative experiences with particular African-Americans, although if she has I don't know when it would have happened. The African-American girl she knows best--Tes at her nursery school--is just about the kindest and sunniest kid in the class.

For some months now, Esme has been working out the contours of a fantasy world called Esmeland in her mind. In Esmeland, Harper is the "Queen of the Baby Bo-bos", unicorns let princesses ride on their backs, and everyone lives in castles. I'm guessing there aren't a lot of dark-skinned people living in Esmeland right now. Thinking about this makes me realize that when Obama speaks of the difficulties of moving towards a post-racial world, he isn't just talking about America as a whole, and he isn't just talking about what he calls his "imperfect campaign"; he's talking about the obstacles inside each of us. He's offering us a personal challenge, one that I intend to take up. While America may or may not make collective progress towards breaking down racial boundaries in the coming year, rest assured that within the sovereign borders of Esmeland we will be addressing the matter of race head-on.