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African American Vignette #7
Written by a black woman My son, Eric, was attending a preschool where the majority of the kids were white. About a month after Eric started school I began getting calls from his white teachers complaining they couldn’t get him to cooperate. We had several meetings, and they wanted to know what was going on at home that was causing him to act out in school. This went on for several months and then Eric came home saying he wanted to be white. A few times he even claimed that he knew about some magic pills which turn black people white. I called a meeting with his teachers and told them that for some reason Eric was uncomfortable being black and wanted to be white, like the majority of the children in the school. There were several interracial kids, a few Latinos and a couple of other black children, but he was the darkest child there. I told them I thought this had something to do with his behavior problem. They listened to my concern for about two minutes and then started to “explain” how it’s perfectly normal for children to daydream they are someone else. One of the teachers told me that her son used to change who he was every week: a fireman, a football player, then a truck driver. I asked her, “Has your child ever come home wanting to be Black?” And she was like, “No, but it is kind of the same thing.” I said, “No, it’s not the same, because your son can be a fireman. My son cannot be white.” (Adapted from a personal narrative by Jacasta Cummings in Skin Deep: Women Writing on Color, Culture and Identity, Elena Featherston (Editor), the Crossing Press, 1994. p. 55) Question for the reader: Why do you think the teachers |
