I was at a party recently and the father said of his son who was playing in the sprinkler, “I haven’t told him he is black yet.” It was sort of a jokey way of saying that he hadn’t spoken about race with his son and before he could, his son’s classmate had written a poem about him, about he liked his son’s skin color, which made his son notice he had skin color.<\/p>\n
Friday, I was reading a AAA magazine and there was a letter about a wonderful vacation experience a couple had in the Bahamas with a couple who owned a hotel: the man was white and the woman black. It bugged me these people were described in color and I wondered if simply saying one was from the U.S. and one from the Bahamas might be enough for the story. Meanwhile on Saturday, I was sitting in the salon on Iberville in the Quarter mesmerized by the hairstyles being coiffed when a Chris Rock episode was playing on BET and the wife had just found out about a prior marriage and kept drilling her husband if the other wife was white. Was she white? Was she white? But was she white?<\/p>\n
Tatjana just read Dan Baum’s Nine Lives<\/em> and I for one am sidestepping any more Katrina and Federal Flood stories for a while because they depress me. My neighbor and I were talking yesterday about the Federal Flood stories and she said she read only One Dead in the Attic<\/em> and decided she needed ten years before she could read the next one. I said I’m like that with Holocaust stories. She said the best matzo ball soup she ever had was at the Holocaust museum in DC. I haven’t been, I told her, much like Katrina stories, Holocaust stories depress me. She said it is a funny thing that the most well kept secret in this land is Slavery and that most people don’t want to talk about it. I told her it was a subject that I was reading up on because I wanted to be able to talk to Tin about it. She told me her mother would be a good person to talk to Tin about it because she was able to explain to her all of the details in a comprehensive way.<\/p>\n But when? – how to introduce that into an otherwise happy childhood with topics such as marching bands and pasta pesto. My neighbor said I had a few years because it wasn’t until she was four years old that she learned she was black and it came from a school mate. She said the world will tell him he is black.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was at a party recently and the father said of his son who was playing in the sprinkler, “I haven’t told him he is black yet.” It was sort of a jokey way of saying that he hadn’t spoken about race with his son and before he could, his son’s classmate had written a poem about him, about he liked his son’s skin color, which made his son notice he had skin color. Friday,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1kHSD-39L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12137"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12142,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12137\/revisions\/12142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dangermond.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}