I was with my daughter’s Girl Scout group at a paint-your-own-pottery place which the girls had earned a trip to through their cookie sales. I sat at a table with my two daughters, my older daughter’s best friend, and that friend’s older sister, who was helping.
On several occasions, one kid would ask for a certain paint bottle to be passed to her. There was one color, light peachy-beige, for which the girls didn’t know the name. When they gestured for it, the teen helping them said “You want skin color.” On another occasion she asked, “do you want the skin color or the brown?”
At this point I stepped in quietly. “Jill,” I said in an undertone, “the brown is skin color.”
“Uh, right,” she said.
Cherie Register, in her book Beyond Good Intentions, tells of her Korean-born daughter looking into a bowl of butterscotch cookie dough and said, “Oh, it’s skin color.” Register said her daughter’s comment came as a surprise to her even though she knew that her daughter’s skin color was in fact that of the majority of humanity (though not in Register’s home state of Minnesota).
Perhaps one thing we need to remember is that the girls may not be similar to their immediate family, they are in fact in the majority in their global family.
The book If the World Were a Village, by geographer and historian David Smith, gives a sense of proportion to impossibly large numbers by translating percentages into people of a village of one hundred. According to this book, sixty percent of the world’s population would be Asian, eighteen percent would be white (but only five percent of the approximately six billion people in the world would be from Canada or the U.S.) Thus my daughters are definitely in the racial majority when looking at humanity as a whole.
The children’s-products industry has caught up with reality, offering new shades of crayons, pencils, playdough and paper more closely representative of the world’s people than the “flesh color” crayon of my childhood. With much more creative names than I could have thought up (I’d probably have settled for “skin colors one through ten”), art products now come in hues whose names range from apricot to cinnamon to gingerbread to sienna to mahogany.
One teacher’s aide, herself biracial African-American and Caucasian, told me of a time when one teacher set out two colors of cutout figures—light and dark—for the children to decorate to look like themselves. The aide quietly went and got a few more shades. One dark-skinned boy from India literally gasped in delight to find just the right shade. The teacher later commented on the incident to my friend, saying she had thought she was doing well to offer a dark-skinned choice as well as light, but she had learned how important it was to the children to have a variety that matched themselves and their classmates.
Parents who adopt transracially are often advised to visit, with their children, places where the child will be in the majority and the parent in the minority. This might be a local ethnic church, a neighborhood such as a Chinatown, or a summer vacation to a different part of the country.
One speaker said a prospective adoptive parent in a workshop told her she felt too shy and uncomfortable to go where she would be the only white person.
“That’s what you’re asking your child to do,” the speaker responded, “if you adopt transracially and live in a white neighborhood.”
It is good for us to put ourselves in the position of being in the minority sometimes. It’s also good to remember, and to make sure our children know, that they, not us, may in fact be like the majority of people in the world.
Please see these related blogs:
How Do My Adopted Kids Think About Skin Color?
Care of African American Children in Transracial Adoptions: Different Skin Colors
Developing Relationships with Cultural Communities, Part Two