racial comments

I read and commented on your blog. I'm sorry you had that experience.

I think what you wrote was very appropriate and compassionate. I think it is important to realize that different people's life experiences play a part in their acceptance, or lack of acceptance, of our families. There was one time I was accosted by an elderly black woman who said that my having a black baby was no different than slavery. I knew that she had grown up in a world where the color of her skin meant that she was a second-class citizen, who couldn't even go through many of the same doors that others could. What she said hurt, a lot, but I knew it wasn't really against me, personally. She didn't know anything about me except that I was white and I was pushing a black baby in a stroller.

Thanks ladies! I've heard racist comments from my patients for years "I don't want that colored dr again" "I don't need a negro nurse aid in here watching me pee" etc. And usually I've just tried to smooth things over and say "they're old, things were different" but it's different for me now - it hurts. It hurts to think that someone might say that they didn't want my daughter in the room with them because of her race. It just makes me mad that we're still talking about race in 2012!

I know what you mean! Its very personal, when it is your child who is being looked down upon. It is hard not to take it personally. I have been so upset about the Trayvon Martin case, that the boy was killed and that now there are people trashing his name and reputation and using a picture of the back of the shooter's head with two superficial cuts on it as justification for killing that young man, who was just walking back to his dad's house with candy he'd bought his brother. I see my own black teenaged son and know that there are people out there who would have the same attitude toward him as they do toward Trayvon, who was just a normal teenaged boy, growing up. The best thing we can do is make sure that our children are always secure about our love for them. Knowing they have their mother's love, no matter what they do, helps to fortify them against anything that anyone else might say.

Our neighbor across the street is in her 80s. She's always been very sweet to our little one and buys him gifts on the holidays etc.My wife and she were talking, while our little guy was standing there and she made a comment about the 'coloreds" living down the street that was less then complimentary. My wife just about fell over thinking what are you talking about, Matthew is black and he's right here!. Matthew being deaf didn't hear anything, but all we could do was write it off to old habits of a different generation.Sadly, anything that is 'different' seems to scare people. Note the states all lined up to stop 'gay marriage'. It's the same kind of silliness. "They' aren't like me so it must be bad! Makes me wonder how we've lasted this long as people.Seems like we should celebrate our diversity, not be scared of it.

I have seen lots of cases where someone seems to accept a little child of a different race just fine, but then, like Guppy's neighbor, still be prejudice toward adults of the same race as the child. It is hard to understand, but I think sometimes we have to just try to remember how different things were when they were growing up and try to be patient with them. It wasn't that long ago that people were still prejudiced towards people of the same race as they, but a different religion or from a different European country. My grandmother's parents were immigrants from German colonies in Russia. They didn't like Italians and had forbidden her to ever go on a date with an Italian boy.

It used to be inconceivable to me that I would have an anything to do with a person who made a racist remark. I would immediately take issue or leave and, at the time, I was moderately ignorant of the issues, had no close friends of color nor any non-white people in my family. Now, I have both children of color and relatives by marriage of color as well as friends of color, and I live in a country where racist comments are daily, common and unremarkable, parroted by university students, children, mothers, teachers, everyone. My husband and I spent one recent summer documenting how long it took to get to a racist comment in a conversation with anyone besides the two of us. The record for the entire summer was 30 minutes. That's how bad it is. So, I do tolerate things that I never thought I would. My in-laws are very bad and yet I have to be respectful. I have to get basic necessities of life, work, even put my children in preschool. So, I often have to let it slide. It is different here. Many Czechs have very little access to English and other languages where one can read and exist in a multiracial environment. I have much ore patience with those Czechs who I know have lived fairy isolated lives and who do not speak other languages. I still get infuriated when I meet well-traveled people with fluent English who spout the same things when they switch back to Czech. One thing that is interesting is that those people who have no actual experiences with Roma or other people of color, tend to be the first to make the racist comments. The Roma are only 3 percent of the population here and they are the ony appreciable group of people of color in the country, so many people simply know about them but have no real experience. After I had heard all the neighbors on our street, except one (a housewife who lacks a high school diploma), make racist comments in the months before our adoption of our first child, I finally asked her why she was different. She said, "I grew up in a poor neighborhood with lots of Roma. I know the as people, good and bad." It turned out that she was the only one on our street with a factual negative tale to tell about Roma. She had been mugged and robbed by a Romani gang as a young girl and yet she was the only one who did not make vicious comments.

Grumblersridge, you are dealing with a dynamic that we in the USA rarely do. It must have taken some doing, learning the culture there. I remember, when we were looking into adopting from Romania, back in 1990, when we were living in Germany. There were both German and American families that were planning a trip to Romania. The children in orphanages were all white, but those who were gypsy were not considered desirable by German families, although it made no difference to the American families. Yet, the social worker said that, had we not taken the black/white biracial baby we adopted the year before (the father of my granddaughter and my new grandson due in a few weeks), she would have had no trouble placing him with a German family. So, obviously, it wasn't just skin color that made the difference. Another interesting thing is that there can be a fine line between what is acceptable noticing and matter-of-fact talking about racial differences and what is offensive. In Hawaii, where I moved when I was 15, everyone talked about what was usually referred to as "nationality". There were many multiracial people and it was common for someone to try to guess, from what someone looked like, before having the person tell them. I got so that I could tell say, Hawaiian-Chinese from Hawaiian-Japanese quite easily. It was pretty common to ask, but it was just interest, kind of like asking someone on the mainland what state they were born in. I guess its because of that that I have always been real comfortable with questions about my kids' backgrounds, where I've known adoptive mothers who got upset if anyone even acknowledged realizing that their kids weren't white. I really worried about those kids growing up thinking that there was something wrong with it, or their mother wouldn't be so sensitive about it. Sometimes, even if someone says something that sounds racist, you can help matters by showing how proud you are with your kids and how comfortable you are with them.

Yeah, don't worry. I don't count noticing as negative. I sometimes worry that I am too open about it. It is kind of my children's private business but, like you said, I really don't want them to think their ethnicity or their adoption is anything to feel embarrassed about or something that is better kept quiet. So, if people ask, I tell them, and if they notice neutrally, I smile. I am proud of everything about my children after all and I would have to quash my natural instincts not to be pleased when someone notices something about them.