A Klatch of Civilizations

Some years ago, I was trying to count the number of African-American students in my son's class. "Let me see..." I said. "There's you and A and B and C..." C's not black, he said. I was surprised. I knew C, her parents and her grandparents; by most societal measures, they would be thought of as black. "Why do you say that?" She hangs out with the white kids. "And you don't? What about your three best friends, X, Y and Z?" They're black. "All three of them are quite blond! What makes them black?" They hang out with me. "So why aren't you white for hanging out with them, like C?" Because white kids go to Starbucks and order light Frappuccinos. "I go to Starbucks!" And you're white. That's why I don't hang out with you. "But you go to Starbucks!" Only twice, and then I ordered a dark chocolate mocha latte.

My son was joshing, but it made me think. I was organizing his classmates by some combination of phenotype, family history and culture. My interest in keeping such a tally was motivated by a wish that my son not be tokenized. Being "the only one" sparks my own anxieties about having grown up as the lone "colored" kid throughout elementary school. In high school there were a few more dark dots in the mix, which was better because those in the majority couldn't generalize about you quite so easily. And if they did generalize, at least you had someone to roll your eyes with at the absurdity of being lumped together. We fought for inclusiveness in a world that too often hoards life's rewards by racial assignation.

My son's tongue-in-cheek use of Starbucks-as-race is obviously a more malleable marker than skin color. It is a stereotype, but it was playful precisely because of its dependence on easy shape-shifting. Of course, even that kind of stereotyping is not without its risks: If his standard had been Nikes or talking like a rapper, it might have been a lot less funny--i.e., if his underlying references were really to fixed or negative assumptions about phenotype and class.

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