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Full-Time Dads;

The Magazine for Caregiver Fathers

Issue 24

It's Not as Easy as Black and White

By Paul E. Kandarian

I was driving down the street one day with my son, shortly before his sixth birthday. In my mirror I spotted a youngster running down the sidewalk who suddenly darted toward the road before cutting back to safety.

"That little girl shouldn't be running in the street like that," I said to him, seizing the impromptu object lesson.

He looked back, saw nothing, then hit me with this cannon: "Was she black or white, Daddy?"

In the one second it took for me to pick my dropped jaw up off my lap and stammer an answer, I knew beyond a doubt that his innocence was forever shattered.

I blame everyone for this. I blame TV, I blame the news, I blame the schools, I blame his friends, I blame you, I blame me. I blame life for his not seeing purely what his eyes see anymore. And I blame no one because there is no one to blame. He is growing up and that is no one's fault.

We talked awhile, an easy calm on his part, a forced one on mine, and I decided it was no big deal, despite everything inside that was pulling for me to make it one. There is no racist lurking inside his tiny soul, only a little boy curious about a world that keeps expanding just ahead of his ability to make sense of it all.

People are different, I told him. They are different in hair, eyes, face language, body shapes, mental and physical blessings and abnormalities-and color of skin. It is simply the way of the world, I told him. Then, touching his chest, I said that inside here, we are all pretty much the same.

It was a lie, of course. inside we are all as different as on the outside. Stand in a line of strangers and you could very well be standing near a righteous, church-going woman, a corporate sleaze who'd trade his own mother's soul for a quick buck on the market, a Nobel Prize winning doctor, a cop on the take, a child molester disguised as a priest, a woman whose sole desire in life is to help others-or a man who wants to kill them all. Stand next to a person, any person, study his exterior as carefully as you will and you will still never know what's going on inside. And it doesn't make a damn bit of difference the color of their skin.

We are all different. It's that easy. And, for a six-year-old boy trying to figure out why, it's that hard. We shrug and accept. He struggles to understand.

We watch television together, my children and my wife, and we see good guys kill bad guys. Switch stations and a dead bad guy will pop up alive to kill or be killed again. The magic of television, the great healer in a box.

We watch the news. Images of fly-coated, bloat-bellied children from a horrible corner of the world fill the screen one moment, splattered young bodies of a religion gone mad the next, all of it fleeting from adult consciousness with the thumbing of a button, but lodging in young minds that cannot fathom children not able to play Sega, go to school, ride bikes on safe, paved streets, or eat whenever they wish.

It is not real, you say, and it is too real. make believe guns don't kill people, real guns kill people. Stay away from them but just to be safe, don't seize too tightly to the bogus power of the fake ones you have in your toy box. The line between reality and fantasy grows ever thinner in the mind of a child, evaporating suddenly with the loss of innocence.

We have children and swear to whatever God we embrace to love and protect them at the expense of our own lives, if need be. We don't let the real world in all at once, but let it seep in a little at a time to slowly erode the wall of innocence. We want to do it on our own terms, shielding them for as long as we can, never for as long as we want. It is a battle that has been waged and lost since man begat man and yet we fight it with the single-minded intensity of a crusade.

In a child's world there are no people of color-there are just people. If a white child and a black child and a yellow child and a red child were playing together, they would do so with utmost trust, security and contentment, just happy to be kids playing together until the end of time, not noticing any difference until someone told them there was. it would be then that the real world would descend upon them, shattering their innocence, forcing them to notice the difference, something of important only to adults, the people children are supposed to trust, the people who are always supposed to know what's right.

"Was she black or white, Daddy?" my son asked.
"That really doesn't make a difference, does it?" I answered.
He thought about it and said sincerely, "No, it doesn't."
But it does. Damn us all for that. And heaven help us as we try to change it.

Copyright 1996 Paul E. Kandarian