Posts Tagged ‘white’

My young sons were thrilled when President Obama was elected. They knew he had lived in Hawaii and the buzzing excitement of the adults around them was contagious. The night the polls closed they watched, in perplexed fascination, as their father wiped the tears streaming down his face. Reassuring them that they were tears of happiness, he explained to the boys that they had just witnessed a wonderful moment in our history. He explained to them that Senator Barack Obama would soon be the first non-white President of the United States. They continued to look puzzled. Their father tried a more personal approach: “We’ll soon have a President who is like us—not white.” Surprised, the boys looked at their hands and arms and asked, “We’re not white?”

My children are Korean. Their father is Korean and Irish. I am a mixture of European and American Indian. Every year I teach a class on skin color in the boys’ classrooms. I bring a box of 30 “people color” crayons and have a chart that shows how melanin is produced. The children and I talk about the areas of the world where skin color is light and where it is dark. At the end, the children are provided paper and crayons and asked to draw a picture of themselves. Interestingly, most of them reach for the pinks and pale beige crayons and push aside the darker ones.

In Hawaii, race is rarely an issue for our family. With a 75% non-Caucasian population, Hawaii is remarkable in its ethnic diversity. A snapshot of the children in a typical Hawaiian classroom would show a rainbow of skin colors. Being diverse here is the norm. Which means that teachers, policemen, coaches, doctors, and parents all look familiar to our children—who literally see in themselves the very features of their role models. So why does a five year old, living in Hawaii, identify with the lightest color crayons?

My sons’ father grew up Asian in a white world. He was acutely aware of being different. For children, being perceived as different is confusing and painful. The weight of that burden shapes who they will become. My children do not yet know that their life here in Hawaii was created so they could grow up free from the perception that they are “different.” Perhaps once they make their way out of this Hawaiian sanctuary our country will have rejected the idea that lighter is better. The fact that we elected a non-white President is evidence that our idea of “different” is changing. Here in Hawaii it is a blessing that children can grow up unburdened by the perception that they are different.

copyright © 2009 by Johanna Kim