In early November 2008, Erica Butler Thomas was in a Louisiana hospital waiting to find out if her newborn son, Darren II, would live through the night. He was born with complications and doctors told her it was touch-and-go. At the time of his birth, the nation was experiencing a sort of rebirth, fueled by the election of President Barack Obama.
Thomas said that as an African-American woman she was proud at that moment, but as an African-American mother she was frightened by this historic event. They were in the Deep South where the roots of racism run deep. She said, “My husband was watching the results of the election in my room and he got really excited, and I told him ‘please don’t do that. There’s not one black doctor or one black nurse in this hospital and we don’t know if he’s going to live or die. I’d hate for him to die tonight because somebody was angry at the results of this election’.” Thomas shielded her joy out of fear that her son would become a casualty of racism.
Two years later Darren is alive and well, but racism has claimed him as a victim in, of all places, the playground. During a play date with fellow Army wives and their children in Texas two weeks ago, Thomas noticed none of the children interacted with her son during play time. That didn’t seem to bother Darren, but at snack time all the kids sat at one end of the table leaving the 22 month old by himself. Thomas noticed the continued isolation and even overheard some of the other children in the [is this a better way to express it?] play group talking about someone with different “skin color”. Other mothers saw the situation and tried to entice their kids to sit near Darren, but no one would comply. Almost immediately, Thomas noticed a change come over her son. She said, “He didn’t eat his snack; he just watched. Then he started looking really lonely, and then he came over to me and just cried and cried and cried. I couldn’t even console him at that point.”Thomas promptly took her heartbroken son home, overwhelmed by empathetic sadness, and a staunch determination to not let him be overcome by racism again.
What happened to Darren Thomas II is a familiar story to many parents of black children — because society still assigns value to people according their skin color. Last spring, CNN re-enacted “The Doll Test,” an experiment originally done by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark in the 1940s to determine psychological attitudes about race.
The network recruited Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer, a professor in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, to oversee a similar test.
The study, which involved 133 kids in New York and Georgia, revealed disturbing similarities with the Clarks’ original findings. White children assigned positive attributes to white dolls and negative stereotypes to dolls with darker skin. Black children did, too, but to a lesser degree.
Dr. Spencer believes these attitudes are a result of both nature and nurture. “I know that perceptual acuity is very much a part of cognitive development. That part of early development in children’s learning is to differentiate color, to differentiate tones,” she explained. . “So, a kid can learn to differentiate skin tones, but they learned from nurture, from family and contacts, to ascribe particular meanings to those differences. That’s not nature, that’s learned behavior.”
Dr. Spencer said she believes that the nurturing negative racial attitudes is what black families have to combat, and too many African Americans have become complacent over time.
Erica Thomas still remembers the racism she experienced on the on the playground decades ago as the only black student at her elementary school in Florida, and during play time one day she was caught unawares. “I remember sitting in that third grade class and we were playing the game ‘I Spy,” Thomas said. “One of the kids said ‘I spy something black,’ and everybody was thinking of what it could be. ‘Is it the ball?’ ‘Is it that car?’ ‘No it’s that girl right there!’ That kid pulled my hair on the way home from school. I remember being ashamed about it and not sharing it with my parents when I came home.”
Thomas’s family dealt with the bigotry by becoming more involved with black civic organizations, such as Jack and Jill, a national organization which focuses on the specific social developmental needs of African-American children.
Enola Aird, president of the Community Healing Network, also believes that, decades after “The Doll Test,” the twin myths of white superiority and black inferiority remain powerful and are profoundly underestimated by many African Americans.. “We need parents to see that this thing exists, it’s part of the air we breathe. After all, these are myths have been perfected over the course of 400 years now. And I think we start when kids are really little by helping them to understand what they see when they look in the mirror is absolutely beautiful to the parents,” Aird said.
The Network, a national organization chaired by Maya Angelou, sponsors among its other activities “Community Healing Days” every October to encourage African Americans to recognize and eradicate the stifling belief in biases
Parental affirmation is crucial in the battle against biases. According to Dr. Spencer, affirming the strength of their racial identity is part of the job of raising black children. Families are where children find acceptance, which is key to healthy growth and development. Dr. Spencer believes parents of black children have to be careful in our families not to reinforce the stereotypes which value light complexions over dark to their kids. She said, “We all can talk about the history of our issues, evident in our own families. We have these traditions. Black men still have a penchant for light women and it’s a pattern. So I just think there’s a lot of work that has to happen in the white community because they associate color with power and there’s a lot of counter work and discussion and owning up and being honest that needs to happen in the black family as well.”
Thomas is putting such skills into practice for her toddler and preparing to do the same for her three-month-old son in the very near future. She’s reached out to African- American organizations and churches of color to find places where her sons can be embraced. She also is trying to prepare them for the integrated world that may not be waiting with open arms. Thomas said, “I started at night while we’re praying, I said you are very special and [Darren] said ‘I am special’ with his 22 month old self. I didn’t think to start feeding that to him before now. But he’s going to grow up hearing that every day those types of affirmations so that he knows ‘hey I am somebody I don’t care how the world treats me. This lady thinks I’m everything, so I must be everything.’”
Tarice L.S. Gray is a freelance writer and blogger.
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