By: Teresa Haughey
I grew up one of nine children in a typical neighborhood in California during the 1960s right out of The Wonder Years. Our house was the one on the block all the children came to, the one their parents yelled them home from at dinner time. I thought being half Irish and half Chinese was cool. It was different, set us apart from our peers’ less exotic backgrounds. Like many human beings, I made sense of my world, in part, by categorizing and grouping what life threw my way to manage and define all the data. I also learned, little by little through many life vignettes when a negative value or conclusion was attached to those distinctions, a new word: Racism.
My friends would tell me sometimes they couldn’t understand my mother’s words when she spoke with an accent I couldn’t hear. When I was about 4 years old, she shared with me the story of her marriage to my father in Chicago, where he’s from, and where they met at work and wed a few years after WWII when anti-Japanese sentiment was still very high. She told me they had trouble procuring an apartment, that he’d be welcomed over the phone but they would be dismissed once they showed up in person to view the place and sign the lease. My mother said she knew it was because they thought she was Japanese. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she explained to me, “China was on the side of the Allies!” It didn’t make sense to me either but years later when my parents divorced and my dad left, the neighborhood kids stopped coming around and no one really talked to my mom anymore. At first, I thought it was because my father had been the social one and my mother quieter and a bit shy. Later, I wondered whether it had anything to do with the fact that she was the only Asian woman on our block and in our entire neighborhood.
We used to have a chart of the Presidents on our family room wall that I loved to look at and read about each boss of our country. (It went up to Nixon at the time.) For some reason, the photo of FDR was darker than the other photos, and I came to the conclusion that he was black. One of my older brothers, upon hearing this, felt the need to point out what he thought should have been obvious to me, that FDR could not be black since there had never been a black President and there might never be one in our country. Of course, as I often do with my brothers, I looked up at him and asked, “Why not?” to which he didn’t really have an answer.
I loved to read and came across The Diary of Anne Frank when I was about 9 years old. I became fascinated by this smiling young girl on the cover who sadly had to hide in an attic for 2 years and, unfortunately, did not survive the Holocaust. I watched the movie, too, with my mom, and we had a very challenging but thought-provoking conversation about Judaism. I remember my mother trying to help me understand “Jewish” as both a religion and a race.
Freshman year in college, I met and became friends with Denise who was African American, with light bronze skin and dimples and who loved to laugh as much as I did. One evening we’d gone out to eat with friends, and as I went into the ladies’ room where Denise had gone a few minutes before, I passed a lady and her daughter coming out. Denise had a sigh of a look on her face and I asked her what was going on. She told me the young girl had been surprised as she came out of her stall and saw Denise and Denise could tell she probably hadn’t seen many black people. Denise said she got that look sometimes and didn’t really mind especially with kids. They’d actually smiled at each other then but when the mother came out, she quickly whisked her daughter away with a different look on her face, which Denise informed me, was, unfortunately, another that she was all too familiar with. She did sigh then and shared that she didn’t care so much about the mother’s look as she did about what that daughter was being taught in that briefest of moments that would reverberate for a much longer time in her life.
Racism isn’t natural or instinctual. It’s learned and perpetuated. Categorizing and sorting are natural in our DNA to process and make sense of our world but the values, both positive and negative, that we associate with those groups and divisions depend on what we are taught by those around us as we grow through childhood and into adulthood and what, we, in turn, pass on to the next generations. It’s particularly relevant to us as nannies who impact the children we care for. With regard to the difference in physical appearance, which really is more of a continuum than mutually exclusive categories, I like the words of Principal Tushman in Wonder, when speaking about Augie the main character (whose many surgeries have rendered his face somewhat disfigured), who says, “He can’t change the way he looks. Maybe we can change the way we see.”
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