34. James Baldwin 2: Raising Brown Children

When we adopted a boy from India and brought him to small town Oregon, we thought all we needed were the skills we had learned from our own families and living in another (Turkish) culture, and love, to set him on the road to a “normal” American life. When his life began to unravel in adolescence we coped as best we could with understanding and all the support we could muster from doctors, teachers, and social workers.

What we did not do was teach him the rudiments of living colored in a white world. And, when I was blessed to have his two children with me for almost a dozen years—they were 7 and 9 when they arrived—I made the same mistake again.

I’m now 77 years old, and it has taken Black Lives Matter, Covid-19, years of learning Nez Perce and American Indian history, reading many books and articles about race, and, especially, rereading James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time, to show me my error.

Our son was a cute little brown boy until he entered puberty, a coming strong, handsome, brown man. At that point some classmates noticed the color difference and tied it to stereotypes they picked up at home and from each other on the playground and playing fields. He got the “N” word; he and we learned that some adults subtly and openly expressed white superiority. 

Baldwin started to notice the complicated and racist world around him in Harlem at 14. He saw boys and girls turn to alcohol and drugs; some became pimps and whores. He chose the other open road, became a child preacher. 

Reading Baldwin I was reminded of books about southern Black maids wet nursing and caring for white children, and about the maids’ children playing with the masters’ children—until a certain age.

Baldwin writes a letter to his nephew, Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates a book to his son, explaining the rules of race in America, counseling them that they will hear “N” and more, how they must comply with authority, and how they can maintain dignity and their own sense of self in a world that makes color a measure of human worth.

I should have done the same.

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