“I am a white woman married to a black man. We have one son. People can easily connect my husband and bi-racial son as a family unit. However, many have great difficulty linking me as the mother of our son and the wife of my husband.
This happens at our son’s school and at our church. When my husband and I attend parent-teacher conferences the teachers routinely welcome my husband and then ask me which child is mine.
The same happens at church, the one we’ve been attending for 6 years. I have to continually remind them that I am our son’s mother and can check him out of Sunday School. They also don’t realize my husband and I are married even though we drive together, sit together and teach together.
Our son is in Boy Scouts and when they meet at our house, the kids ask why I have so many pictures of my son in our house. They are shocked when I remind them that this is the scout that is my son.
My husband can fly with my son with no additional documentation to prove he belongs with my husband. However, when I fly alone with my son, I am stopped and questioned about whose child I’m traveling with and if I have the correct paperwork. So I always carry his passport when it is just the two of us.
One last story. One day my son told me that his teacher was calling him ‘Jamal’ (my son’s name is Chad). I asked him who Jamal was and he said another boy in his class. My son said, ‘She said she can’t tell us apart.’ Jamal was the only other black child in the class. I brought this up in the conference and the teacher blew if off as happening by accident a few times. I still feel sick when I think about how insignificant my son must have felt. It’s a challenge as a parent to know how hard to push especially when someone spends hours a day with your child.”
This is a touching story and I really feel sorry for this woman. My advice to her is this: she needs to continue to be strong and focussed on the job joy children bring to us parents, by ignoring people who are ignorant and lack critical thinking. it is ironic that in the 21st century, this kind of story and many others alike still emerge because of people who are narrow-minded.
As a mixed-race, African American-appearing person with biracial children of a white appearance, I can relate to this problem on the flip side. For some reason particularly when my kids were young, I was sometimes asked if I were the babysitter or nanny. More “generously”, I was asked if I were the step-mom. That happened less as they got older, thought their appearance didn’t change. I’ve never had to document that my children and I belonged together, but, then again, we never flew just us. I sometimes traveled by train without my husband but perhaps Amtrak is more laid back. Schools could sometimes be a problem. I remember a teacher saying how nice it was that my younger son had befriended the new kid in class because it was hard for the new kid to be the only black kid in the room. Only black kid? Well, looking, I suppose. But she shouldn’t have been surprised.