A KID’S-EYE VIEW : Children Grow Up Soon Enough, So Why Rush Into Lessons in Black and White?
Chuck E. Cheese’s in Torrance is part of the children’s pizza-and-amusement chain that bills itself as a place where a kid can be a kid. It’s also the place where a grown-up can be swallowed up by hordes of adrenaline-charged 5-year-olds, shouting and pushing one another to get first crack at a dozen or so noisy games and rides.
But since I have a 5-year-old, I periodically wind up there, slide a few dollars into a change machine, hand Amanda 10 tokens and watch her surge into the fray. And each time that she happily disappears in search of the Bozo Ping-Pong ball toss and leaves me at my table, I feel as though I’m seeing my world in microcosm: brown kids, white kids, black kids, all good-naturedly colliding, looking for their places, learning how much to take and how much to dish out.
It’s a nice picture, and, of course, it’s a lie. For all the census prattle about the increasing diversity of Los Angeles, we live--as we have always lived here--in an intensely segregated place. Census data cares nothing about whether neighbors talk to one another or about the prejudices they pass down to their children.
Those of us who grew up here can tell ourselves, as I often do, that because L.A. is a different place today, our children won’t grow up with the same racial stupidity that isolation bred in us. My mother reminded me the other day that in the 1950s, one of my cousins, raised in a home where respect for all people was a commandment, saw a black person on a bus and innocently asked whether people had dark skin because they neglected to bathe. That was not South Carolina. That was West L.A.
And so I sit in my booth and daydream about what my daughter, a white child, will inherit. Unlike her father, she has grown up around people of all races. She has viewed hundreds of multiculturally sensitized episodes of “Sesame Street.” Her school, integrated by hundreds of kids bused in from overcrowded campuses miles away, holds special observances for almost every ethnic group.
And yet I know that soon racism is going to knock on the door and demand to be dealt with. Someone--at school or on the sidewalk or in somebody’s living room--is going to cut loose with the kind of unfocused epithet that we so casually share with each other. Someone is going to light the devil’s candle that makes us self-conscious and teaches us to judge one another long before we learn what’s in our hearts. And she is going to come home, and there will be questions.
I know the answers. I’ve spoken them to myself a thousand times and refined them so that they will make sense to her. Life will go on, far worse traumas will befall us. And still I dread and resent this approaching moment because it is going to force me to acknowledge that yet another generation must grapple with America’s unwritten apartheid.
A long time ago, I imagined that all this would end by the time I had children--that so much pain and chaos had flashed across our television sets and newspapers, that the cost of this disease was so obvious that it would simply stop and we could say there had been some purpose to the madness, that for once a set of children could grow up without being crippled by it.
Amanda runs out of tokens, redeems 57 tickets for two tiny plastic toys, and we go home. That night, at bedtime, she asks me to read “Charlie Brown’s ‘Cyclopedia: Your Amazing Body.” On Page 27 we come to a paragraph titled “Why do people have different-colored skin?” Everyone has different mixtures of brown and yellow pigment, it says. “Black people have a lot of brown pigment in their skin, and not much yellow. White people have a small amount of each pigment. . . .”
I don’t read those last two sentences. I am not ready for there to be black people and white people in Amanda’s world. I know it is inevitable, though, and I hope my daughter will steer the right course. For all I know, tomorrow we’ll drive by a billboard advertising the basketball movie “White Men Can’t Jump,” and she’ll want to know what that means. Tomorrow, maybe. But not tonight. Not yet.
