Is it …?
Maybe there isn’t
much to read into this but I do remember about 15 years ago planning to visit a
young family and I found myself asking whether their two boys have ever seen or
met anyone of my race.
I just had the
feeling that they having lived in a somewhat expatriate community in the United
States and then moving back to Suffolk they might not have been exposed. Those
silly assumptions fed my imagination with pictures of two kids under 5 hiding
behind daddy’s legs and stealthily coming round to poke me to see if I will
react before scurrying back to the protection of daddy.
My makeup is permanent
That is what I
think prepared me for an episode yesterday at Upminster station where I was
waiting to board a train into London. The waiting room has a heater on timer so
I always go in there to get some warmth considering it was raining cats and
dogs with blustering wind to boot.
There, I saw a man probably
in his late twenties and his son, maybe not even 3 years old yet, sat in his
buggy. I switched on the heater and as I stood by taking in the warmth, I
looked at the boy and this conversation between them ensued.
Son: Look, he’s got
a black face.
Father: He’s
a man.
The appropriateness
of that conversation can be left to conjecture as I smiled pretending not to be
shocked by it all.
In 2012?
The boy had just
been picked up from spending a week’s holiday with his grandparents and
Upminster for all intents and purposes is not entirely out in the sticks and completely beyond civilisation. If the boy lived anywhere in London and from whatever
baggage they had, they were not travelling far; one can only wonder how and why
the boy could not have noticed and realised that black faces are not all that
rare.
Kids have a way of
learning fast and learning well from their environments. I would hate to think
that influences around the boy had negatively coloured his quite impressionable
young mind. It is not like we are in the 1960s when the sight of a person of
colour was so much a curiosity as to be cause for amusement, surprise and fear.
Really?
All the knowledge
the father could impart to the child was that I am a man. It made me wonder if
I had a red face or a green face, dare I say a yellow face or a blue face and
by the time I have a grey face, I might well be a weather vane.
If anything, for
the sake of the well-being of that child, they all need to get out a bit more
and if they have been saying silly things, that child will be growing up in a
society that will be radically different from what he has been hearing or been
fed and maybe next time, I will roll up my sleeves and pull up the leg of my
trousers just to show that I not only have a black face and it is not a paint
job either.
2 comments:
Hello Akin, it may well be that the father opted to wait until he was alone with the child, before imparting to the child the knowledge that you seem to think he ought to have imparted. Also, it is quite feasible that a pre-school age white child, living in a sheltered white household, surrounded by white people and in a predominantly white area, could see a black face at close quarters as something of a novelty. The "he's a man" might just have been the father's attempt to point out what was relevant, ie, that the colour of the man's face wasn't the relevant thing.
Thanks Anengiyefa for your comment.
Your perspective might well be true but I tried to address the issue of exposure, remoteness and awareness in my blog.
However, if living so close to London a pre-school aged child finds a black face a novelty, my concerns are quite valid too.
Akin
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