Is yours the black kid?

On Thursdays I post from the vault. This post is from March 2008.

It’s always funny seeing people trying to be PC about our transracial family. It’s like everyone is scared to say the word “black” or describe him in those terms. I am constantly chuckling to myself when people will say, “is that your son over there, with the blue shirt, and jeans?” or “is your son the one with dreadlocks?”. Particularly because in most scenarios here in vanilla OC, he is the one-and-only black child in a 20-mile radius. So why does it seems so weird just to cut to the chase and say, “the black one. Mine is the black kid”.

And yet . . . wouldn’t that make you kinda cringe to hear? But why? Why would I need to dance around a descriptive term that we all understand? Why does it seem crude to describe him in terms of his race, which is the most obvious feature, when everyone else feels fine to describe their children by other obvious features (the redhead, the blonde, the one with two pigtails).

Anyways, yesterday there was a new mom at our playgroup, and for the first time since we adopted him, someone just asked the obvious. She looked at the kids and turned to me and said, “is yours the black kid?”. And after a little nervous chuckle, and amidst the stares of several mortified moms, I said, “yes, mine’s the black kid”. And in my mind I was thankful for this one person who felt that Jafta’s being black was just a simple question, and nothing more.