brown is actually the best color skin daddy says

There was a piece on NPR about how children pattern from their parents’ examples in the absence of frank, uncomfortable conversations about race, the implication being that if you perform the right values loudly enough, the kid absorbs them by osmosis. So I asked her.

The setup, per the radio, is a clean little instrument. You ask your child a direct question about which color skin is the best. The assumption is that your good performative language will have done its work, that she will look at the question like you’ve asked which Tuesday is the heaviest. No answer should present itself because the category is incoherent. She did not look at it like that. At all. She announced, with the confidence of someone telling you the sky is blue, that white was clearly best.

I probed. I tried to conceal my judgment of her, really a verdict on us. Her supplied reasons ran vague, on self-esteem (I will accept it), on identification, on preference for the particular form her parents happened to arrive in. She had not learnt what I thought we were teaching.

Rather she had noticed instead that our actual circle of acquaintances, friends, co-workers was monochromatic with a token exception or two, and she read into that circle like it was a cipher key. You teach social stratification even when it is inflicted it by access, by geography or chance.

I attempted to listen to her. To understand. And to accept this as a teachable moment rather than a fail. I course corrected. I talked about why rainbows are beautiful, about melanin and its advantages across climates, the whole NOVA special. She received it uncharacteristically without argument, which I noted and mis-interpreted. Then I waited. An amateur sociologist collecting a second singular sample, having just actively contaminated the first.

The answer came back equally confident. Brown is actually the best color skin Daddy says.

Hard failure. Overcorrected into ruin.

Bona fides as parent, as sociologist, in tatters. Both credentials revoked in the same breath, by the same five-year-old, who had, as it turned out, been listening. I went looking one more time for that elusive middle path, the one where no Tuesday can be heaviest.

Which reminds me. The experiment is still running, and I should probably check in again. Or maybe I'd rather not.