Sometimes I write a blog because I am assigned to do so. Other times I churn some words as a reaction to a news item that has cultural implications. And every once in a while, I write a thoughtful blog out of a desire to help people pry open their minds. In the end, it is usually my own mind that becomes enlightened, often by the provocative comments of my readers. This is one of those.

Get ready. It’s about race.

A few days ago I posted on Facebook, the following missive. It was intended to be humorous and express a mother’s pride at watching her child learn to love and accept herself.

“My (brown) 7-year-old just revealed her big dilemma. She wants to marry Justin Bieber but can’t because she might “have white babies. I want my kids to look as good as me.” Should I tone down her self esteem?”

The comment stream included words like “Awesome” and “No.No.No.” and “No, don’t tone it down, the world already has enough to tear it down in the future.” Most readers interpreted the true spirit of my intentions.

But there were other kinds of comments. Quiet ones. Like a throat clear at the back of church. Postings that belied unspoken feelings.

“Interesting,”

“As a non-parent, I’m not going to comment.”

“Have you no baby pictures of you to show her that white babies can be beautiful?”

Finally, a bull entered my china shop in the form of a dude named Rob. His FB profile is flimsy, noting only things like his long-ago college and his penchant for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

But his words were thick and to the point.

“Racism is racism.”

I sat up straight. Believe it or not, I had never even considered the concept of race, neither when my child spoke the words, nor when I typed them in stone on the internet. I was so wrapped up in the notion of beauty being in the eye of the beholder and so proud of what my daughter beholds when she looks in the mirror, I hadn’t even considered that I might sound racist. Really. I guess I’m lucky that way.

I offered the “beauty in the eye of the beholder?” theory to the bull. But he wasn’t biting. He still declared it as racism.

“….because of the simple fact that a distinction was made, preferring one color over another. If for beauty’s purposes or not, it’s still an ugly paradigm. No doubt, a person can have beautiful skin, but it’s a subtle putdown to other kids and their parents to make race the focus.”

Then it hit me. In our society, descriptions of beautiful people can include hair color, height, weight, teeth, eye color, but NEVER skin color. All of a sudden a single physical characteristic gets entangled with language, customs, food, dialect, education, and maybe even crime. Because race to me (whatever that is) is a term that blurs melanin with opinion and saddles simple skin tone with history.

Wow.

So I gave Rob a piece of me.

“@Rob I disagree. We are all attracted to certain physical traits in human beings, be they gender, shape, height, hair texture, eye color, or melanin. If gentlemen prefer blondes, is that racism? No, it is simply stating a preference for one physical trait. Our culture gets nervous when the preference includes an attraction (or not) to melanin and this discussion spirals down to a talk about race. The term “race” includes unspoken references to culture more than physical characteristics. Imagine skin tone as just a physical trait, free of cultural trappings. In the case of my post, the person of attraction is my daughter, herself. It is a child’s way of learning to appreciate her own unique beauty and feel gorgeous. (Something to be celebrated in a culture with a history of a narrow definition of beauty.) That’s all. It wasn’t a slight against white babies everywhere. It was a celebration of budding self esteem, against certain odds.”

But my bull had a logical fastball.

“@Wendy – sounds lovely the way you put it, but to test the logic of that argument, just turn it around – have a white girl do that a school and talk about how her whiteness makes her feel ‘prettier’ than the brown-skinned kids. That’s always my test for the racial arguments. You have ‘gay pride’ you have ‘black pride…’ mention ‘white pride’ and sit back and watch the world go into panic.”

Lovely, the way I put it? I sucked back my urge to take a swipe at his reference to Pollyanna-ism. Then I went back into the ring. Yes, I know you guys have noticed that my sports metaphors have moved from a bull fight, to a baseball diamond, to a boxing ring, but stay with my clumsiness.

‎@Rob. I agree with you. White pride should be okay too. But the problem is that we ALREADY have too much white pride when a culture holds a narrow definition of beauty. Sigh. Increasing pride is the burden of minorities. When I stand at the grocery store check-out and see the wall of blondes on the covers of magazines, I wonder what messages my girls must be taking in. So, I am absolutely thrilled that my daughter likes the way she looks.

In the end the bull and I kissed and made up, agreeing that we live in imperfect world. As for me, I stick by my attempt at humor in my post. Because all good humor is tragedy viewed from across the street. And, Rob, I’ll even accept that I may be a tad like Pollyanna, because that girl was a true optimist!

My next thought had to do with the sweet brown melanin in that yummy boy’s skin. How could one not notice how beautiful this baby was? (Aren’t all babies beautiful?) Yet, so many politically correct online bloggers, reporters, and comment posters ignored his race. Kudos to you, but by ignoring a physical trait completely draws attention to it. I mean, if Sandra’s baby had been a blonde tow-head with bright blue eyes, his physical attributes would have been mentioned. So, why the silence over melanin? It seems we are as progressive as we are confused. Afraid to say the wrong thing. Yet to create a race-less society would be to homogenize beauty. How sad.

Here’s what’s wrong. As a single mother of two biracial children the wrong thing is to not mention how cute my kids are. How fabulous their curls spiral. How their mocha complexion looks positively breath-taking in colors like bright orange and turquoise. How their strong brown legs shine in the froth and frolic of ocean play. To ignore human beauty, whether it be white, brown, beige, curly, straight, or frizzy, is to draw attention to race as an “unmentionable.”

Even Sandra, in her PEOPLE magazine interview failed to mention her baby’s appearance, simply calling him “perfect.” Perfect he is, as is every healthy baby, but Sandra, he is also exceptionally gorgeous, partly because of his racial mix.

The thing about beauty is that it is in the eye of the beholder. We are all attracted to a set of visual stimuli that created in our brains through a series of exposures in our formative years. My particular early life experiences happened in Nova Scotia, Canada, where I was born. Many Americans don’t know that the true end of the historical “underground railroad” was Nova Scotia, where run-away slaves sought refuge and safety north of the boarder. To this day there is a huge population of African-Americas (I’m told that title is preferred over African-Canadian) on the east coast of Canada, and when I entered elementary school I attended a fully integrated public school. My first crushes were boys with brown skin. Many of my playmates were black girls. Sitting at my school desk, behind well coiffed braided heads and high cheek bones wrapped in flawless glowing completions, I developed a penchant for that version of beauty. So, it was no surprise to me that I would fall in love with a man with dark skin and give birth to such beauty myself.

Like Sandra’s son, my babies are perfect. But they are also brown. Gorgeous brown. And to say I don’t LOVE they way they look — because of race — would be a lie. I’ll never forget the first time my then three-year-old compared her legs to my white legs in the bathtub. She wanted to know why her legs were brown. I didn’t even have to consider my answer. I quickly responded with, “Your legs are brown because your Mommy is smart. I found the most beautiful man on the planet to be your Daddy because I wanted you to be the most beautiful girl. And it worked.”

All babies are beautiful, but Sandra Bullock, don’t be afraid to scream it from the top of a mountain that your BROWN baby is beautiful.

So, I talked to her about it. I told her that movies like “White Chicks” and “Legally Blonde” may make it seem that girls with blonde hair are the last group that are culture allows us to make fun of, but that doesn’t mean it’s right. Then she stunned me with this retort. “Mom, we are best friends. We’re joking. It’s how she knows I love her. And she calls me her maid.”

“Maid?” I asked

“Yah, she said if we were born a long time ago, I would be a slave so she calls me her maid.” Then my daughter peeled into giggles of laughter at the thought. I should tell you here, if you haven’t figured it out already, that my daughter is bi-racial, of Irish and African ethnicity.

This whole expanded definition of the “blonde and maid” friendship didn’t soothe me a whole lot. But it did get me thinking about how terms of endearment are sometimes slurs that spoken in the privacy of an intimacy imply, “This is our special word. Our joke. This separates us from the world and bonds us together,”

A perfect example would be the fact that many African-Americans use the “N” word within their racial circle as a term of affection. Oprah would prefer to erase even that use of the word. Chris Rock thinks it’s powerful. Within the context that it is used, it is a word of acceptance and brotherhood or sisterhood. But damn the person with white skin who accidently thinks they are in the club and uses the word. For many Americans of color, that word, even spoken in love and affection by a white person, represents yet another thing they are robbed of. Call it culture, identity, or simply a group cohesion. When a white person uses the “N” word they are often met with a glare that says, “You will not take that away from us! We remember the historical use of that word.” Curiously, I should also tell you that I have been referred to by the “N” word. It happened often in a loving, intimate way with an old boyfriend who felt proud to call me his, “N.” And I accepted it with love.

But back to maids and blondes. Have our historical trappings become loosened? Are we so far past the tragedies and injustices of the past that this new generation can make light of it? Maybe it’s no different from the “witches” costumes that we wear at halloween, a tragic symbol of hundreds of thousands of women who were mercilessly tortured and murdered for the crime of thinking “out of the box.” Are these middle school maids and blondes doing the same thing? What do you think?