Racial Identity: Unknown

This is a post which I have been trying to write, or to give up on writing for a year.

Every now and then someone will ask me what, meaning what race, Carl is. Usually the questions come from the side. Once someone asked where he got that amazing skin tone. I have been asked several times about his hair. It grows out and starts falling in Shirley Temple curls -- except of course for the color. I tell them that his mother had naturally curly hair. They are uncomfortable, because that wasn't really what they wanted. They already know that his mother was white. They want to know "what his father is."

But I side-step the question. I tell people that is father is from Belize and that the people in Belize are generally multi-racial. I change the subject.

Of course, I do so because none of us should care, right? It isn't supposed to matter.

And it doesn't. It doesn't have anything to do with our relationship. He is Carl, dear to my heart in ways no one else could be. He is the boy who changed my life. The gift I did not seek. I can bring myself to tears just thinking about how easily I could have missed him. What if I hadn't been in church that day? What if I hadn't followed through on that insane impulse to call a social worker and become a foster parent so that I could parent him?

And then again, it does matter. I know it matters to him. I know he would like to know. Everyone else can tell their story. Though it may be impolite to ask, we expect that people do know the answer. Barak Obama knows. So does Tiger Woods.

Everywhere I turn I see articles about race. In The New York Times I read about new discussion about what it is to be multi-racial. I read an interesting column in which a mother tries to explain to her daughter that she is Puerto Rican and Filipino all the time; she is not one first and the other second. Everyone knows "what" they are. The discussion is about what it means.

What does it mean to be a transracial adoptee? Harlow's Monkey can help you get thinking about that. Her posts are all about being a Korean adopted by a white family. She does not know her family tree, didn't even eat Korean foods until she was 30. Recently she wrote about parents responsibility to educate children about race.

But Carl does not have even that. He cannot ask what it means to have his heritage, because he doesn't really know what his heritage is. Not in terms that makes sense to us, anyway.

His father is from Belize which in turn is home to several distinct ethnic groups. There are Creole/Kriols; Garifunas; Mestizos; Mayans; people from Eastern India, Mennonites, and more. His mother told him that his father was an east Indian. She might have meant "from Eastern Indian," but she probably meant "from the East Indies." If the later, does that mean that his father migrated to Belize from the Caribbean, or was Garifuna, or did she just think of Belize as being part of the Caribbean? The photograph of his father is not much help. Perhaps the people in Belize could hazard a guess as to his father's ethnicity from his photograph, but I cannot. I imagine that most people in the United States would have the same reaction to his father that they have to Carl: how did he get that skin and that hair? It's unusual. Maybe Carl really did get his curls from his mother.

Things get more confusing when you look at other photographs. Carl's half sister appears to be unquestionably of African descent, as do his father's band-mates. Does that mean anything about Carl's dad? Probably not. In the US he had a child with a white woman. In Belize he had a child with a woman we would classify as Black, although she probably identified as Kriol or Garifuna.

When he first moved in I wanted to help him learn about and celebrate his heritage. Then I found out how complicated it was. I let it go and concentrated on helping him find his identity as a gay man while finding my own identity as the mother of a gay man.

What is race anyway? It is nothing. It is a social construct. Carl did not seem to worry about it, not much anyway. He was sixteen then and twenty-four now. It is not my job to figure this out for him. It is just my job to love him. He will have to construct his own identity, as he has always done. But I am surrounded by talk about race it makes me want to help him again. I want to find out for him. I want to give him the information as a present. I can't imagine it does not matter to him.

Because though it is rude to ask someone about their racial identity, everyone knows, right?