Race & my mother's footsteps
Excerpt:
"So it's gonna be biracial."
These were my mom's words when I showed her a picture of me and my future baby daddy.
These words could have been uttered with just about any kind of emotional inflection imaginable: humor, rage, disregard, antagonism. As actually spoken by my mom, they might have been about a trip to the supermarket or the day's weather: "Oh, fancy that. Another cloudy day in Eugene!"
I told my mom drily, "Yes, that does tend to be a consequence of having a white mom and a black dad."
That was it. That was our entire conversation on race before my mom passed away almost a year later. Frankly, it was a much more exhaustive conversation than I’d expected on the matter, which–knowing my mom–I hadn’t even realized would warrant note.
Much more important to my mom was the question, “How’d that happen?” When she asked these words immediately after I announced that I was pregnant, she wasn’t asking for a refresher on sex ed. She was asking, “How’d my presumably lesbian daughter end up pregnant?”
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