“M ommy?”

“Yeah?”

Six year old Brookti pointed out the window: “Everybody out there is your color.”

“Yeah , you’re right. Mostly everyone is.” I went back to reading the paper and Brookti went back to watching her movie.

Then pointing to the tv, she said, “Everybody there is my color.”

“Not everybody. I think the girl boxer is sort of in-between.” I went back to reading the paper.

Brookti suddenly got a little weepy.

“What’s wrong?” I put down the paper.

“They were teasing me about my color at school.”

“They were?”

“Yes,” she whimpered.

“Well, they’re stupid.”

She perked up considerably. “Mom, you said a bad word.”

“Yeah well in this case you’re allowed to use a bad word — and here’s a new bad word — they’re ignorant, which means they’re really really stupid. Anyway, you know very well that your color is beautiful and so are you.”

“But they teased me.”

“What’d they say?”

No answer.

“Brookti, what’d they say?”

No answer.

“C’mon, what’d they say? Brookti, is this for real? And who said it?”

Still no answer.

“You’re sure this isn’t pretend?”

“It’s for real, Mommy… will you tell the teachers?”

I wrote a note to Brookti’s kindergarten teachers (their preferred form of communication) asking if they’d noticed any teasing. Or did they think Brookti was making it up.

Brookti loves to make up stories; she has had a wild imagination from the get go, no doubt one of her many survival tactics. At least half the time we spend together, no matter what we’re doing, we play ‘pretend’ — since, regardless of whether she makes sense, Brookti rarely stops talking, just as she rarely stops moving. During an eight block walk to school, we play up to half a dozen pretend mother and daughter combos, with Brookti taking on the more dominant role of mother, needless to say. By the time we’ve arrived at school, she is apt to be the matriarch of a large family, with at least six offspring, ages ranging from two months to sixteen years, and a husband who travels a lot for work, not that she begrudges him. She and her part-time babysitter can handle all the kids even though she works too (the jobs vary), but the kids do get in a lot of trouble and they do drive her crazy at times. As for me, I’m usually too discombobulated to remember my particular role by the time we get to school.

At any rate, she’s been fixated on skin color recently. One day as as we were playing another favorite combo, ‘two mothers walking to school,’ it turned out we both had a daughter named Brookti.

Mother #1 (Brookti) says, “My daughter has white skin, what about yours?”

“Mine has brown,” Mother #2 (White Mama) replies.

“We have the same daughter!” Mother #1 exclaims.

“That’s incredible,” says Mother #2.

The skin color fixation is fine by me but not everyone appreciates her commentary, which is often conducted in public at high volume. For example, she likes to count the number of “brown” people on the subway in a loudspeaker voice while I try to avoid the brown people’s eyes, praying no one will notice we’re together (fat chance). Whenever we’re in a predominantly black neighborhood — as opposed to the veritable honkytown we live in — first thing she asks me, loud and clear, is why so many brown people live there and why aren’t there any brown people where we live. Just the other day on our street, she’d yelled: “Hey, Mom, look! There’s a whole family my color!” I laughingly concurred and the brown family laughed too.

To my great relief. Because, as I’ve indicated, when you’re part of a two-toned duo, you just never know.

Very early on, a black woman literally stopped me on the street to ask if Brookti was my child. When I innocently replied, “Yes,” she shook her head slowly, clearly disgusted, and gave me such an evil look that I shuddered and yanked Brookti, who was fortunately too young to understand, across the street.

Around the same time, the two of us were crossing a very busy New York intersection, and for once in my life, I did not hold Brookti’s hand (or rather, clutch it as though it were a million dollar bill.) She had her scooter and I had my bike, assorted bags, and it was crowded. But I will swear in a court of law that our bodies were no further than two and a half hand-grabbing inches apart. When a black woman hollered from the other side of street, “You better hold that child’s hand, you’re gonna get her killed!” I turned around and said, “Fuck you.” (Once again, in my defense I can only say that maybe I’d already been accosted that day by a hostile black woman or maybe it was a smarmy white woman or maybe both or maybe I was just being White-Mama-paranoid or maybe it had merely been a bad day.) As the woman hurtled a stream of obscenities back at me, Brookti looked terrified…momentarily. As I hastened to explain to her that “Mommy made a mistake, she said a bad word, don’t worry,” she whipped around, hands on hips, and began cursing and screaming back at the woman. The black newspaperman on the corner began laughing hysterically while the white people in the vicinity looked scared and picked up their pace.

As for black children, they often ask Brookti if I’m her mother and when she nods, they reply in no uncertain terms that it’s impossible.

At any rate, what with Brookti’s current skin color obsession, it wouldn’t have surprised me if she’d made up, or exaggerated, the brown skin teasing incident. But the next evening Brookti brought up the teasing again. This time she named names and provided details so I knew it was “for real”. According to her, the perps had said brown skin was yucch and white skin was beautiful so the next morning, I ignored protocol and asked one of the teachers if they’d gotten my note.

“Notice anything going on?” I added casually.

The teacher, well, she bristled: “No! Unequivocally no!!”

“Okay, okay,” I replied hastily, thinking to myself, “No offense, but why so unequivocally?” Because, let’s be honest, If I’d said that Brookti’s classmates had been teasing her because she was, say, fat, would the teacher be so defensive? Probably not. Probably at one point during the day, both teachers would take her aside and find out what was going on.

Not that I blamed the teachers personally. Brookti’s teachers, an American black woman and a Jewish white woman, were two of the most dedicated, hard working, highly intelligent, emotionally attuned, empathetic, you name it teachers I’d come across, especially in public school where teachers are currently treated as vipers blamed for every educational ill. Indeed, teaching social skills to the kids was one of the priorities in their kindergarten class, something I heartily endorsed. No doubt, unconsciously, they didn’t want to believe Brookti in this instance, because it would suggest they’d overlooked a social skill (one that was not so cut and dried, not so easy to tackle). Or perhaps they were simply burnt out — it was the end of the school year, after all — and didn’t have the energy to either believe it or deal with it.

Still, as much as I empathized, I was seething and as I left the schoolyard, I asked the West Indian assistant teacher if she’d noticed anything. No, she said. I asked her if she’d watch for me. Of course, she said.

By the time I got home I had worked myself into a post-Pantheresque rage. I considered talking to the alleged perps’ mother but I find modern mother-to-mother interference not only distasteful but counter-productive. In fact I’d rather stick my head in the oven. So I decided to email the teachers, composing the missive delicately since feathers were already somewhat ruffled.

They were probably overwhelmed, with the end of the school year and all, I wrote, but Brookti had brought up the teasing again, unprompted, described it very convincingly, and now I was sure it was true — and could one of them just talk to her briefly. I even painted a possible scenario, perhaps Brookti (an unabashed diva) had been prancing around singing, “I’m beautiful!” and the kids had retaliated with the first insult that came to mind, perhaps unaware of its history and implications. (Doubtful, since racial attitudes pass like osmosis from generation to generation…but I was trying not to overreact.) I added that I was working on the ‘I’m beautiful’ issue but that it was tough to reign in her vanity because so many people stopped Brookti on the street to exclaim over her beauty. (White people that is…which usually starts a fight between Brookti and me because she forgets to say thank you; on the other hand, at least she’s so busy fighting with me that she doesn’t notice the white people walking away beaming with pride, I guess, because they did their good minority deed for the day and maybe they mean well, but it’s a pain in the ass and invasive and any day now, Brookti is going to notice and start thinking something’s peculiar.)

When Brookti came home from school, I chatted in the kitchen with Brookti’s babysitter Jasmine and Jasmine’s friend and fellow West Indian babysitter, Ann, while Brookti ran off to her room. Fiercely loyal Jasmine usually handled matters such as these in a direct, yet steely-polite manner, West Indian-style, (yielding far more successful results than hysterical White Mama). However, when I mentioned the Brown Skin Incident, Jasmine went into a not-so-polite tirade against Brookti’s teachers and the alleged perps while Ann shrugged it off as just another example of white people’s stupidity. When Brookti reappeared in an after-school evening gown and long purple wig in mid-discussion, I asked her if the teachers had said anything to her. Brookti, who loves nothing better than to describe the gory details of someone other than herself getting into trouble (which she did, rather frequently, like the time she’d been sent to the principal’s office for raising her fist…now how do they know she wasn’t giving a Black Power salute and, I ask you, where is the harm there?) proudly reported that the perps had been brought to justice. That is, they’d been lectured and duly sent to the principal’s office. The punishment might have been a slight exaggeration or wishful thinking on Brookti’s part, but I decided not to challenge her. The important thing was that they’d been chastised in one way or another.

Jasmine immediately directs a “Black is Beautiful” speech at Brookti which I interrupt by hissing, “No, say brown is beautiful.” In a futile attempt to protect Brookti’s innocence for as long as possible, I cling to Brookti’s use of the terms ‘brown’ and ‘pink’ similar to obdurate — and again futile — attempts to convince Brookti that our skin colors aren’t really that different, especially in the summer when I willingly court skin cancer so that we can match. Brookti trumps us both to interrupt, “Like, I know all that, Jasmine…” after which she skips over to her closest ally, the gigantic mirror in the living room, to preen and pose in her finery and yes, to sing “I’m beautiful!” again and again.

Meanwhile I congratulated myself: for handling the Brown Skin Incident in an adult, non-confrontational manner and achieving a favorable result — when really what I’d wanted to do was get a machine gun and take out every white person in the schoolyard. Number one, two of the perps became Brookti’s best friends — naturally — and number two, come on, the principal’s office, if that indeed was true. What more could you ask for?

I rationalize my White Mama-Angry Black Woman behavior with the following. First of all, issues of race — and its inexorable cousin, class — are commonly known to cause politically incorrect emotions like bitterness and rage. Secondly, black mothers, my comrades in arms (not that most of them were eager to embrace me as such during the early years) have years of dark skin experience under their belts by the time they reach motherhood. They’ve had no choice but to figure out coping strategies. And, in my experience, they’ve usually got a similar shade of mother-friends somewhere (mother-friends are a distinct category of friendship, rather inexplicable to the uninitiated, in fact consider yourself lucky if you’re not aware of this particular category) to rant and rave to — or to at least exchange weary eye rolls with, a small comfort but still a comfort. Consequently, they are pragmatic and dignified and simply deal with the cards they’ve been dealt. I, on the other hand, have been living high on the hog as a white person for five decades with no need of developing armor or any kind of ‘skill set’ on account of my skin color until Brookti’s entrance into my life. Consequently, I’m doing the ranting and raving — and becoming slightly unhinged in the process.

One of my black American mother-friends (the first of her ilk to befriend the likes of me post-Brookti, bless her heart) has told me the story of how her parents didn’t teach her to hate white people and how lucky she feels, especially since if anyone had reason to hate white people, it was her parents.

Well, I am starting to hate white people — and as you are well aware, I am one. And despite my growing animosity towards my fellow people, some of my best friends, as they say, remain, yes, white, white as the driven snow. In fact, one of these white (liberal to the core, I might add) friends bitterly accused me — long before I had Brookti — with the following: “You just love black people!”

Why the accusation? I guess because some of my best friends, as they say, were black too — let’s estimate three or four black friends out of an army of white friends. The more immediate cause — rather, the straw that broke the camel’s back — was a discussion concerning Venus Williams when she first hit the courts and was dissed for being a snob in the whites-only, let’s be honest, locker room. I had the unmitigated gall to defend her which incensed my friend. My argument was based on personal experience: I’d had a few years of playing tournament tennis, having learned on city public courts, and I didn’t want to talk to any of those snotty country club girls either.

Got any ideas why this would this lead to the conclusion that “I love black people?” I mean ideas based on simple human logic — not ideas based on something akin to a Klu Klux Klan mentality from a long ago era.

Here’s another interesting conversation before Brookti in the flesh had even entered my consciousness, a conversation that occurred while I was just beginning the process of domestic adoption. I was having lunch with a friend, not a close friend but a friend nevertheless, and we were discussing the difficulties of working mothers which she was, when I mentioned that I was planning to adopt a baby. She asked me specifics and I said the baby would be an infant, hopefully, and would undoubtedly be black and male (because I’d been told that more boys of color were available). My friend, a writer who had written extensively about political upheaval in the Caribbean, looked at me with concern and said, “What are you going to do when he’s a six foot tall black man and he’s bigger than you?” I was certain she was joking. She wasn’t. I was momentarily speechless and probably stuttered some sort of nonsense. But what I was thinking was, “You mean because he’s a ‘six foot tall black man’ and bigger than me, his own mother, he’s going to turn around and beat me to a bloody pulp or commit rape and pillage because I’m white?”

More recently, post-Brookti, I was talking to another white friend — a freaked out modern mother trying to toe the increasingly inane modern parenting line — about one of parents’ favorite objects of mind-numbing discussion: the school selection process. Her child was standing on the verge of getting into a decent charter middle school that was moments away from their familial hearth. Except it was predominantly black.

“So what’s the problem,” I said, as if I didn’t know.

“He’d be one of the only white kids,” she said, horrified, “I don’t want to do that to him.”

“Why not?”

“Well, the kids seem ok, I mean nice, but, I mean…” she trailed off.

“Well, Brookti’s one of the few black kids in her school and it’s definitely not the best case scenario but she’s managing.”

Some sputtering ensued from my well meaning friend and I caved a little, because, I’m the first to admit, there are times when I’m as complicit as the next person when it comes to avoiding conversations regarding race. I’ve learned the hard way: If you’re going to go the distance, it’s key to pace yourself.

These are just a few seemingly innocuous examples of white peoples’ deeply ingrained stereotypical thinking or inveterate double standard or plain old fashioned ignorance or whatever the technical PC term is, but these examples add up. Take my word for it, this nonsense can rub your nerves raw when your daughter is on the other team, that is, the team being implicated.

Do you know how many times I’ve heard the “I don’t want my kid to be one of the only white kids there!” in tones of helpless horror, and how many times I have bitten my tongue not to retort, “I know what you mean, my daughter is the only black child in a sea of whites on a regular basis and it’s really tragic.”

Another white friend felt the urgent need to remind me that I was (still) white, just as I was issuing invectives — conveniently, perhaps unfairly, based on the race card — against a mother who’d committed an offense against Brookti, who, in this instance, had touched her son — Brookti’s long bony arms are always inadvertently flailing around, gesturing Jewish-style when she holds forth — whereupon the son began to whimper and the mother reprimanded Brookti, clutching the son to her breast like he was baby Jesus.

It happened again within months — well, it was less of a touch than a vigorous tap to the chest, a Brookti-style ‘friendly’ greeting to a little white boy she’d played with since she was two and a half — and the little boy fell over. Ok, so she’s a little frisky (I could get into a whole sexism rant here, but don’t panic, I won’t). The little boy got right up with a smile; obviously, he was playing too. Two mothers in the vicinity — not his mother, she would have simply ignored it — glared at me with such animosity — was I the mother of this wild savage? — that I felt obliged to half-heartedly chastise Brookti, which I deeply regretted. Since the age of two, Brookti has reduced white boys up to eight years of age to tears with a mere point of her finger. Do these kind of, shall we call them visceral, reactions have something to do with her skin color? Take a wild guess. Regardless…come on, young fellows — and young gals too — let’s man up, for god’s sake!

As for my possibly, possibly not, unwarranted use of the race card, well, the Card is always a temptation. Especially when you can’t resist making a member of the ever-growing breed of prissy stick-up-their-ass white parents squirm (there are plenty of prissy black parents too, you know who you are, or maybe you don’t, but, in my experience, it’s usually a somewhat different ballgame). Regarding the use of the Card, some element of truth is usually lurking, generally of the subconscious variety, and if not, at least the use of the Card is almost always guaranteed to get a reaction. Even if it involves the classic white person’s simpleton proclamation “I’m not a racist!” well, that might get something of a dialogue going, albeit a potentially unpleasant one.

Obviously racial discord, shall we call it, is not nearly as simple as black and white; it involves every ethnicity against every other ethnicity. It’s white against black against brown against brown, especially these days since most dark immigrants are battling one another for whatever sliver of the American pie they can get — particularly when any given day could be their last on this soil. And, of course, you’ve always got to figure in — big-time — that pesky all-inclusive class war that gets more volatile and personal with an economic crisis a day or the announcement of an economic crisis faux-solution a day.

One day when I was with my first black mother-friend and our kids (after years of chipping away, there’s more than one; White Mama has become many a black mother’s token white friend) I ran into another black friend from pre-motherhood days, who asked me later, “Who was that with you, a babysitter?” In a moment of beneficence (and plain old apathy) I didn’t bother to remind him that he should know better; that not all black females in upper class white enclaves are babysitters although it may appear so. Nor did I want to stir up the alleged babysitter friend, who has, needless to say, been mistaken as such countless times, and quite possibly could react with some latent bitterness and, yes, anger.

Brookti’s babysitter Jasmine has told me of the countless times she’s been confronted by black American women — strangers, mind you — when she’s taking care of a white child, accusing her of abasing her West Indian self by working for Whitey. “Why are you taking care of that child for a white woman; can’t you get a real job?” is a favorite line of attack, according to Jasmine. It goes both ways: Brookti’s first babysitter, also West Indian, had a sister who was ostracized from the family because she married a black American. And no West Indian babysitter I know will deign to work for a black American family unless they’re desperate. Really desperate.

Another friend, a divorced mother who is French, white and West Indian, or mixed, as they say, knows her black mother doesn’t approve of the way she’s raising her son. Her mother thinks she’s raising him “too white, ” which means (I’m guessing) she’s not as strict as a conventional black mother would be. My friend usually shrugs it off. However she is a little concerned that her son “thinks he’s white,” which means… I’m not exactly sure what she means there…perhaps that he has a healthy sense of entitlement? My friend is always commenting that Brookti acts like “such an American black girl.” Black Americans tell me Brookti “acts black ” too. White people are more cautious; they allude to it in coded language.

What’s black about Brookti? Is it because she has a loud voice (that could be Jewish too, come on now) and she can do the neck roll — flawlessly — with a precise whip of the finger (what six or seven year old black girl can’t who watches every black female stereotype, oops, I mean character, on Disney or Nickelodeon) and she’s a very talented dancer (how do you know she didn’t get it from me?). Oh yeah…and she can run at a very brisk clip. That must be it.

Around this time, Brookti’s white therapist congratulated me effusively with these words: “It’s remarkable, you’ve given Brookti a black identity.”

Lord knows she meant well, but how did I give Brookti a “black identity” when I don’t even know what she means. Do you know anyone who has ever been congratulated for giving their adopted white child a “white identity?” I don’t.

Another question: What exactly does a black identity mean in America in the twenty-first century?