Does Parenthood Turn You Into A Racist?

To hear the wife tell it, it was a morning like most others she has with the boy.

After I left for work, a second morning breakfast. (The kid can eat, perpetually in a growth spurt.) A nap, shorter than normal. The now daily struggle to get his squirming body into a fresh diaper and some clothes. Then, some errands.

Everything was normal, in the way that spending every day with an almost one year-old can be, until she got to Kohl’s.
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She’d been shopping for a bit, then rolled up to the check out line with a couple of new t-shirts for the boy, as well as some odds and ends she thought we’d need for vacation. Huddled near the only open register were seven women, chatting with the sales clerk and paying.

They cooed over the boy. This is nothing new. Most people, even those with the hardest of hearts, tend to melt around babies. And to be completely objective, or as objective as I can be, we have an exceptionally cute son. To the point that the wife and I, in an only half-joking way, wonder if someone switched our child for another. Given that we were both in the delivery room, it would be a hell of a trick. Still, sometimes we wonder.

The cooing was especially heavy. There was leaning in and peering. One of the women started to touch the boy’s face, his hands, his feet, talking to him in that high, baby talk people tend to affect, her face inches from his.

Not that he could tell what part was close to him. Because she was wearing a head-to-toe-no-skin-exposed burkha.
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There is a funny aside to the story, one of those things that tumbled out of my wife’s mouth as the woman had her finger on the boy’s cheek.

He just sat there, not reacting. Normally, the boy is pretty expressive around people. Hopping in chairs. Smiling. Reaching out his hands. But nothing. Just this open-mouthed look of curiosity slash terror.

The wife says, “He must not recognize you.”

The sales clerk laughed. The woman didn’t. The wife couldn’t pay fast enough and wheel him out to the parking lot.
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She’s told the story a few times now. To me. To family. To fellow mothers.

There is her affable humor in the telling, as well as discomfort. Because under the surface of her story is the question she’s asking without asking it.

Am I a bad person for not wanting this foreign woman touching my child?

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Sometimes I tease the wife, calling her a marketer’s dream. She listens to commercials, to news reports, and bases decisions off of them.

Given the times we live in, and the near decade-long war on terror we’ve been waging and hearing about every day, can anyone honestly say that they don’t have the passing dark thought when they see someone wearing clothing from another culture out in public?

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One of the questions I asked the wife is if she would have felt the way she did — that momentary clench, that confusion over whether she was allowed to tell the burkha-wearing woman to stop touching the boy because of fear of how that might come across — if it had been your standard issue Lincoln Square mom.

What she says makes utterly reasonable sense to me. It’s not the woman’s race or heritage that gave her pause. It was that she couldn’t see her face. Didn’t know the expression. Was she looking at the boy with a look of pure hatred? Or joy in trying to make him smile?

It was the not knowing that bothered her.

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Given the repository of things that have happened with Jack this first year of his, I have the feeling this might be one of those stories we tell him. It will be told, if I were to guess, to end on the line “I guess he didn’t recognize you.” With time, we’ll smooth away the rough edges, the way my wife felt conflicted and guilty and angry.

That’s probably good. It will show him that we’re open and accepting parents, which we try to be. That you should trust people, until they give you a reason not to. That the way people look doesn’t tell you a thing about who they are.

But in a way, it will be an incomplete picture. Because in this revised telling, what it won’t say is that we both share this instinctual, primal urge to protect him. From any and everything.

Especially strangers whose eyes we can’t read and who feel that, while they want their cultural boundaries to be respected, don’t understand the boundaries of new parents. That we don’t want strangers touching our kids without our permission. And we don’t care where you come from.