Recently at a visit to our local zoo with my daughter and grandchildren, I ran straight into both gender and racial issues.  I am white and my daughter and grandchildren are African American.   I have walked this line for a few decades now, so there is not a lot in these dynamics that confuses me on a day to day basis. I am very used to seeing how people of different races treat her versus how they treat my white son, or myself. I am very used to the questioning looks when people try to figure out who we are. I am used to the fear and anxiety that someone will look at us and presume I am approaching this younger African American woman for illicit purposes.  When they were little and we had to cross a border, the fear that the border officers would presume something bad, and yes we sometimes had more questions than others.  However recently at the zoo, the racial/sexual dynamics hit me in my face on a piece of play equipment.

The children involved were under 4.  They were clueless.  I, the grandfather, was supervising my almost-three-year-old granddaughter.  There were young white families all over the zoo and few nonwhite faces. This is not unusual for a number of institutional reasons in these settings.

At this moment a young white boy was on a piece of climbing equipment and my granddaughter headed right for it.  So now we had two young bodies – one white, one African American, – one male, one female, both vying to use the same piece of equipment.  The other child’s parents were uninvolved.

The question that momentarily threw me was would I step in and have my granddaughter defer to the male child? Would I have my African American grandchild defer and wait for the white child?  Do I subtly reinforce that girls defer to boys or that African Americans defer to whites?  What message would I send by my action or inaction?  I, of course, being an older white grandfather, was very unlikely to be accused of pulling the race card in this setting. It would, of course, be an entirely different situation with many more dynamics, if I was a young African American male father or mother. I being who I was, was likely generally seen as safe.

So what did I do, I stepped back and doing that, the little boy found something more interesting to do.  Of course, a few minutes later the same instance reoccurred and reoccurred again, and again. So about a third of the time, I helped my granddaughter find something else to do or had her wait, but about two-thirds of the time, I did not. Even that third felt like too much.  After all, what would I do, if my grandchild was a white male?  I would likely be taking selfies or sitting on a bench like most other parents were doing.  Because of course from that position of white privilege, there was nothing to be intervened with.  There would have been very few reasons for me to even be concerned.

This is not the first time, this has happened in play spaces.  It will not be the last.   Raising strong girls, and strong African American children requires balance, but it does not mean teaching them to defer to boys or to whites.

© words by Dan DeMarle 3/2020