Learning about systemic racism isn't a black-and-white issue for my brown-and-white children

This First Person article is written by Neil Gonsalves, who lives in the Greater Toronto Area. For more information about CBC's First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

"Dad, am I a bad person?" 

The question made my head whip around to look at my eight-year-old son in the back seat of the car. His school day had just ended and those were the first words he said as he buckled up. 

"Why do you ask, raja?" I replied, attempting to sound as nonchalant as possible. I knew something did not feel right. Using the common Indian term of affection was clearly a sign I was retreating to a place of cultural comfort; that's how my parents referred to me growing up. 

My son seemed far less perturbed by the question. There is an innocence to children who have not yet been jaded by the nuances of racial discourse. He had simply listened to a lesson, no different than the times tables they practised in the first period. 

Ironically, both lessons will probably contribute to his life moving forward. One to multiply his mathematical competence, the other to sharpen his capacity to divide. 

Reverberations of 'seismic racism' 

As we drove home, my child told me his class had learned about "seismic racism" but he was still confused. Not wanting to shut down the conversation, I asked him what seismic racism was, and he casually filled me in. "It is when all white people are mean to black and brown people because that is how the world works," he replied confidently. 

"Do you mean systemic racism?" I asked just to clarify. "Maybe," was the response. "So Dad, am I a bad person because Mum is white?" 

My son is biracial. His mother is white, of British ancestry, a second-generation Canadian. I am a first-generation immigrant of Indian ancestry with some Portuguese DNA, the remnants of 450 years of Portuguese colonization of India. 

Early in his life, we didn't explicitly discuss his racial identity. Perhaps we were hopeful that labelling would be a bygone practice, perhaps we wished he'd grow up to see a multi-racial society as simply normal. 

Three years after he was born, his mother and I divorced. By the time he was six, I had remarried and we were now a part of a beautiful blended family. My wife, of Scottish ancestry whose family had settled in Canada more than 200 years previously, also had mixed-race children from a previous relationship. Our home and our family was truly representative of the Canadian mosaic. 

Now, confronted with his question, I bought time and said we'd talk about it after dinner when his step-mum came home.

You would think we were perfectly suited to deal with this situation. After all, we had three children who'd had multiple experiences of some variation of the same thing, from the child-like curiosity behind questions like, "Why do you have green eyes and dark curly hair?" or that seemingly innocuous query that all immigrants encounter way too often, "Where are you really from?" I had dealt with that bias over my 28 years in Canada, but my children simply saw themselves as kids from the neighbourhood.

More complicated than casting blame 

Yet here we were again, and once more I shared my angst and fears with my wife. I wondered out loud whether my child, who is half-brown and half-white, was considered half oppressor and half oppressed? Does his white privilege overshadow his brown historical subjugation? Or does his brown historical subjugation overshadow his white privilege? How do I help my child make sense of this polarized world? 

As identity politics has made its way into elementary schools, I wonder if anyone has thought about how biracial children perceive these simplistic and reductive labels. And above all, I'm deeply aware that we racialized parents must teach our biracial kids how to navigate a world that is still sorting them based on their skin-deep characteristics.

In the end, we explained that while some people feel it is important to assign blame and create shame, history is more complicated than that. 

We told him that his identity cannot be separated neatly into little colour bundles. He is a combination of his history, his experiences and his choices. We told him he is a person first and a person of colour second. We told him character matters more than skin colour. All these things we told him were things we'd said before to our older kids. 

He looked me square in the face."So I'm not half-bad then? Why didn't you just say that in the car?" 

Then he asked, "Can I go play on my iPad for a bit?" 

My wife and I looked at each other and then back at him. "Sure, raja," I said. As I glanced back at my wife, I knew this would not be the last time we would have this conversation at home.

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