Sadly, clearly, race still matters

My eight-year-old son and I were walking the beach in Florida over last fall break. We were looking for shells on the sand and dolphins in the sea. I was peering at the sand when I felt him jerk my hand and whisper, “Mom, are there only white people here?”

I looked up. I searched for anyone that looked like my biracial son, but came up with only pale faces. “Yes, honey.”

He squeezed my hand and walked by my side. A knot started in my gut.

A few minutes later, I was still wondering what I should have said, if I needed to have said more, when he ran back to me. “Mom, the white people.” I’m Caucasian so I know he is not uncomfortable around white people. I knelt down. “Well, what’s wrong? Are you scared?”

He answered, “There are just so many of them.” He stopped short of saying “and there’s just one of me.” So many times there is “just one of” my son.

He went to church for several months with a friend of his and he would come home and say no one looked like him there. He looks at our family of five and points out how he wishes he had “blonde” skin like everyone else. This is something that started around age three or four. It is instinctual within my son. Internal. Something I know nothing about. This feeling of being the only one.

I have tried to educate myself on the issue by speaking with black friends and scholars. They have given great advice. But when it is your son, clutching your hand, feeling so isolated when you were completely oblivious a moment before, it is a complete feeling of failure as a parent.

I told my son, “You know it doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside, honey, it only matters what is on the inside.”

Those words even felt hollow to my ears. I cannot imagine what they felt like to him. The entire walk back I chastised myself for saying something so irresponsible. In a world where deaths like Tamir Rice’s can occur, of course outside appearance matters. In my son’s life, it always will.

I hear people say that affirmative action should be discontinued because decisions based on race should not be made. Or that white privilege does not exist.

These statements are nonsensical.

There are plenty of places in this country where there are only seas of white faces, including churches and schools. Those are the places where diversity should be sprouting up from, not the last places we find it.

Every time I hear negative statements about our president’s citizenship or his character or I see the Confederate flag flying by on my streets at home, I am assured our fight against racism is far from won.

I do not anticipate this knot in my gut to go away any time soon. If I am being truthful, it has been there longer than our beach trip. At the end of the day, maybe all I can hope to do is hold his hand, and let him know that even when he feels like he is the only one, he is not.

There is always someone else willing to walk beside him, learn from him and for him. Imagine what a world it would be if everyone would be willing to do the same.

This story was originally published October 14, 2016 at 6:58 PM with the headline "Sadly, clearly, race still matters."