You my dear are white.

My mother describes me as a precocious toddler who would wander off so often that she understood the purpose of child leashes. However, she was too scared to ever actually use one because she thought it would not play well if someone took a snapped a campaign shot of her with her daughter strapped into a harness. My general disregard of crosswalks also extended to my—at times brazen—bluntness. I once asked my grandmother where grandchildren laid their head if their grandmother had no boobs. I was very apparently very concerned about the cup size of grandmothers because I believed all grandmothers should solely serve as the ideal cushion for their grandkids. Generally, when I busted out endearingly awkward and socially inappropriate questions they were met with laughter, an explanation and an ever so gentle reminder of how to behave. As a manner-school drop-out still known for bluntness I don’t know if the lessons in decorum ever fully took.

The first time I remember stopping all the adults in the room with my childhood bluntness was Thanksgiving Dinner 1993 when for some unknown reason as a 4-year-old I sat at the adult table. That Thanksgiving began as an unremarkable dinner, I assume it was a relatively small gathering that year since we all fit at one table. My grandmother came to town from New York and her close friend Rev. Dr. Donald G. Jacobs and his son accompanied her to dinner. Rev. Dr. Jacobs was an African Methodist Episcopal pastor in Cleveland, Ohio who my grandmother grew close to during their work together in the Civil Rights movement and with the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States.

Throughout appetizers, the adults engaged in conversation while my sister and I oscillated between snacking, chasing each other around and coloring with our box of 96 Crayola crayons. A few times I heard the adults refer to Rev. Dr. Jacobs as “Black” and as someone who was recently tested on their rainbow skills, I found this found incongruent with what I knew to be true. I inquisitively picked up the black crayon did a quick comparison check and confirmed in my mind that, no in fact Rev. Dr. Jacobs was not black, the adults must have just forgotten the colors of the rainbow. Rev. Dr. Jacobs wasn’t black he was brown, and I had the crayon to prove it.  

Content in my superior color knowing skills I smugly sat down at the table believing I was smarter than the adults around me. In the middle of dinner, in the context of a conversation I will never remember one of the adults again referred to Rev. Jacobs as “Black,” this time I knew it was my duty to correct them, lest they fail a test on the rainbow. I mustered up that righteous indignation only a preschooler can carry and loudly informed the dining room table “Rev. Jacob’s isn’t black he’s brown” unapologetically correcting what I believed to be a mistake.  

Clearly a child with a strong understanding of race

The conversation came to a screeching halt. My grandma gave me an “well shit” face realizing my understanding of color didn’t expand beyond a box of crayons. I made abundantly clear in the middle of Thanksgiving dinner that no one had ever explained race to me, and that someone would have to explain it to me very soon. The looks of stunned polite awkwardness on my parent’s face was a mixture of white apologetic, well don’t kids just say the darndest thing and the face you make when a kid spills grape juice on fancy couch. There was this lingering pause where everyone tried to figure out where to go from there after I unintentionally tossed a landmine into conversation. Rev. Dr. Jacobs took my ignorance in stride and kindly turned to me saying, “I am Black and brown honey, I’ll explain to you after dinner.” He said it with a calm firmness that told me the conversation was over for the moment but there was more to come. I remember thinking to myself, I don’t believe you, but I can’t prove you wrong. It was the same feeling I had when I was learning to swim and my parents telling me they weren’t getting further away even though I was pretty convinced they were. Like there was something I was missing but I had no clue what it was. With a heartfelt smile and comment that I was going to be quite a handful Rev. Dr. Jacobs got conversation back on track and dinner continued with lovely un-memorability.  

As dinner finished, I grabbed my crayon box itching to learn exactly how Rev. Dr. Jacobs could be both Black and brown as he claimed. Rev. Dr. Jacobs sat in an armchair by the fireplace the shadow of two three feet high black and white framed photos of his time in Africa that stood over the mantle and I sat at his feet, crayons at the ready. My competitiveness drove me to prove that I was the superior color master, so I unceremoniously took out my brown crayon and held it up to Rev. Dr. Jacob’s hand and said, “look your brown, not black.” He looked me in straight in the eyes and responded, “Black is more than just a crayon color.” He picked up the peach-colored crayon, the white crayon and began explaining race to me with four crayons.

One of the portraits that hung above our mantel— -my father’s Peace Corps host family (Mombasa, Kenya)

Rev. Dr. Jacobs sat there with me next to the fire for what felt like hours, but was probably closer to 20 minutes, and explained constructs of Black and white to me in a way that pushed my understanding of color far beyond crayons. He told me I was white and even though I look like a peach crayon society saw me as white. Similarly, society looked at him as Black even though his skin, as I had correctly identified, was brown. He explained that a long time ago someone decided peach skin was more valuable than brown skin and as a result people might be nicer to me simply because I looked like a peach crayon. I wasn’t necessarily a better person just because I was white, but some people act like everyone peach skin is better. At the same token some white people who look like me claim that people who look like him and those in the portraits above us are less valuable. He explained to me that there are people who believe that Black people and people with brown skin mattered less than white people with peach skin and as a white person I had to try to not be one of the people who saw Black as less beautiful. I had to keep working to be friends with all of God’s children no matter what color crayon they are. I had heard the lesson “love all God’s children” many times before in Sunday school but this time it was different because he taught me that I am white, and he was Black and that meant something. That fact impacted the way we form relationships and we had to work to undo the idea that white is better.

It wasn’t until my first year at Yale Divinity School that I began to understand the profound significance of my Crayola race lesson. During my first semester in Black Theology, I noticed Rev. Dr. Don Jacobs’ name as a signatory of the “Black Power Statement by the National Committee on Negro Churchmen, July 31, 1966.” “The Black Power Statement by the National Committee on Negro Churchmen” was published in the New York Times in 1966 and considered one of the foundational documents of Black Theology. When I saw his name I immediately thought of our fireside chat and began to comprehend how truly blessed I was that a church leader deeply involved in the incarnation of Black theology of liberation took the time to explain white privilege to an overconfident four-year-old with a box of crayons.

At divinity school I saw many of my peers learn they are white in their 20’s and begin to struggle with how whiteness and the legacy of white supremacy impacted the way they moved through the world. Through this I began to understand that Rev. Dr. Jacobs gave me a foundational understanding of race that many of my peers didn’t have. I feel as though many white children are never told they are white until their teen years or later because there is an idea that white children are too young to understand or be burdened with the race conversation. However, due to the violent oppressive white supremacy foundational to American democracy demands that Black and brown children have the talk and explain things such as “hands up, don’t shoot” at very young ages. Tamir Rice was only 12 yet there are 12-year-old white children who live in blissful ignorance of what whiteness is and how it impacts our world. In Mariah Carey’s autobiography The Meaning of Mariah Carey she talks about how as a 4-year-old she was publicly humiliated by teachers for using the wrong crayon in a family portrait because the teachers assumed her father had peach skin rather than brown as she had drawn it. Teachers weaponized crayons against her at the same age Rev. Dr. Jacobs used crayons to explain whiteness.

 During this past summer of racial reckoning several of my white female peers asked me questions about whiteness and what “doing the work” looks like. I believe that one of the most important things that parents of white children can do is explain to their children that they are white and what that means for how they move through the world. Lessons about dismantling white supremacy shouldn’t begin at 30 after grotesque police executions are caught on film, it should begin in childhood. White people have to start taking responsibility for how white children understand themselves in the world and how they can work to be anti-racist throughout their entire lives rather than waiting until they are “old enough” to talk about race. Not every white child will have the privilege of having an empathetic Black religious leader take the time to explain race to them after they are wholly incorrect at the dinner table, we have to start taking responsibility for ourselves.