swirlies

An interesting sort of situation.
What color do we call our kids?
Our oldest child is Latino. Latinos tend to be called brown, and he definitely has brown skin.
Our younger two children are African. In the U.S., those of African descent tend to be called black.
If you sit our three kids down together, they are very close in color with just a little variation in shade. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to call one of them brown and the other two black.

And what about mom and dad?
Should we really be white? Snow is white. Paper is white. I'm a peachy-pink hue.

I had this conversation with an African-American co-worker/friend of mine. He's a very cool guy whose preference in women is Caucasian, so his former wives have fallen into this category, which makes his children biracial. As we talked about color, he told me that he has always called his kids "swirl kids" or "swirl babies." He said, "Yeah, I used to always say, 'come here you swirlies.'" We talked about the differences experienced by his kids growing up and his own life in the '60s, and how we really didn't like narrowing everyone down to two colors, black and white.

And isn't that really the problem? Trying to shove people into little boxes?
I am a lot of things. My children are a lot of things. Seems unfair to define us with just a word or two.

Talking about color can be hard. It can be really hard talking about it with someone who's shade is different from your own, but it can be done and it should be done. My hope is that by doing so we move away from black and white to shades of browns and peaches. Lofty goal, I'm sure.