Our White Day

One of my stated goals as a parent of a mixed race family is to have my children in mixed race situations and environments 50% of the time.

Here's today.

Fridays exist as field trip day in our greater home school plan. We started out the morning at the Pacific Science Center.  Somehow the Science Center is dominated by white people (the staff is largely white and usually most of the families there are white).  In the sea of school groups that arrived shortly after we did (gack!), a few of the parent chaperones presented as people of color as did a small percentage of the children in the groups. Mostly we spent our morning in an ocean of white.

After lunch we headed to the local toy store.  It's called Retroactive Kids.  Bill and I were laughing about the name, because you gotta figure this is going to be a white owned, white dominated place.  Who else, besides white folks, looks back fondly at the early part of the century and longs to recreate what we had back then? Oh, and their store hours are 10-5:30, thus available (I'm guessing) primarily to stay-at-home moms - a hallmark of class privilege and value.  True to name, everyone in the store was white.  To give the store credit, they did carry non-white baby dolls and Playmobil figures.

Girl Scouts comes at 5pm with pretty much a 50/50 mix of girls of color and white girls. A 2 hour oasis in a day of white.

My score today: Rosie will spend 2 of her 12 waking hours in a mixed race environment (16%).  Theo will spend 12 of 12 hours in a white world.

I have a long ways to go.