A Little Color Wouldn’t Hurt

It’s a strange feeling to stand in front of the mirror and think, hmmmm: skin color white, father is around most of the time, grandmother is neither strict nor overly-principled, just affectionate, and you’ve never gone to school in Indonesia or Hawaii. All that would be the right combination. For what? Well, to be something great in the United States. President, for example.

I note that those of us who were always satisfied with our skin are now looking around and thinking that maybe a little more color wouldn’t hurt. Not that anyone would say it out loud, for goodness sake. But there’s a new color-consciousness going around these days here in the land of the first half-white President. Or, to put it another way, Obama is black and we whites were the only ones at his inauguration who weren’t, so we couldn’t celebrate as heartily as the African-Americans could.

In Washington lately, it seems everyone giving out invitations wants to celebrate birthdays AND diversity. Until recently, nothing was amiss when we whites wanted to grill out, make punch, cook dinner or have a few drinks with others. Now, color nuances are popping up at parties. The discrete search for black guests, brown guests, guests of some other color, ANY other color, has begun. It goes something like this: “Oh, I recently met the Williamsons who live down on the corner and thought I’d invite them over. Their child goes to the same school as ours.” Then it turns out that the Williamsons have been living down on the corner for years, they’re not particularly amusing, but they ARE somehow black and therefore dark enough to celebrate the new era with.

Since word got around that I have a black colleague who fulfills all the necessary criteria, I’ve been getting invitations that go “Sure be nice if you could come . . . and by the way, do you think your friend would like to come? She works at your exciting publishing house too, doesn’t she?” Never mind that this exciting publishing house deals mainly in compiling congressional speeches. I later find that out my colleague who, despite her impoverished background and absentee father, and who managed to pull herself up by her own bootstraps and make a successful career for herself has been getting invitations for years that didn’t include me.

OK, I figure I’m just run-of-the-mill white and resign myself to drinking my wine alone at home on Saturday night. While channel surfing, I happen to catch a reflective Larry King (the guy with the colorful suspenders) telling an aging Bob Woodward (of Watergate scandal fame) that his 8-year old son, who happens to be white, now says he wants to be black. And Woodward says his teenage daughter wants to become a social worker just like Obama did after he left the renowned university to work with problem kids on the streets. I assumed that Obama would bring change to the nation, but I never suspected it would reach into kids’ bedrooms.

Just recently, another acquaintance (white) called me to report that her seven-year old son now has a completely different outlook on life since Obama became President. Wow – what now? Does he want to be black, too? Oh, no. Christopher has a different identity problem, namely that he doesn’t have a daddy. Daddy took off shortly after Christopher was born and he’s spent his entire life asking his mom why all the other kids in his class had dads but he didn’t. Now that Christopher heard the President didn’t have a daddy either, he’s been healed. My friend cheerfully reported that Christopher is a changed kid, much more confident. It’s cool. He now thinks that he can also become President because he doesn’t have a daddy, either.

Aha! I think. Does that mean that German kids raised in single-parent families since Gerhard Schroeder’s day will want to become Chancellor? If that’s the case, I can only advise them from far-away Washington to start making German-Turkish, African-German and every other combination of friends, otherwise they might end up sitting home alone on Saturday night, too.