Getting my portrait painted and addressing the “Critical Race Theory” conversation head on
Magdalena, artistic child, age 10, was creating a portrait of a classmate. In the portrait, the friend’s skin was peach, like a skin colored crayon, the highlights were blue. I asked Magdalena if she’d paint a watercolor portrait of me and she said yes. She asked me if she could go through my closet and look for something different for me to wear.
“Um… but all you have to do is a painting of my face. Just like the painting you’re working on right now,” I told her.
“No. That won’t work for the painting of you.”
She went through my closet, picking and choosing and discarding several items of clothing that I actually like very much. We settled on a blouse, tan colored, with ducks and hearts. I know this sounds terrible but it’s actually pretty cute. She told me she’d take it from me if it didn’t fit me anymore.
After arranging my clothing, she arranged my hair, sighing frequently. Next, she tackled the lighting in the bedroom, moving a bedside lamp, a chair, playing with the overhead light and opening blinds. She arranged me in my seat and arranged the position of my head.
“Can I read while I wait?” I asked.
“No. It ruins the light and the position of your face,” she replied.
“Crap,” I said. “So. I just sit here?”
“Yes. Stop moving. Now look up. Take off your glasses,” Magdalena commanded. “This is my process. How do you want this painting? Picasso-style?”
“Sure. That sounds good.”
“I don’t know how to do Picasso-style.” She shrugs. “Your face is shaped weird. Why is your face so small? Your forehead is too small. This is going to be challenging. I guess your nose is normal though. Good thing some of your face is normal or this would take all day.”
“Then why did you offer Picasso-style?” I ask. She shrugs again. “So how did you do that painting of your friend?”
“Photo reference!” she declares.
“Can you just take a few photos of me and use those?” I ask, hopefully.
She’s started to grunt disapprovingly every time I move, even to scratch my nose.
“Mom. No. Do you want this done right or not at all? I’m going to have to custom mix colors for your lips. They’re… purplish. Hm.”
I manage to get ahold of my cell phone. I text my husband. Help me. He walks into the room, surveys the scene, laughs a little, walks away. Sometime later she tells me I can leave because her sketch is complete. I change my clothes back to the black t-shirt and jeans I’d been wearing. I feel relieved. She finishes her painting. It’s just my face, neck up, without even a peek of the blouse she told me to wear. I laugh.
This self-assured, light caramel colored child is one of the lights of my life. She is one of many reasons we can’t just roll our eyes at the sudden surge against teaching “critical race theory” in schools as “not a thing that happens” or with memes.
When she was 5, we were new to Virginia and she was starting kindergarten at a highly rated elementary school in Falls Church. Outgoing and VERY talkative from an early age, we were a little worried that her gregariousness would translate to disruptiveness in a classroom setting, but we were wrong. In class, during work times, she was attentive, caring, and eager to follow the rules. She loved school. Outside of school, she was a mile a minute, her words sometimes spilling out faster than her brain could process them. She’d tell anyone who would listen about that day at school and talk even when there was no one listening. One day, in her fountain of words, she said that a classmate, a little boy, told her that she was garbage, that Mexicans were garbage and that the Spanish language was garbage. And she told us that she’d responded that she was not garbage, that she was the color of caramel, and that caramel is delicious.
I took a deep breath and felt my heart crack. I don’t remember all of the conversation that followed but we surrounded her with love that day and then we called the teacher. The teacher, in her first year, was definitely not equipped to have this conversation. Follow ups at school went nowhere. We continued to reinforce her love of her caramel colored skin at home.
I will never forget that and neither has she. Which brings us to now. Is critical race theory a thing that’s taught in elementary schools? No. Of course not.
But here’s what the current dialogue has brought up for my talented, smart child:
There are people who don’t want us to talk about racism or being poor or being an immigrant, but for a lot of us, these are the things that affect us every day. People (kids, teachers, community members) comment on our clothes, our accents, our skin color and mispronounce our names. Sometimes they don’t mean to be offensive, and sometimes they do, but either way these things devalue us as human beings. When we say “LOL. That’s not a thing. The political right is so dumb,” our kids are hearing “we’re not going to say anything to fight back against the narrative that talking about race and class are inappropriate for a school setting EVEN THOUGH all of these things affect us every single day.”
I could lie to her, I guess. Shut our house down so that the news doesn’t permeate. But given that her first brush with racism happened in kindergarten, that seems blind and ineffective.
Like many light brown parents, I struggle to articulate the hard stuff sometimes. How are you addressing the current moment with your kids? Has the vocal anti-CRT dialogue come up in your home or at your local school board meetings? How will you talk about it if or when it does?
