"Kin."
"A Black boy in the fourth grade said to me,
I'd like to be your son.
A white boy sitting near him responded,
You could never be her son.
Why not?
I asked.
Because he's Black.
But I'm Black too.
He looked at me, his eyes swimming
with pain and confusion.
It occurred to me that white children
might have a more difficult time forming a concept of kinship
to people of different colors than Black children.
Black children grow up in families
where there is every conceivable color, texture of hair,
thickness of feature.
In white families, there's much less variation.
I decided to test this.
I asked the children, How many in here
have people in their family that are all different colors?
Some people as light as I am, some people as dark as Sheldon?
All the Black kids raise their hands.
How many in here have people in their family
that are all just about the same color as you are?
All the white children raise their hands.
Schools with predominantly white children
want to teach the concept of the human family
by including pictures of Black people in the textbooks.
But if valuing the other, learning
we are all of the same blood, is not
a lesson one learns with the mind, but with the body.
The way we first learn love is by physical closeness.
I remember sleeping over my best friend
Amanda's when we were 10 or 11.
We kicked her older sister out of the bed
and talked far into the night.
Summer nights I remember most, we
would swing open the large door of the screened window.
Sometimes the moon would be out there
with its shattering white grin.
We would lie at the foot of the bed
in a puddle of brightness, her skin shown like silver as
if a kind of luminous breath poured out of her.
She would soon go to sleep, but I would stay awake
for hours, exuberant.
Already I had sensed the darkness beyond the window,
beyond the moonlight, and I was comforted.
I was not alone."