People always ask me what Danish people are like and a few years ago, while I was caught up with my own issues of unhappiness and sorrow, I probably would have answered with a shake of my head and say, “Well, they’re Danish.” I knew I was generalizing, and hated doing so, but it was easy to do and as far as I could tell, I wasn’t hurting anyone—or so I thought.
When my son and I returned from New York City this summer, he said a few things to me that made me think. First of all, you have to understand, when we stayed in New York, we stayed at Marie’s on 154th Street—a beautiful brownstone full of books, amazing artwork and people. At Marie’s, Kai met play directors, writers, painters, editors, agents, sales directors, actors—all of whom just happened to be Black. And he loved it. He loved it, I suppose, because he got to see others who looked like his mother and who, from what he could tell, valued his mother highly. What child doesn’t like to see that, especially when he’s gotten to see some unsavory sides of me here as an immigrant in another a country—a mother’s spirit who seems broken from the inability to feel connected to a culture so obviously outside of her own. He’s used to seeing his mother being the different one, which in itself is not a bad thing, I’m just saying. Take for example this story one of his kindergarten teachers told me. I had bumped into her in a bar and she said, “Are you Kai’s mother? Well, I have the funniest story to tell you!” And she continued, “Kai and I were sitting by the lake and he sat on my lap. He pointed out to the water and asked, “Hva’ det?” (What’s that?) “It’s a swan!” She answered, to which he responded, “Hva’ det?” yet again, but this time he pointed to the little cygnets. “Oh, those are her babies.” Kai looked at her very confused, “But why are they brown?”
“Oh, they are brown, but when they grow up—”
“You mean, when I grow up, I’ll turn white too?”
It’s not easy for a child to grasp being a minority if the security measures and positive reinforcements are not in place. One of the things I learned so profoundly about race is how our children learn to think about it. So when my child returns with me from New York and says, “Mommy, white people are not as smart as Black people, are they?” I’m flabbergasted. I wonder where he received this tacit message? “Why do you ask me that?”
“Well, I can see it in the way they all act. It not so nice how white people have treated Black people, you know, with the slaves. You can not be so smart to treat other people like that.” While there was one part of me, the emotional, irrational, fed-up part that wanted to be like, “Yeah!” I had to admit to myself that I could not send the message to my son that it was ok to conclude that certain groups of people were different from other groups. I’m a tree-hugging hippie and in the end, I will die saying it, human beings are human beings. It may be hard for me to stand by that sometimes, but in the end, it is my credo, the words that allow me to carry my head up high and look every one in the eyes. I’m not saying there are not days when I feel like putting both hands up in the air and declare, well, fill in the blanks.
Now I also realize that my son has access to a world that I do not. When he is not with me, he is with Danes, for the most part. He gets to do that Eddie Murphy thing—you know, discover the world as a white guy. So I’m thinking that maybe my son is hip to some things that I will never be privy to. But who knows? This is all speculation and not based on any real, solid experiences. So when people ask me what Danish people are like, this is how I’ll respond from now on:
