“Samantha will be the father, Ally will be the daughter and I will be the mother,” Kayla said as she allotted the playground roles at daycare.
“What will Celine be?” Samantha asked.
“She can’t play with us because she has slanty eyes.” Kayla was the leader, and Kayla had decided: I would not play house with them because my eyes did not match theirs. I did not look like them so I could not be part of their family.
While the three little girls ran around, I sat by myself and watched as their blonde hair so effortlessly glistened in the sun. I spent that playtime picking the paint off of the table where I sat, and little chips became large chunks revealing a rich brown wood underneath the once thick layer of paint. The dirty, turquoise benches became my friends that day, and when I returned to the classroom for homework time, I sat by myself and quietly waited for my mother to pick me up from school.
I was 7 years old, and for the first time in my life, I realized that I was different. Unlike their sandy blonde hair, blue-green eyes and fair skin, my hair was thick and brown, my dark eyes were the shape of almonds and my skin held a golden-yellow hue that greatly contrasted with theirs. I recall that day with such vivid clarity because it was the day that the reality of race hit me at full force. Although I was only a child, I knew that something was wrong, and because I was a child, I thought that something that was wrong was me. My limited understanding of race made me believe that I was ugly because I was not white.
I grew to feel embarrassed and eventually to hate the shape of my eyes more and more as I became older. I remember being 10 years old and looking in the closet door mirrors of my childhood room and crying because of my uneven eyelids. I had never noticed them before, but a classmate of mine had pointed them out one day when I removed my glasses to clean them. He commented that one eyelid hung lower than the other and said, “One eye looks Asian and the other looks super Asian.” Basically, my classmate commented on my monolid, or the lack of an eyelid fold that is common among some groups of Asians.
I reflect on such comments and many more from my childhood, and I often wonder if they were the result of racist attitudes in familial settings that children were just imitating, or the socialization of the Eurocentric standard of beauty as ideal. Perhaps the comments were made as a result of both, and perhaps had I known then what I know now, I would have loved myself a little bit more when I was growing up. What matters now is the awareness that ignorant comments such as these that emerge from the mouths of oblivious children can create long-lasting scars that take many, many years to heal, and more importantly, that the reality of racism for children of color begins at a very young age.
