Unicorn Pool

Start of the School Year

Today is a day that’s about unicorns. My five year old daughter’s twice rescheduled pool birthday party, to be exact. She’s also picked out a purple unicorn backpack for her first day of kindergarten, which is tomorrow. We had her orientation Friday.

All the feelings I have about my baby girl being in kindergarten notwithstanding, going to orientation really highlighted so much of the demographic shift in our community and society (and part of what’s roiling politics among the old people).

In an auditorium at this very good local public school, all but about six families or so were non-white. Mostly Asian, Indian, Hispanic. I sat in between an Asian mom anxious that her son might be bored since he already knows how to read (same as my daughter), and a Hispanic dad who didn’t say anything to us, but quietly wiped away a couple tears when our children lined up to go tour their classroom.

My daughter was concerned she’d be the shortest one in her class (she is) but she was not even thinking about being the only Asian student, or one of a handful, or otherwise having the kind of experience my husband had when he came to Quincy as a small Vietnamese immigrant child, part of the first wave, entering an almost entirely white school system where his ADHD was misdiagnosed as a language barrier, and he was simply held back a year in second grade.

Later I looked around at my garden and did nothing. With the new baby and new job and new school year, I’ve kind of given it up for lost this season. We are harvesting the last of the tomatoes (most of which have split due to inconsistent watering), and the first of the figs. Plus a few of the apples that have prematurely dropped, a little tart but still crisp and delicious. I’ve been desperately trying to give away pears to people, because all the ones left in the box will need to be cut and frozen by me tonight, if I am to stave off the growing fruit fly cloud amassing itself in my kitchen.

Yesterday I went to a Quincy Votes! meeting, where I brought some pears and the new baby, and we were talking about local preliminary elections and the main upcoming local elections (November 4th!). We have had Asian candidates running in a good number of them, and Asian-run political volunteer organizations are growing stronger even since I’ve been involved. Gearing up to eventually match the people with the politics.

My kids play at the school playground all the time when it’s open to the public. A diverse crowd and a largely caring environment. We have met a number of people there who have become friends and a lot more who could be.

I realize that as a white person who grew up in a majority-minority area (greater New Orleans) and now lives in one again, the change has been significant for me in that the culture here is entirely different, but I didn’t come with expectations that people around me need to look like me in order for it to feel like home.

In fact, when I’m in a space of only white people, I often feel a little awkward, wondering where everybody else is.

My only concern about my daughter being in a class of other brown children is that experience tells me that when a school is majority minority, and especially when it’s almost entirely minority, the old white people in charge of funding and properly staffing it will cease to care about doing so and direct money and positive attention elsewhere.

That white flight will lead to resource removal.

I hope that’s not the case, because what we have here is good. And it’s probably not a unicorn.

I bet there are schools all over this country that are having similar back-to-school days. Similar demographic changes. Similar kids happily wearing new backpacks with their favorite things on or in them. Similar bittersweet feelings among parents sending our little ones in for what we hope will be a good education, watching them grow up before our eyes.

But when people talk about the children being our future, I think they’re getting the timeline wrong. Children are our now. They are part of us already. And they will thrive or struggle in large part based on what we (the collective we and the parental we) give them. They will inherit what we leave behind.

That’s the part that makes me increasingly nervous.

I don’t want to have no answers for her when she says “the earth is sizzling, so how do we protect it?”

I don’t want to see her heart break when she realizes that there are a lot of people, too many in very prominent current positions, who think children who look like her and her classmates, or people who look like her classmates’ other parents, have inherently less value and deserve less respect.

I want her to feel like her life belongs to her just as much as she feels like this home and this school belong to her. I want her to feel like this country belongs to her. And that it recognizes her and the people around her as belonging too.

This isn’t a request for some kind of special treatment, but the political and social change needed for basic respect and consideration to be cool again.

I believe her and all her classmates need to be seen as deserving, worthy, and full of promise, because it is the right thing to do. I hope that we can do our part to deliver that.

Because what loving parent among us would not want their five year old daughter to have the apples and figs and friends and sense of safety and classroom full of books and birthday party full of unicorns that her heart desires?