Father of an Ethnically Ambiguous Child Encounters Prejudice

I’m unabashedly thankful that my daughter looks like a miniature version of my wife, who is empirically attractive and someone that few people would mind resembling. Unless you saw me holding my daughter or parenting her in some recognizable way, you wouldn’t automatically assume that she is my child. And that’s fine, really. Any disassociation that strangers have in their minds between myself and my daughter pales in comparison (no pun intended) to the disassociation that Shawn Taylor, a black man with tattoos, encounters with strangers when they see him with his “ethnically-ambiguous” toddler.

As Taylor writes in a moving article at the Daddy Dialectic, this dynamic “makes many people double, triple, quadruple take—and also, for some odd reason, loosens tongues, mostly of white folks, and creates an environment of familiarity. And yet they still manage to see me wrong: In my daughter’s 22 months of living, I have been labeled ‘uncle,’ ‘babysitter,’ ‘guardian,’ ‘cousin,’ but never father. I can’t tell you just how crushing a blow this is. I LOVE being a father and I think that I am becoming a better one by the day, but to have one of my greatest joys discounted is painful.”

Taylor asks,

Do we really live in a society that is still stuck in the lie that Black men cannot be fathers? Well … I must admit that I was on that same shit for a while. When my partner told me she was pregnant, I had fears that, at the moment of birth, a Greyhound ticket would appear in my hands and I’d leave my partner and new child to fend for themselves. I thought I’d become an absent father sleeper agent—the baby’s first cry would activate me and my mission would be to get as far away from mother and baby as possible.

And why does he think like that? Because of his own life story.

I never once had a friend or met anyone (of color) whose father lived with them, or in some cases, even knew who their fathers were. There is a generation of brothers and sisters born after Vietnam and before the release of Ghostbusters that are a tribe of fatherless children. My own father, I saw the bastard five times in my life.

Overcoming the assumption that a black man can’t possibly be the father of an “ethnically-ambiguous toddler” hasn’t been the biggest challenge of fatherhood, he writes. “When I think about it more, not being recognized or acknowledged as my daughter’s father, while painful, isn’t nearly as crazy as being a man-of-color at a park.”

He goes on to describe a confrontation between himself and a woman at the park, where both of them had taken their daughters. While the woman, who was white, was speaking on the phone, her child fell and hurt herself. The mother, not recognizing that Taylor had helped the little girl up, looked up and assumed that her daughter was crying because “this big nigger just pushed Miriam to the ground.”She’s told this over the phone to her husband, who wastes no time in speeding to the playground to confront Taylor.

The description of the ensuing confrontation in front of the children comes off as a bit heavy-handed. And yet the conclusion to Taylor’s column raises the hope that everyone—even senior citizens—can look beyond the surface of things to find connections between seemingly incongruous parts.