LIFE LESSONS

COLOUR IS OVERRATED?

My son returned from his first day at University. Apparently the hour we spent outside the train station where I received a minute by minute breakdown of his day was not enough. Something was troubling him and as is usual, he chose a rather unique way to address it. And as is also always usual, I waited, rather than immediately probing.

"Mum, can I watch what you are watching?"

He'd appeared at my bedroom door several hours later. I was in the middle of an episode of 'The Affair' something I'd repeatedly tried to make him watch downstairs on their screen in the garage; for the sheer cleverness of the production. He'd declined every time. Yet here he now was.

I passed a couple of pillows over and he settled back. I watched but really I was waiting.

"Mum?"

"Yeah babe?" (I know, I know, I call my sons 'babe' and 'hon' and one day I'm going to have to stop. I know.)

"Here's the thing. You asked before who my lecturers were. I said they were good and all that right?"

"Yeah?" My brain was racing ahead but there were too many directions to anticipate.

"I wanted to say... they are all brown."

And so the bomb exploded. A few seconds of silence, as I gathered my scattered thoughts and honed in on the now very obvious direction.

The thing is, Dylan is the least caring of people when it comes to 'colour'. Before we moved down to the coast, he'd been at both a kindergarten and a Primary school where most of the students were a diverse mix of at least a dozen nationalities and yes, colours. His few 'best' friends as a youngster had been an adopted Korean kid, an Indian kid and a Nigerian kid who'd only been in the country a few months.

When we moved to the coast, the first thing he said after his first day at school there (he was around nine at the time) was: "Mum, there's something wrong. Everyone is white here."  I remember this, because it was our first real conversation about colour.

See, in his young mind, colour had not existed. Kids had been kids. He never noticed their skins. Only when removed from the multi-cultural environment to a predominantly white one (I say predominantly because there were a few Italian kids and some Greek ones too - more noticeable during the summer months as they tanned easily and never suffered from 'pink skin burn') did his brain pick up that something was different. He missed the colour see, and felt uneasy without it. Something was wrong in this new 'white' environment.

"Brown."

"Yeah. I don't know whether they are Indian or Pakistani or Sri Lankan... see, it got me thinking."

"Go on?" I could have stopped it here and spoken about the need to not discriminate blah blah. But I knew my kid and he never discriminated on any grounds. This was something different.

"No one cares if they are called white - okay, they use the PC word Caucasian - and you can call someone black without too much fuss these days right?"

"Ummm"

"If I say my professor is brown why is it racist?"

"Well, it is - I guess it is based on the fact that you have identified him or her by the colour of their skin."

"Yes, but why is this racist? I am not putting him down by saying it. I am just stating a fact. His skin is brown."

"I get it, but you're still labelling-"

"No hang in. I'm not doing that! I don't care about the colour of their skin, that's just it."

"You're losing me."