I have to tell you, writing this first post has been quite a challenge. I’ve been on a no sleep marathon thanks to the arrival of pearly whites in the mouth of our 8 month old. I’m suffering from post-partum brain fog - “honey, can you get me the thingamajiggy out of the whatsit?” I’m also awed by the many wonderful writers who make up the lesbianfamily.org team, and hope I can measure up! Unfortunately, every time I try to write something down, I can hardly finish a sentence without baby brain kicking in…

So I’ve decided to start with an introduction. I’m Kwynne, a 30 year old black queer and new mom to a (right now) very sleepy baby boy (sleep is for the weak, he seems to be telling me). I’m currently a stay at home parent, but I hope to get back to work very soon to make headway on that never ending PhD dissertation.

I used to blog at Butch Baby Makin’. I gave up that blog a few months ago, for many reasons. The blog was mainly a space to document my TTC and pregnancy story as it coupled with my gender identity as butch. The baby was then “made”, he arrived and then suddenly? Well, I really couldn’t keep up with all the swirling topics in my head (let alone the very real gender flux I have been thrown into – more on that in another post).

So here is something that has been on my mind..

Are lesbians families thinking about race and racism and how these issues affect our families? Are we, by nature of having experienced at least one form of marginality, developing anti-oppression parenting philosophies? What do they look like?

This question of course comes from my experience as a black queer partnered to a white woman, suddenly thrust into mainstream motherhood and finding that my allies are few and far between. I am awed every day at the number of asinine questions I’ve received about our child, and the lengths some have gone to figure out his racial origins. “What he is mixed with?” has been one of the more popular questions, and many ask me if his “dad” is white? South Asian? Latino? Light skinned black? My partner has been asked if her husband is foreign, placing this non existent “father” quite squarely outside of the nation.

Personally, I’m beside myself with the cake batter race theories* and often find myself tongue tied when I try to answer. I have to admit, I wasn’t necessarily prepared to deal with the questioning of my son’s racial history so outrightly. Maybe I’m one of the few who don’t see race as being so easily inscribed and I wish I could avoid these questions entirely and wait for the day my child can make his own decisions about his racial identity. As someone who has lived in this brown skin for 30 years, I have never really been asked these invasive questions. It seems that my racialized drag is quite obvious to others. I’m wondering where the skin colour line is drawn, and when one no longer becomes racially intelligible.

When folks find out I’m also queer, another line of (offensive, oppressive) questioning gets heaped onto me, and I’m at a loss. What do all these academic texts call it? Oh yes, intersectionality! I’m at the crossroads of homophobia and racism, and am not quite sure how to get through it.

So, what have been your experiences? I wonder about others working through these situations, as lesbians/queers who are parenting/will be parenting/hope to parent kids of colour. And even though most of the folks I’ve met in the lesbian parenting blog world have been white, I wonder what thoughts you have had about this topic (if your family does not include folks of colour). What kind of anti-oppression politic are you creating within your family?

Thank you again to Liza for asking me to join this wonderful team. I hope that my brain fog can lift more often and to become a much more active participant!

*My partner and I have come to use the term, “cake batter race theories” to describe our society’s tendency to see race as a biological truth, rather than a social creation – an emphasis on skin colour, facial features and hair texture, among other things, as a way of categorizing people. For many, race is so literally what is on the skin, that we (and I include myself here, as I’ve been guilty of it as well,) believe that we can predict the shade (and therefore race) of our children as easily as it would be to mix cake batters of different colours/flavours. Let’s put it another way. A lot of people think you mix ‘A’ + ‘B’ = a predictable little ‘C’ when really there are eight bazillion possible outcomes. People then look at ‘mixed’ race children and try to determine the ‘race’ of their parents, assuming that each parent is a ‘pure’ A or B. Of course we have to question the very idea of ‘race’ itself but perhaps that too is a question for another post.