Aibu to think my child is called a boy because of her race

[OnlyFoolsnMothers]

This may be petty to a few but this is really starting to get to me. I have mixed race daughters- and a mixed race niece- all of them have continually been mistaken for boys in their early years. It’s got to me more today as a woman approached me in a playgroup and apologised for calling my two year old a boy and said it was down to her clothes- light blue jeans and a cardigan with birds on it.
I don’t put her in dresses daily because we’re often in a park or soft play, but joggers and a T-shirt with a bunny or bird on it is pretty standard. I also see plenty of girls in leggings and jeans etc.

I’m now starting to think it’s unconscious racism- and it’s predominantly down to hair.
White/ Asian girls hair grows downwards. Black girls I know of have twists and plaits that are deemed “girly” hairstyles.

My daughters hair is in an Afro- it’s combed and oiled daily and well cared for but I don’t routinely plait it because it won’t hold.
My niece was always called a boy, and when her hair was corn rowed was called a boy.
Apparently if you don’t subscribe to the Caucasian aesthetic that makes you masculine.
Aibu?

I'm Caucasian and had short hair when I was a young kid. I was always being called a boy if I was in trousers or shorts.

I got a strangers kid wrong around age 3 - he was a boy with long blonde hair! They don't really look very obviously male or female that young so it's all clues based on clothes and hair usually. I don't think it's racism just difficult!

Says a white mother of white kids 🙄

As the mother of blonde(ish) white boys, one of whom still gets mistaken for a girl at nearly 12 because of his ringlets halfway down his back, I came on to say I've read through your posts OP and you - and other posters you've responded to or highlighted - have really opened my eyes.

I started reading thinking you must be wrong, largely because of my aforementioned experience (or so I thought), but I now think you're absolutely right about that pretty much unconscious association of Caucasian hair (in particular blonde) that grows downwards with being 'pretty' or feminine.

It was the poster referring to her son's 'angelic blonde' locks who unintentionally drove it home the most.

I guess it's such an embedded cultural racism that it's hard (and painful) for people to look into themselves deeply enough to acknowledge it. But FWIW you've made this middle-aged white woman think about her own privilege and prejudices.

Again, whilst racism could be at the bottom of older (7 plus) misgendering, studies have shown that people are less accurate in differentiation outside of their own race, so you'd expect them to get it wrong more. Not racism, it's just evolution is slow and people generally only regularly saw people of similar origins around them till very recently.

And you are discounting the white people who said they were misgendered right up to their teens.

Fact is puberty is the force that removes all doubt. Not hair length, bows or colours. This is just something modern humans have added in because gender stereotypes are given breathing space and importance.

Which is interesting, because even in more supposedly sexist times boys and girls were both dressed in dresses and had long hair(see Tudor portraiture)

I believe this was because Tudor children were basically seen as lavae until they reached a certain age. Once that age was reached(no doubt when they'd more likely cleared infant mortality) did they start with the gender stereotyping.

Stereotyping starts from birth these days and you only have to look around at teens of today that it does massive harm to a significant amount of children. It limits the skills they gain, dents their self.esteem and even confuses them about their actual biology.

Which is why people should quit getting upset about people misgendering children who are largely too similar looking to make hard and fast rules.

Is it getting upset, or is it noticing?

I see what the OP is driving at and other posters have, as others have said, reinforced this with their trills that it’s soooo silly and their angelic blonde boy was always mistaken for a girl.

I mean - if we have this fixed idea that beauty and femininity is long and blonde - and having read this thread I don’t see how anyone can dispute this - then that’s a problem for black girls, isn’t it?

And again, I'm sure there may be some racial factor to later angel imagery, but I imagine those evolutionary and social factors that predate mass racial mixing probably factor more in pre enlightenment imagery.

Those are the images people are imagining when they say 'angelic curls', pre Raphaelite etc.

Now when I was at school, the blonde girls were cast as fairies/angels in one school play and the two black girls as trolls. That actually was racism, because the casting teacher made the active choice to assert blonde=angels black=evil.

Thankfully, that has largely disappeared and in recent years have noticed 'angel' casting has largely been done on practical reasons like preference, lines given etc. The angels are a mix now. Hurrah.

But that doesn't mean you can easily erase people's archetypal ideas of angels which are built on thousands of years of images and text. These things take time to change, as they took time to evolve.

You’ve read the thread but hey, fingers over eyes, not happening here is it?

Oh YOU said that, YOU must be racist. I’m not. I’m definitely not. It’s here and it’s in front of me but I don’t see it so I can’t be racist. You do, so you are.

That doesn’t work as an argument, @MuraRocker .

Its here. Pretending you can’t see it really doesn’t make you gloriously liberal.

Maybe their ideas of angels are based on visions? That would be awkward.

if we have this fixed idea that beauty and femininity is long and blonde - and having read this thread I don’t see how anyone can dispute this - then that’s a problem for black girls, isn’t it?

And it’s also a problem for anyone who isn’t long and blonde… including but not limited to Asian girls (both south and East Asian), Hispanic, any Caucasian who isn’t blonde and doesn’t have long hair, and many others.

I don’t see how the same problem is bigger for one group of people than another. You can claim white privelege and unconscious racism all you like but it doesn’t make it true.

You can find racism in everything, if that's what you're looking for.

And that is racist.

I don’t see how the same problem is bigger for one group of people than another well because on the whole your white daughters short hair will grow longer downwards, an Afro will always be an Afro.

There's a kid at my daughters nursery we weren't sure and actually thought maybe a girl at first - he is mixed race, his curly hair is long enough to tie in a ponytail. So I think it must all be in the hair! Just thought you'd like a story about a mixed race boy being mistaken for a girl to even the odds :p

You can (and most certainly do) express all the opinion you want. Perhaps though, you are not best placed to judge if what a black child is experiencing is due to their race. Perhaps, you would be cognisant of the fact that what you and YOUR children are experiencing is different to what the OP is experiencing. And to recognise that for what it is, white privilege.

As (predominantly) women on here I’d much rather we all accepted that the big problem here is latent (but blatant) sexism, not racism and white privelege, since the problem quite clearly happens to everyone.

@Lndnmummy I’m really sorry but neither you nor the OP have been able to help us understand HOW it is different.

But the preference for blonde and red hair is firstly evolutionary and has hence been a problem for white brunettes way before racism was a larger factor.

In England it's largely because of the Tudor dynasty using art propoganda and text to assert the idea that their pale skin and hair made them superior.

And the families they descended from interbred across Europe predating this era so the idea that powerful god like figures were pale has been entrenched for a long time.

I'm pretty sure (although my knowledge of the texts is not particularly well remembered) that blonde hair is mentioned as being possessed by god's and nymphs in Roman and Greek texts. Which again suggests more evolutionary reasons rather than racism (seeing as the romans were generally darker than the Celts, whom they considered barbaric and were not the ruling class) Roman women dyed their hair blonde and red, so there must be something more to it other than racism because if they wanted to highlight difference between them and those they considered below them, they'd emphasise dark hair.

I just don't think you can just deem something racist when there are so many evolutionary, social and historical factors to consider. Again, that doesn't mean it can't play a part, I'm sure in some cases it does. It's just that a broadbrush assertion of racism is unhelpful and makes actual racism easier to dismiss.

I’m sorry but this is a majority white country, that’s what people are exposed to mainly and are used to .. because it’s a white country. People don’t naturally know the nuances of people different to them. That doesn’t make them racist, that makes them human. Are you telling me you could go to South Korea or some other Asian country and know the nuances between their phenotypes? Probably not! Would you like to be called racist because of it? Probably not! How about we stop throwing the label around of racist whenever there is something difficult about interaction with others of a different race? As a mixed race woman myself, it wouldn’t have helped me to have my parents make me super conscious of being different and paranoid people are being racist towards me!

I believe I really have. Or at least I have tried very hard.

The problem is that people look at a tiny, tiny part of what it means to be a black girl in Britain and huffily declare it isn’t a problem because it happened to them too.

We know. White girls are mistaken for boys. White men are stopped by the police.

It does make me realise that I think for a lot of people who are not of British heritage the line of acceptance is actually quite thin and any mention of any sort of - conscious or otherwise - prejudice or racism or even ignorance - has people getting quite cross and quite annoyed about it.

Why is that?

I think it’s because we know it is there and for many of us if we look deep we see it within us. Do I see that my traditional ideas of beauty are Caucasian? Yes, I think they probably are. That hasn’t happened intentionally, and I don’t think that it means I look at black women and think they are not attractive but if we consider women like Beyoncé, they are very light skinned with straightened hair and so on.

Examining these sort of attitudes is surely a start but we can’t do that if we just keep insisting they don’t exist.

Sexism is generally a much more tolerated term by white women than racism and white privilege...