A child learns blackness is wrong through familial response

Evidence

The anonymous narrator forcefully implores, “Mother, mother, tell me, am I a nigger?” (Weldon Johnson, 1995:8). Posing this question as a nine-year-old, the little boy realizes that blackness is “wrong.” As the brown-skinned mother tearfully replies, “No, my darling, you are not a nigger,” she recognizes her son’s pain and attempts to disengage him from an injurious meaning of blackness. Calling him “my darling” - not “my baby,” or “my child” - she underscores an endearment that does not infantilize her son. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2475

Categorization

• XREF: The child’s ‘am I a nigger?’ and the mother’s protective refusal connect to Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and to the narrator’s own childhood taunts in Invisible Man.