A WOMAN I know, whom I will refer to as “Mrs. C.�? is raising two African-American daughters.1 Mrs. C. is their biological mother and she is white. Their biological father is a man from Kenya, from whom Mrs. C separated when the children were young. Recently Mrs. C. told me that her daughters, now both in college, have become somewhat critical of her for not providing them with a stronger sense of their identity as African Americans. She had always identified her children as part Kenyan and part American, and she has attempted to raise them as she would have raised children of any skin pigment. That is, Mrs. C. seems to have chosen to be color-blind in matters pertaining to her daughters as a way of resisting a society that is not. Yet, this maternal strategy of blindness to “race�? and “color�?—a strategy that may have even seemed morally necessary to Mrs. C.—has not, from her children's perspectives, enabled them to negotiate successfully the racial system in the U.S.
