I had a different blog post for this week but shit happened. There are things that can’t be ignored. Still, I am very far away from the terrifying events going on in my home country and I don’t have much that is new to say.

I’ve already written about white privelege and coming to understand the underlying structural racism I didn’t used to know existed. I’ve already written about my path out of ignorance. And a lot of people are writing those things now, as they should.

And really, do we need more white people yammering on about our feelings or opinions about black people being murdered in a structurally racist society in which we are all complicit, whether we want to be or not? On the other hand, silence doesn’t work. White people just carrying on as usual won’t help, even from ten-thousand miles away.

So, I’ll let my kids, who aren’t black but also aren’t white, have a go, in so far as they can.

My kids don’t watch the news much. I have tried to introduce them to the issues of the day, but usually they refuse. We live in Central Europe, far from the current tensions in the United States. They both have significant learning disabilities and although they are nine and eleven, they don’t follow current events. I fear that they are particularly unprepared for the harsh realities of adult racism.

Even so, somehow the events in America filtered through into their media world of YouTube slapstick humor, video games and Likee clips. Today during an increasingly rare quiet time before bed, my daughter asks, “Mama, why are they killing black people?”

I’m careful with my answer. She has been very negative about her own background and appearance lately. Frankly, I’m wary of painting too negative a picture of the racism situation—not because I think it is anything but catastrophic, not because I don’t think kids should be educated about it—but because my first concern must be for the child right in front of me, her shaky self-concept and her propensity to interpret racism against people of color as another reason to hate her own body.

“A lot of people are prejudiced or don’t like people who look different from them,” I say, turning toward both kids. This is not the first time we’ve had this conversation by a long shot.

“I told you it’s better to be blonde,” my daughter puts in. “I wish I was white and blonde. I wish my hair was straight.” And it definitely isn’t the first time she’s made those statements, but it is telling that white police shooting black people in her mother’s far away home country sets this off..

She is obsessed with ultra-blonde YouTube celebrity kids and constantly talks about wanting to bleach her dark brown hair.

“You are beautiful, honey.” I tell her and add quite truthfully, “and people in America are going to think you should be a model.”

COVID-era Black Lives Matter demonstration in Madison, Wisconsin. Signs read “I can’t breathe,” “The Divided States of America” and “Is this the American dream?” - Creative Commons image by Ken Fager

“Shhhh!” she hisses, ducking her head in the bedroom, as if someone might overhear. “Stop it, Mom! Don’t say anything about it. I don’t want anyone to know.”

In recent weeks, her fear that someone might realize she isn’t just golden brown in color but specifically Romani has become extreme. She shushes me in panicked whispers if I mention anything about her birth culture, even in private. That’s why I don’t use her first or last name or ever speak or write about any of this in the local language, even though a great many people in town do already know.

It hurts my heart, even if I know this is a common phase adopted kids go through. We did all the things you are “supposed to do.” We got her lots of expensive, high quality dolls that look like her and other racially diverse dolls. We organized as many POC friends as possible. We went to culture camps. We paid a tutor to teach us all Romani language.

It has been a massive effort and it helped a little in the early years. In preschool, there were times when she would joyfully tell the others she is Roma, which is one way most of her classmates’ parents found out. But now she has absorbed the “norm” and is focused on what is “popular” in all things.

Being blonde is apparently popular. Being beautifully golden brown with voluptuous dark brown curls and mesmerizing blue eyes with long dark lashes is not. Or so she thinks.

“But why are they shooting so many people?” my son breaks in. He is almost entirely silent on these issues, so I allow his question to turn the conversation.

I explain that some police officers are good and very careful not to hurt anyone but some are not. Some police officers are afraid, but also some like the power of being able to control people and being the one with a gun. I explain that some white police officers think black people are bad or mostly all criminals and so lots of times they shoot immediately when they see a black person, just in case it might be a bad guy. And lots of times it isn’t and some nice person gets killed.

“Will the police try to shoot me when we go to America?” my daughter asks. My son, the one most likely to be in real danger, does not ask. I am not sure what I would say right now, if he did ask point blank. Someday we’ll have to really go into detail on this, but he’s so fragile right now.

“We are going to grandma’s house and that isn’t in the city. It isn’t dangerous there. And even in the city, most police officers are good…” My throat is closing up.

How do black, Hispanic or even Romani mothers do this? Damn it.

“The police won’t shoot you. You don’t have to be afraid of them. If you are lost, you can ask them for help.” What mother doesn’t need to tell her children that? I have told them that before and it still applies. “Most police officers are good and will protect you. But it is important to do what they tell you. If they tell you to stop when you’re walking, you have to stop right away.”

“What if they are telling someone else to stop, not me?” my daughter asks.

I understand what she means. What if she isn’t entirely sure? What if she thought they were talking to someone else? This is what fear does.

“You had better stop, if they say stop, even if you don’t think they are talking to you. You had better be polite and not touch them. You have to tell the truth and use polite words,” I continue, searching for the way through this morass. “If they tell you to go away from some place, where they are trying to get bad guys, then you have to do it quickly and politely.”

I know, of course, that isn’t enough. But I’ve seen enough videos of ultra-polite black kids dealing with police, that I know their mamas must have taught them this part. You have to be polite and positive about the police, but also careful and obedient. I don’t live in a place with other people of color, mentors for my kids. I don’t have anyone to tell me what else to say or what to teach my kids.

“I’ll bet if we were black you wouldn’t let us go to America,” my daughter adds before I can finish.

“Not exactly,” I tell her. “I would be very careful though. I would make sure you didn’t play with toy guns, if we were in a city.”

“Can I have a nerf gun in America?” my son speaks up again, timidly but clearly focused on his own priorities.

Once I might have said a nerf gun is so clearly not a weapon that there couldn’t possibly be a problem. But as he gets older and his face looks more and more like a young man—a young man with darker skin than my daughter’s, dark eyes and dimpled cheeks that tan to a deep brown in summer—fear rises up in me, the kind of fear that wasn’t made for white mothers.

“In the city, no, you can’t have any kind of toy gun,” I tell them. “But at grandma’s house you can have nerf guns.”

Grandma’s house is five miles from the nearest tiny town of 250 people in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon. The kids’ uncles think I restrict toy guns because I’m a peacenik and that might have actually been true when they were toddlers and I just couldn’t bear the sight of two- and three-year-olds pretending at carnage. But today, I’m a lot more cynical as a parent. My idealistic, peacenik side has been pretty well pulverized, but then there is this part. I may have to have words with the uncles, who mean well but might not think their gifts to my kids through.

“What about in La Grande,” my daughter is quick to bargain with me. La Grande is the nearby metropolis of 12,000. And it is full of little boys with toy guns and slightly bigger boys with real guns, but all of them white and at risk mainly of accidentally shooting themselves or their friends, parents and siblings. It is the kind of place that is supposed to be ultra safe. I wandered all over it as a kid and the police, such as they are,, are pretty friendly.

But today… I do wonder. It is also as white as a new journal book on January 1 and there are all those guns in the hands of people who aren’t police, people who have been steeped in this culture and who have been watching the same news I have.

“We’ll see,” I tell the kids. “Maybe nerf guns, maybe. But nothing that looks anything like a real gun.”

This is all happily theoretical to us for right at the moment. Thanks to COVID-19 our summer trip to the US may well be postponed. The Czech Republic, where we live now, has its own race problems but not very many guns and very strictly reigned in police forces.

Just last weekend, we went to see the Romani cultural museum. It is a three-hour drive from home, so it isn’t a trip we can do often. It also isn’t particularly child-friendly. The vast majority of the exhibits are not interactive. But it does represent one of the best collections of Romani cultural pride and identity anywhere in the world.

We had a lovely guide—an older Rom, who took us under his wing and delivered his memorized speech interspersed with interesting personal asides. At one point, he murmured discretely to me, “Those children are Roma, aren’t they?” I confirmed it. If his Rom-dar is that good, he deserves the truth.

The kids stopped by one of the few interactive displays, a tablet which would read out the Romani words for the numbers along with the Hindi words, to show how Romanes and Hindi are related. The kids were mildly interested, and the guide asked, eagerly, “You know Romani language?”

The kids looked sideways at him and squirmed away, refusing to answer.

My daughter had protested coming to the museum at all. My son had been silent, uncertain what to think. Then on the way there, walking through a part of town with more Roma than usual, they asked an adult friend with us why there are so many Roma in one place. Before I could say anything, the friend answered, “Because the Roma were so noisy at night that all the white people left.”

I told myself to just ignore it. This was not the time to start a fight. But the images from the US news flooded into my brain. The buzzing noise and flashing lights in my peripheral vision rose up so fast that I didn’t know what was happening, until I whirled around and demanded, “That’s a lie and you know it! Do not lie to children! Tell them the truth!”

This adult friend’s children were present as well. I didn’t want him spreading twisted stereotypes in front of my kids or his own kids..

Of course, it didn’t help. Maybe I should have tried to explain the nuances. There were lots of other reasons for ghettoization. And if any of it was because of cultural differences, it was just a cultural difference. In actual fact, white households here generate at least as many decibels, if not more, because of the almost ubiquitous keeping of very loud and poorly behaved dogs among the white population. But the stereotype remains.

A stereo played inside one apartment we passed and Romani kids sat on the steps. The music was muffled and gentle but audible on the street, a grievous sin to the local white culture. As we passed, a Romani girl in another doorway read out a phone number off of her phone’s screen to someone leaning out of a nearby window.

My kids and the white and Asian kids with us stared. This too is not “normal” in the socially repressed local white culture.

I could have tried to explain, but the kids would not have heard any of it. Their attention spans are lightening quick and the fact that they were paying attention to such a topic at all when my adult friend spoke was rare and certain to be brief.

The same goes for my daughter’s question about the news from America. It was a fleeting opportunity to address the complex issues or to try to support their faltering self-respect.

My son has gone silent on the topic of Romani background since he was bullied several times with racist epithets last year. I tell him how beautiful and amazing and strong Roma people are, how courageous and steadfast they had to be to survive everything they came through. He doesn’t answer. He says nothing, just turns away and presses his back into the pocket between my body and my arm for comfort.

Adults can’t make sense of the events of these past weeks. How in the world can we expect children to?

My heart is broken. I am angry and afraid. I would be afraid of rioters if I was there and yet I don’t blame them. Quiet protest is ignored or silenced. The killing must stop and if you and your family are next in line, you’ll grasp at whatever you can—even if it makes no sense, even if it might make things worse. I don’t blame them.

It has gone so far beyond “too far.” Negligently racist killing is intolerable. Denial of racism is intolerable. Fraudulent justice is intolerable.

I can’t breathe. I really can’t get a deep, full breath of clean air. And I’m not even in the line of fire.