If I'm honest, I know why. It's because I know they're not black. I am but they're not. They're biracial.

Like most kids, mine love to 'give me five' to signal any sort of triumph. Last night, I realized that I'd stifled a reflexive impulse to teach them part of the high-five -- 'on the black hand side.' Back in the militant '60s and early '70s when I was a kid, black men would often slap each other five, then flip their hands over and do it again on 'the black hand side' or 'the black man's side.' Now it's rarely done and only then as kitsch, but what explains my hesitance, my refusal, to initiate my children into the club when this relic of my identity formation naturally surfaced? As I thought about that, all at once it hit me that I never 'talk black' with my kids either. None of the 'used ta coulds' and 'mighta woulds' and 'he be's' that I slip into so comfortably with my Miss'ippi mama and relatives back home. Without realizing it, I had made Chez Debra Ebonics-free when the kids were in earshot, even though my bilingualism has been the key to my mainstream success. So why wasn't I teaching them to be bilingual? Why was I refusing them their ghetto pass?

If I'm honest, I know why. It's because I know they're not black. I am but they're not. They're biracial.

I lived blackness. All they can do is study and perform blackness. My parents were Mississippi sharecroppers who became part of the Great Migration north. My great-grandfather, who lived well past 100 and was still kicking when I was a child, had been born a slave. His son, my grandfather, got a 'Klan escort' out of Mississippi. I saw 'Whites only' signs when we went visiting down south and remembered white cops coming to my A'int Mazelle's to 'urge' her to teach her kin from up north in St. Louis 'how to behave.' Clueless, I hadn't yielded my place in line to whites at the country store. At my own home in Missouri I knew not to enter South St. Louis after dark, and I grew up sharing my World War II combat veteran father's bitterness at the racism of the Marine Corps. Segregation made black culture pervasive in our lives; the same oppression that so limited our options gave us all a common frame of reference. My kids can only study that in books.

'I never make them the soul food I grew up eating -- it's so unhealthy, however heavenly. Besides, I only know how to make cornbread and cabbage for eight. I live far, far from my relatives; my kids have spent far more time with their relatives on their father's side because travel is foreign, and too expensive, for my working-class family. I lasted only a few Sundays taking my kids to a black Southern Baptist church like the one I attended growing up because I couldn't, in good conscience, give my implicit stamp of approval to all that drove me away in the first place. We belong to a Unitarian church now, though I deeply miss gospel music. Had the kids and I stayed in D.C. things might be different, but now that we live in upstate New York, we encounter very few black people and even fewer who are not mainstream professionals, with all the requisite class implications that follow (affluent, private-school educated, i.e., not very culturally black).

I can't bring myself to turn my kids into cultural tourists of their mother's people by, for example, sending them to black church camps during the summer, like some of my bougie black friends have done. Blacks are not exotic creatures to be visited on brief safaris. How could I ever make my daughter understand why I wept through 'The Colour Purple' on Broadway a few weeks ago? Truth be told, I don't even want her to understand how cathartic that was for someone born a poor and very black woman. I don't want to force experiences on my son and daughter just to make them feel black. And that's not because they look white. It's because they're half-white, features be damned.

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