OH the pink! My 6 month old girl has thankfully almost outgrown all the pink infant clothes she was given. She’s starting to wear some of her brother’s old clothes now and I couldn’t be happier about it. It’s not so much the color pink per se, as the AMOUNT of it, and the frilly impractical nature of some of the clothes. It’s also the urgency people seem to place on her "looking like a girl". At AGE ZERO!! She’s ZERO YEARS OLD, people. She is a baby who is learning social skills, motor skills, language skills- she needs to be able to move around without the people she’s bonding with constantly having to worry over a dress staying in place or a dumb bow in her hair. Why is it so important to people that baby girls wear pink and/or frilly things? Do we want girls to be display dolls, passive and not participating in life from day one??
She will be expected quite soon enough to wear chemicals on her fingernails, her hair, her face- to look at her now and think about that is really horrifying! She’s so perfect the way she is. We all are. I can’t stand fingernail polish or the other things I will probably have to put on myself when I get a job again. Ok, that’s all for now.
I think the following demonstrates how strong the focus you’re talking about can be. Even diversity trainers want their daughters to be more “girlie.” From the blog http://www.antiracistparent.com/…2/not-my-hair/:
“She endured 6-months of chemotherapy to kill the cancer cells in her body, lost her beautiful baby afro, and was often called a “boy” even though she work [sic] pink hats with butterflies on them … I even went and hired a babysitter who actually had hair like Joli’s, hoping the [sic] would play fun girlie games like dress up or “hair dresser” or something.”
The author of this article doesn’t mention that she wants her daughter to appear and act more feminine because her daughter wants to. It can be implied, but it’s not necessarily stated.
Also, the connection between one’s hair and whether one appears to be male or female seems to be an issue for this anti-racist, diversity training author. Overall, she’s clear with her daughter that whatever hair her daughter has is fine with her, but these two sentences (the only two that explicitly discuss the gender issue in relation to her daughter’s hair) stand out to me for some reason. It’s as if the author feels like her daughter will be helped by playing “fun girlie games like dress up.”
Maybe I’m wrong, which I am quite often, but I can’t help thinking that her daughter’s resistance to having her own hair is not just about the internalized racism of having an afro in the U.S., but also about the author’s and her husband’s potential inability to accept alternative gender roles. I don’t know. Something, I think, a diversity trainer (and all the people making comments to the blog post) might have thought to consider.