A few years ago, my nephew DJ and I were at my parents’ house and watching The Long Walk Home, a 1990 film about a black domestic worker (Whoopi Goldberg), her white employer (Sissy Spacek) and how their lives intersect personally and professionally during the 1955-1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott. “Why are all of the black people walking Auntie LoLo?” DJ asked.

“Remember learning about how Rosa Parks was arrested for not vacating her bus seat for a white man?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, many blacks decided to protest by not riding the buses and either carpooling or walking to work. That boycott —-”

“Lorrie, what are you talking with him about that for?” another relative, whom I’ll call ‘Stan’, suddenly burst into the room and with his tone, made it perfectly clear that he took an odd exception to the topic of conversation.

“Because he asked me about it Stan, that’s why: the movie is based on a historic event and DJ needs to be aware of the Civil Rights Era and what’s changed since then.”

“Well, that was a looooong time ago and bringing up the past doesn’t change anything. I don’t even discuss race with my kids because I don’t want them to see color.”

O..kay. Race-neutral kids in a race-conscious world is certainly a noble goal to have. But according to author Rajen Persaud, it isn’t the reality in which we live and parents with biracial children must teach kids to embrace their ethnicities, not avoid them.

“Everybody discusses racism and race relations as it should be, as opposed to what it is,” says Persaud, who explored those dynamics in his controversial book Why Black Men Love White Women: Going Beyond Sexual Politics and Getting To The Heart of the Matter. “There is an actual genetic composition of who they are and that is not gonna change, so if you look Black, society is going to tell you you’re black. It’s not just about what your kids are seeing, but what everybody else is seeing when they look at your kids.

“For example, if you have a daughter and don’t teach girls about the accomplishments of women, she can’t defend herself against those who tell her that she can’t do what she wants to do in life. So you can raise your kids to ‘be’ snow leopards, birds or whatever, but its how everybody treats and perceives them that counts.”

Kim Kardashian says she wants her child with rapper Kanye West to not see color. Like Kardashian, Stan still holds fast to the belief that if he and his wife choose to overlook the physical and cultural differences that their union has created, their kids will adapt to that dubious mindset as well. But what they fail to realize is that just because they choose to ignore the issue doesn’t make others obligated to do the same. The uniqueness that sets biracial children apart can also make them targets for insults if there isn’t a firm foundation of self-knowledge already in place. And the well-meaning practice of refusing to ‘see color’ can be just as damaging, since the differences with which we are endowed are meant to be celebrated, not shunned.

A piece of wisdom I learned years ago taught me that whoever speaks to a child first about a subject becomes its authority. And as confusing as the subjects of color and race can become, the voices defining who our children are and how they fit into society should originate from inside a loving home, not the world outside of it.