How my 1-year-old taught me about diversity
So here's the context. It's April 2020. We're in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. And my younger daughter is at the time, almost two. She turns two in May.
My wife is recording an interview with her and one of the questions has a surprising answer.
How funny is that? A one-year-old choosing Michelle Obama as her favorite person.
After my wife and I were done laughing about this, I was left thinking about it. The obvious reason that she had said Michelle Obama is because we had recently got a book called Parker Looks Up. And Parker Looks Up was this book about a girl named Parker, who is an African American girl who goes to the museum with her mother, her sister and her friend. At the museum, she sees a bunch of different portraits, but what catches her eye is this portrait of Michelle Obama. She stares up at it. And her mother explains to her the kind of amazing hero that Michelle Obama is. The book goes something along the lines of, “and in her Parker saw endless possibilities and all the things that she could be.” It's a beautiful book, I highly recommend it.
Obviously, that was her introduction to Michelle Obama - I mean, we're not a household that talks about Michelle Obama regularly. So it's not like she had any other context for that. You can tell by the surprise in my wife's voice at hearing that answer.
But I wanted to dig even further. Parker Looks Up is one of 100 books that we read to our girls. It's not like there's any shortage of people that she's introduced to or characters that she resonates with. There's no shortage of stories. It's not like this is the one story that we'd read to her. So what is it that when she was asked the question, “Who is your favorite person?” she replied with, “Michelle Obama.”
I’m a big believer in Occam’s razor - the simplest explanation is usually the right one.
My first thought was maybe this is recency bias. Maybe this was the last book she read, maybe right before the interview, my wife was reading Parker looks up to her. But that wasn't the case. I confirmed this with my wife, but also you can tell by the surprise in her voice.
Secondly, maybe it was right in her visual line of sight. Maybe it was right there in the room and she just looked at it. But that's not true either - it wasn't directly in her line of sight at the time of the interview.
Then I thought maybe the book itself has that exact phrasing. Does it use “favorite person” in some way? So I reread the book. And no, there's nothing in it that says anything like “favorite person”. And favorite is not a word that a one year old is very familiar with.
Next, I thought about how I sometimes replace the characters in books with my daughter's names. So I’ll call Elmo my older daughter and Cookie Monster my younger daughter. Something like that. I'll insert their names just to spice things up in our reading. But I do that with lots of books. Even if that somehow sparked something, it's quite an amazing connection to get to “my favorite person”.
Even weirder was that this answer really stuck. For a few months, you would go back to it and you just ask her who her favorite person was. Maybe it was because our reaction was so happy, but she continued to say “Michelle Obama”. And anyone who raises kids knows one year olds have a short term memory. They move on quickly to new things and new interests. This was somehow different. Parker Looks Up was one of the first books that she would actively ask to reread.
Finally, Occam's razor left me with - Michelle Obama is a hero she could identify with.
I don't know if she saw herself in Parker, the protagonists of the book, or directly at Michelle Obama and the description of her. But somehow,this dark skinned person that looked up and saw this hero, Michelle Obama - my daughter identified enough with her at the age of one to answer the question of “Who is your favorite person?” with Michelle Obama (when 90% of her answers to questions are Mommy, Daddy, Elmo or Daniel Tiger).
This experience really opened my eyes to making the case for diversity. It made me rethink some things from my own past. I used to play tennis a lot as a kid. And at the ages between like 13 and 17, I was a nationally ranked tennis player. So I would go to these tournaments with my dad where there'd be 64 kids or 128 kids playing. (I was always one of the worst kids there and barely making it at that level).
My dad and I would go and there was this strange thing that would happen. At that level of tennis, there were very few Indians. It was me and two or three other Indians. (Little-known fact - at my peak, I was the #3 ranked Indian-American in the country, the type of stat that only I kept track of). Anyways, there were very few Indians there. And they weren't the best, they all happen to be in my range of barely making it to the top levels. But my dad, whenever we would go to these tournaments, during the inevitable dead times hanging out between matches, he would find those Indians and watch them. I always used to make fun of him about this. Even at the time, I found it hilarious. I was like, “Dad, we could be watching the number one kid in the country that might go pro one day. And here you are choosing this Indian kid that's like, approximately my level. Why don't you just want to watch the best?”
Now I reflect on it. My identity at that time happened to be way more tied to tennis itself. I wanted to watch the best people that played the style of tennis I played. But for my dad, he wasn't a tennis player. He was an Indian who immigrated to this country. And, raising his Indian kid, seeing others that looked like his kid out there had to mean something. There's something validating or even aspirational about that potentially. I can totally see that. Now, as a parent, I do the same thing with my own girls. When I take them to our local tennis center, even though I’d prefer to watch the best, I’d rather them see a girl that looked like them even if she wasn’t the best one out there. There's something about that that seems aspirational.
And then the second thing was Kamala Harris's election as our first female vice president. Because everyone has been saying to me, “This must be so amazing. Your daughters are half Indian-American, part-black. Having someone who shares their ethnic identity must be so awesome.” And for some reason I was always a little dismissive of this. I focused on minor things like, “She's not President. She's Vice President?!” Because people kept saying it was the highest elected office that a woman had ever reached in the US. And I responded with, “Is she really an elected official?” It feels closer to a cabinet pick than an elected official to me, because honestly, I can't imagine there's even a single voter that was like, “I prefer Trump to Biden, but because Kamala Harris is on the ticket, I'm gonna vote for Biden.” I just don't think that voter really exists. Maybe there are a few voters that were like, “I'm not really energized by Biden or Trump, so I'm not gonna vote. But the fact that Kamala Harris is on the ticket…you know what…actually I will take the time to to vote.” But all this is besides the point. I was just dismissive. My friend Randall sent me this meme that was absolutely hilarious.
Any Indian kid can share the experience of coming home with a 99 and your parents asking “What did you get wrong?”
It couldn’t have captured my response any better. I had somehow become that Indian dad, and I was completely missing the forest for the trees. That is someone my girls can identify with. Which brings me to my point.
Wouldn't it be awesome if no matter what you identified with, you had heroes you could identify with?
Your identity may be strongly tied to your ethnicity. your gender, your interests, your personality - whatever it may be, wouldn't it be awesome to have heroes that you could identify with? Maybe that's an obvious point to everyone else. But to me, it took my one-year-old to drive that point home.