Parenting while not white
Originally published on July 29, 2022
Last week, during Kweli’s two-week checkup, her pediatrician, who was meeting her and us for the first time, began our appointment by asking us two questions:
1. What is your understanding about what’s happened so far?
2. How does Kweli look to you?
Up until that point, even though we spent a total of nine days at two different hospitals, no nurse or doctor had taken a few minutes to gauge what we knew and ask us what we had observed. We explained to the pediatrician what all the doctors and nurses told us. Then we told him that since Kweli had been home, she’d been eating, farting, burping, and sleeping like any other baby. The pediatrician replied that’s because she’s about as healthy as any other baby. He opined that once the ventricular septal defect (small hole in heart) was diagnosed at Boston Children’s Hospital, they went a little overboard with treatment and monitoring, and that if she’d been sent to a Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital connected to the one she was born in, they would have been less aggressive because generally, ventricular septal defects close on their own with time. He told us that there is no need to bring Kweli in for checkups every two weeks, and that unless we observe a drastic change, her next echocardiogram can wait until six months.
While Chevon and I are grateful for the care that Kweli received at Boston Children’s Hospital, I feel that they may have kept Kweli there longer than necessary in part because they didn’t trust us, her parents. We both feel that there are instances where we would have been treated differently if we were white parents. Most of the instances are subtle, but two incidents stand out. After the doctors and nurses told us that Kweli was going to be discharged, one of the NICU nurses, who hadn’t been treating Kweli or ever spoken to us, turned to Chevon and gave her a pop quiz. "How often should you feed her?" "What are the signs that she's hungry?" "What is safe sleep?" We had been in the hospital for eight days, seven of which were spent in the NICU. Kweli hadn't missed a feeding. Chevon was regularly pumping and voluntarily speaking to their lactation specialists. Every time a new nurse came in we went over feeding and safe sleep. They gave us a discharge packet containing that information and had us go over it with the nurse that had been caring for Kweli. The hospital that we came from gave us a discharge packet containing identical information that we went over with their nurse. Kweli wasn't in the hospital because she was malnourished or didn't have a bassinet to sleep in. The pop quiz was unnecessary and insulting.
I was ready to leave by that point because I started to get the sense that the NICU staff, who provided excellent care, were starting to act like Kweli was their baby and not ours. Several times throughout our stay we were reminded that Kweli was their patient, not Chevon, who was still recovering from giving birth. I was generally treated more like a visitor than a parent, and unfortunately, at times, so was Chevon.
The second incident happened later that day. After instructing us not to put Kweli in a car seat or stroller because being reclined caused her oxygen levels to dip, the hospital gave us a car bed, and advised us to install it ahead of putting Kweli in the car. Chevon went to install the car bed in our rental car and pull up to the main entrance while I gathered Kweli. When it was time to exit (after the hospital resolved their printer issue that caused a delay), I walked out of the room carrying Kweli, and the NICU nurse supervisor asked if I had a car seat. After I explained to her the diagnosis, the car bed, and their own instructions, they still refused to allow me to walk to the elevator. "What if you fall?" they asked. I'd been walking around the hospital for eight days and hadn't fallen once. I'd seen other (white) parents carrying babies in and out of the hospital. I think the way I was dressed- tank top, leopard print shorts, cowboy hat, was.. different, and signaled to them that I didn't have the capacity to carry a 7.5 lb. baby to an elevator and then through a lobby. They made me wait for a rolling bassinet. I was the only person that had to use one. It felt to me like that had less to do with safety or liability (I love when non-lawyers decide to play lawyers) and more to do with asserting control over us. I know that I don’t dress like a polite, good Asian American. In fact one of the tank tops I wore at the hospital says “Bad Asian American”, and I have tattoos. I guess that’s the penalty for being bad at fitting into other people’s perceptions of what good Asian Americans should be.
Imagine if Chevon hadn’t earned a PhD and I hadn’t earned a JD, both experiences which prepared us to navigate white spaces and negotiate with oblivious, self-important white people. What if we couldn’t afford to take time off of work to be with Kweli in the NICU? How different, how much worse, would our experience have been?
Reflecting on what happened, we could have refused to take the dumbass pop quiz, and I could have flipped the nurses off with one hand while carrying Kweli to the elevator in my other arm. But what penalty would our family have incurred for resisting these almost polite assaults on our dignity? We recognized that we are a Black woman, an American Born Chinaman, and a Blasian baby. They, the white people, wield the force of the institution, and the threat of violence under the guise of order. They have the power. At that moment, we were exhausted, and our sole focus was to bring our Kweli home, out of the hospital we’d lived in for more than a week, and away from Boston, where white supremacists assaulted a Black man three days prior to our arrival.
I wish I could promise Kweli that she’ll never have to decide between accepting being disrespected and incurring the wrath of karens and chads in power, but I know she will. I think the best we can do is to teach her to not internalize it, not to live in fear of them, and to not bend or make herself small to make other people comfortable.