What, Exactly, Is the Meaning of This Weird MLK Day Celebration Tradition?

Every year at my children's preschool, MLK Day is celebrated with a strange tradition: decorating cupcakes with frosting of a spectrum pink-to-chocolate hues. Banal and empty, you might say, but so what? There's a twist. The frosting is supposed to represent skin tones. After selecting their preferred frosting skin-tone, the kids then decorate the cupcake with eyes, nose, and mouth.

This tradition has always made me ill at ease, but it's taken me awhile to put my finger on just why. First, it is banal and empty. Dr. King's central point, after all, is that skin tone is decidedly not the point; character is. I can see what the school is trying to do, especially given that young children--as Piaget famously discovered--are astonishingly concrete thinkers. They do think in terms of what they see, literally. They don't get abstract concepts. Yet to underscore skin color as the main event seems to me to be misguided, if not wrong.

My kids are, technically, bi-racial, but that's a term that other people use to describe them. We don't use that term. When people say things to me like, "Wow, your children are so beautiful, so exotic," there's a part of me that just wants to rage: "Exotic to whom? They came right out of me, brother--nothing exotic about that." They are not exotic to me, their Dad, or to themselves. They are themselves.

Virtually everyone is mixed in this country. WASPs, for example, might think of themselves as thoroughbreds, but chances are, they've got some Scottish, some English, Irish, Welsch, and probably a touch of German. Go to Europe with that pedigree, and you definitely qualify as mixed. These people have been to war with each other over ethnic/cultural conflicts, for Godssakes!

This cupcake thing, while well intentioned, draws attention to differences in a meaningless, and potentially harmful, way. What I would like my children to note is the injustice that has been, and continues to be, done to people because of their skin color, because of the way they look. I would like them to take pride in their heritage, but not to think that skin color is the endgame. I don't say that it's irrelevant. What is relevant is how discrimination has made difference insidious and influenced generations of people socially, economically, and psychologically.

I would like them to think about how Dr. King would respond to them to the "exotic" comments, and the, "Where do you come from?" questions--and how he would understand why it makes them sad. I would like them to think about how Dr. King might suggest responding. It wouldn't be with a cupcake. Or maybe it would be--along with another question, "What makes you ask that question?"

So, I think I've answered my own question: I'm going to speak up on this.