Offbeat op-eds: White or brown, girl or boy. It doesn't matter.
Written by Denise Fixcat

The most frequent question I get about my pregnancy is whether I want a boy a girl. The second question is whether I want to know.

The only reason I would like to know is for practical reasons, the baby shower. My husband says he wants a boy because of the “boyfriend issue” if we had a girl. I’ve noticed that’s something that freaks many men out about having a daughter.

It makes no difference to me whether it’s a boy or a girl, whether he has brown skin like me or she has light skin like my husband. I was born in Mexico City and my husband is from California, he is half Mexican and half Guatemalan with British ancestry (we think, sometimes he seems more Scottish to me) that makes him look white.

People are always shocked when he starts talking Spanish and he’s even had to face reverse racism from more brown looking Mexicans he has met. Racism has also shown its ugly face in comments that our baby will be a beautiful light skinned baby.

I know it’s so ingrained in our society to look at white babies as more beautiful than those of color, but it angers me. At this point in our so-called evolved society, shouldn’t we have grown out of that? Sadly we are nowhere close to seeing people from the inside out.

I doesn’t matter to me whether our baby is a boy or a girl or brown or white.

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