Raising children in a land where ghosts still haunt us

Marianne Thamm: The question - "So, how are you raising your children?" - is fair and reasonable, and we are asked it often. My daughters are both adopted. We are white, they are black.

The combination raises a myriad issues, perspectives and everyday challenges.

My reply on this occasion was: "The same way you're raising yours I hope," instead of the more facetious: "The Osbournes are our role models." (Referring to the MTV reality show that documented the chaotic home life of Black Sabbath rocker Ozzy Osbourne and his family.)

The point is: the construction of a South African identity is constant and complex. Race, ethnicity, religion and culture are just a few of the things we still see when we judge or evaluate fellow citizens.

The question of how we are raising our children takes on different nuances depending on who asks. And might I just add here that I am convinced that the question is never asked out of malice. People are simply curious.

When white people ask the question, the implicit assumption generally is: "In which culture are you raising your children?"

My reply there would have to be: "As two spoilt, middle-class brats." You see, there is, among most white people, a notion that black children (and people) are somehow undifferentiated, part of a collective, and that their cultural coding is set at birth.

And so, for these people at least, for me to be true to "their culture" I need to teach my daughters "their language" or take them to "townships" where they will no doubt experience how other black people live.

I could pop around the corner where a middle-class black family, who speak Sotho and English and who own a Mercedes-Benz SLK, live but that, I take it, would not be helpful.

But let's look at it from another perspective. If I had adopted two white children from Russia or Romania, would anyone ask how we were raising them?

I think not. The construction of white identity doesn't work that way. No one would suggest that I teach my daughters to speak Russian or expect me to dress them up as little babushkas on Russian national holidays.

But the construction of blackness is so much more complicated and, as white people, we can never really fathom how it is to live in the world in a black skin. And then there's the fact that we live in South Africa, where all manner of ghosts still haunt us.

We have the responsibility to ensure that our daughters grow up with positive and confident internalised images of themselves as black women and we find, because we are white, we have to be eternally vigilant. We hope we will teach our children to speak at least two indigenous languages over and above English.

Not only do we need to check our own notions daily, but also those of the world that rush in from every direction. It's in the stories we read, the movies they watch, the adverts they see and even how representative the cast of a children's theatre production might be.

But the South African mother of two white children should be as concerned about giving them black dolls or scouting out movies or books where the chief protagonist is black.

She should be as concerned with seeking out integrated spaces. The pale children at my daughters' preschool, a school invested in diversity, were able to make that leap and view themselves within a greater group of children.

White children are constantly unconsciously affirmed and reaffirmed in almost everything they experience.

This is not their fault, but it is crucial that parents are aware of this and mediate, lest these children unwittingly absorb that they might be superior to others. The wonderful opening ceremony for the World Cup displayed the multiple identities we can choose in this country - and seeing a white woman in traditional Zulu garb was one of many highlights.

As economics Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen writes in Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny: "In our normal lives, we see ourselves as members of a variety of groups - we belong to all of them. A person's citizenship, residence, geographic origin, gender, class, politics, profession, employment, food habits, sport interests, taste in music, social commitments, etc, make us members of a variety of groups. Each of these collectivities, to all of which this person simultaneously belongs, gives her a particular identity. None of them can be taken to be the person's identity or singular membership category."

And that is how we should raise our children ...