If I had told my parents about the prom debacle with Frederick, I feared they would have been:
1) sad that I thought Rob’s invitation to prom was a sign of him settling;
2) dismayed that I didn’t know the one and only Black boy at my school;
3) busy examining my actions and words to discern my motivations (they would have discovered a self-loathing writhing at the heart of it);
4) shown the hazy outline of my wariness toward Black people;
5) unable to ignore the evidence that their interracial child experiment was failing.
They would have wondered what they’d done, whether they could have done anything, whether at that point anything could be done by anyone at all.
But I never told them.
And if, even without this prom fiasco information, they were concerned that their mixed-race child was struggling psychologically, they would have been right.