If you did not experience integration as a black child, you cannot denigrate someone else's reality or experience of that, and to do so, calling his opinion "hateful" and "inaccurate," in the name of supposed racial tolerance b/c you have biracial children is simply using those children as a front.

Okay, since I grew up in egalitarian Iowa, I have not the "right" to question the foolish behavior that is propagated in the Houston "ghetto?" The only appreciable difference between my wife, who has a Master's Degree in Education and her "welfare queen" sisters is that she lived with her grandmother instead of their mother. That boring, conservative household deprived her of the daily social interactions that her siblings later had, leaving book reading (and old black & white movies) as her primary activity. By six, she was reading the newspaper because there was nothing else in the house. She experienced plenty of discrimination, but nearly all of it from her classmates who saw her as too "black", too fat and too smart. Perhaps her reading and television watching inspired her "whiteness", but I'm her third white husband, and after 17 years of marriage, things couldn't be much happier.

Our biggest problem now is with her health issues, some of which resulted from being taught poor eating habits, others of which are genetic in nature. The advantage of "outcrossing" is that neither of our daughters (or her other one from a previous husband) manifest any of these problems.

What I worry about most is how to explain to my daughters the blatant racism her black cousins see as "normal." The 8-year-old cried Thursday when her cousin called her a "nigger" (though without malice). How do I explain this? The other one can't comprehend her other cousin's disparagement of her clothing (why do you wear "white girls' clothes?")

It's the racist attitudes that blacks internalize that are most destructive. Some see racism as simply a challenge to be overcome (see: Sidney Poitier) while others see it as an occasional bother but one that can work for you as well as against you. At any rate, the deleterious effects of racism are diminishing and will die out completely in time f you will just allow it.