To anyone not active on the children’s birthday party circuit these days, I will say that parties have become sophisticated affairs, with a common theme reflected in the invitations, decorations, cake, and goodie bags.

And we had to come up with a theme for our middle son’s second birthday. We first decided on dogs, but my best friend had already chosen that for her three-year-old son, and she sent out invitations before I could get my act together. That revelation led to serious brainstorming sessions with my husband, Kevin. After a few digressions (most notably, a Raffi-the-person, not Raffi’s music, party, with Raffi masks, a Raffi-shaped cake, and a Raffi-through-the-decades game), we settled on a “monkeys and bananas” theme.

It was actually perfect for Manny. “Ra-ras” (as he calls bananas) are his favorite food, and he loves to eat them “monkey style”—peeled, rather than cut into slices. His current favorite books, Goodnight Gorilla and Hug, prominently feature monkeys. We quickly laid plans to make a banana cake, give monkey finger puppets as party favors, and ask everyone to draw a picture of a monkey eating a banana for the birthday scrapbook.

But as I sat at the kitchen table this morning, making the party invitations—paper bananas that peeled open to reveal date, time, place, and so on—I re-read what I had written through my new racial injustice glasses—the glasses I acquired by adopting two children of African-American heritage.

Not-so-Innocent Associations

Manny is not African-American, but his older and younger brothers are. I suddenly realized that I wouldn’t feel comfortable hosting a similarly themed party for either of them. Something made me pause as I was jotting on the paper peel, “It’s Time for Monkey Business….”

Maybe it was the report I’d seen a few days earlier on ESPN, about racism in the European football league. Apparently, when black football players enter the field or make plays in certain countries—notably, Spain and Italy—they are greeted with monkey sounds so deafening they fill the stadium.

Or maybe it was last year’s controversy over a “joke” made by a Boston sports radio host: After an adolescent male gorilla escaped from the Franklin Park Zoo, it was later found sitting at a bus stop. The host referred to the gorilla as “a METCO student.” METCO is a program in which minority students are bused to public schools in mainly white suburban neighborhoods.

And I also thought about the time when my mother said that my oldest son, then six months old, looked like a little monkey clinging to his mother. I told her not to use monkey comparisons. (If she felt she must liken him to an animal, I conceded, she could call him a koala.)

Then, of course, there are the horrible caricatures of African Americans as monkeys that used to pervade our country’s mainstream media until about 40 years ago.

What needs rethinking?

I realized that my white son enjoys a unique form of privilege, one I had never thought about before: He gets to have a monkey-themed birthday party with no racist baggage. Except there is baggage—I don’t want to give him any kind of party that I wouldn’t hold for my other two children.

I talked this over with my husband, who counseled, “Just stick with ‘It’s Time to Go Bananas!’ on the party invitations.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Why should we let racists decide for us that we don’t want our kids to pretend to be monkeys or wear monkey costumes? We’re not inviting any to the party, anyway. And shouldn’t we be trying to reclaim things that racism has tainted, the way my divorced friend revisits places she went with her husband to create new memories and meanings?”

I still serve my kids watermelon, even after a close relative commented that she’d “never seen a black kid who didn’t like watermelon.” Never mind that my white husband eats watermelon whenever he can all summer long. But I admit that, since that remark was made, I do feel self-conscious buying watermelon when accompanied by all three of my sons.

One of my oldest son’s favorite songs is “Pick a Bale of Cotton.” When my husband wondered aloud whether we wanted him singing songs like that in public, whether others might see a stereotype, I argued that African-American folk songs are part of American culture, like jazz. We certainly wanted him to listen to jazz, didn’t we? My husband is a Dixieland jazz fanatic, but the comparison isn’t so straightforward. No one would argue that jazz has the same slave/sharecropper/pickaninny connotations as the work songs sung by field hands on a cotton plantation.

A Parent’s Decisions

If my middle son were the one who sang about picking cotton, I probably wouldn’t think twice about others’ perceptions. If anything, it would show that his parents are good, liberal whites, teaching their kid about diversity and tolerance and the history of race in our country. It would reflect well on us and on him, and accurately represent our family’s values.

But a monkey-and-banana party for my other two kids? Would it imply that my husband and I are oblivious to past and present stereotypes? Unmindful of racism’s sting? Trying in vain to raise a child who can transcend prejudices, despite the intolerance that persists in society? Would we offend our African-American friends, as well as our white friends who have also adopted children of color?

My children are still young enough to live in a world where race isn’t even a concept, where differences in skin color are rarely noticed or discussed. To them, a monkey is just a monkey—an animal at the zoo, or a funny character in a book or a song. But, as this birthday party reminds me, my children are growing older by the day. Will it be possible to stay in that cocoon with them, even as they move into an adult world fraught with stereotypes?

Here’s how I finally answered these questions, at least for now: I threw out the invitations I’d made that referred to “monkey business” and made new ones that said, “Let’s Go Bananas.” I got angry about denying my son a monkey-themed birthday. And I wrote this essay. What would you have done?