By Brooke Lea Foster
- Nov. 26, 2020
I often forgot that my infant son, Harper, didn’t look like me when I was a new mother living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 2010. Around the neighborhood, I thought of him as the perfect brown baby, soft-skinned and tulip-lipped, with a full head of black hair, even if it was the opposite of my blond waves and fair skin as I pushed him.
“He’s adorable. Exactly just What nationality is his mother?” a middle-aged white girl asked me personally outside Barnes & Noble on Broadway 1 day, mistaking me personally for a nanny.
“I am his mom,” I informed her.