As all parents know, bedtime in a household with toddlers can be a time fraught with frustration.  Suddenly, even the most obedient child can become a stubborn advocate, a trial lawyer in feety pajamas, explaining all the various reasons why his or her client (e.g., himself or herself) cannot go to bed at the appointed hour because of various explanations, rationales, and otherworldly circumstances.

In multiracial families, the situation is no different. In fact, the kids can be even more devilishly clever as they play and prey on your parental concerns that your child has been exposed to racism.  Thus, for example, in multiracial families, as it’s time for the nightly “tuck-in” you can hear kids offering up the following excuses for not going to bed:

1. This is racial discrimination.  You’re only making me go to bed now because I’m a person of color.

2. If I leave the living room now, I will be forfeiting my responsibility to integrate this common area, and I cannot do that.

3. Banishing me to the bedroom is ghettoization of a minority — namely, people under the age of 4.

4. If I was all-White and not just half-White, you wouldn’t send me to bed without first granting me my request for a cucumber sandwich with mayonnaise with the crusts cut off like they make at the Thurston & Lovey Howell Country Club.

5. Obama’s mother didn’t make him go to bed without the iPad (yes, I realize iPad’s didn’t exist in the Sixties, but that is an academic point that you are raising in an effort to thwart my youthful need for visual dexterity exercises before bed).

There are many more, and these are just highlights.  But, as you can see, in the multiracial family, bedtime is civil rights time.  So, we wish you good night and good luck with your own junior protestors and demonstrators and sitter-inners.

For more about multiracial families, please check out the Multiracial Family Man Podcast at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/multiracial-family-man/id969793342?mt=2

And, to join the conversation, please catch up with me on Twitter at: @barnettcomic