First off, I hate trying to write the same day Ta-Nehisi Coates comes out with an article. His writing is so substantive and seemingly effortlessly good...and here I am writing about frivolity. But the show must go on...

This past Saturday my wife was out of town with her girlfriends, which meant my son Nyles and me were left to our own devices. We went to the barbershop, we bought shoes, we had lunch, shared fancy pretzels, went to the playground, and we ended up at a carnival.

Nyles was way too afraid to get on the Ferris wheel, the rollercoaster, or frankly, anything that lifted off the ground. But he was all into the games. First he played a basketball game, then he tossed beanbags into random holes, then he squirted water into holes to advance his horse (I promise this wasn't as perverse as it may be reading), and did a little outdoor fooseball.

The last event of the night was some type of hammer contraption. Nyles had to hammer an object as hard as he possibly could, and the higher his score, the bigger the prize. He swung as hard as he could three times, and finally he earned a prize: A Marvel Superhero Balloon. He had three choices: Spiderman, Batman and Superman.

Nyles has plenty of Spiderman action figures big and small, so I knew that was out of the running. I wanted him to choose Batman because I always regarded him as a dark, mysterious bad ass. The Superman ballon had a cape and he...well he was all white. Now I have nothing against white people or white superheroes, but as I may have alluded to before on this blog, so many of the fictional characters my son sees on TV are white or non-white characters voiced by white people. He may not realize how demoralizing and unfair that is for a little brown boy, but I do, and I don't like it one bit. Whenever I can literally, sprinkle a brown (Fat Albert) or black (Black Panther) cartoon/action figure in his life, I do just that.

But needless to say, my son chose Superman.

So after the carnival, Nyles and I went to the liquor store so Daddy could get some wine, and all these black folks took one look at my son, and another at this Superman balloon with the super white face, and they looked back at me as if say, "Dude what the f**k?". For the remainder of the day, my son was carrying this damn balloon around like Linus carried his blanket, and it was eating away at my insides---but I said nothing to discourage him or his choices.

But at one point, my son was play fighting with this giant balloon in one hand, and the tiny Black Panther action figure in the other, and I literally wanted to maim that damn Superman doll. Luckily for me, a few days have passed and Black Panther is back in the can-I-hold-a-toy-on-the-way-to-school rotation. And today when he got back home from school, he played with both superheroes in harmony. The Black Panther won some fights, as did Superman. Racial equality at its finest.

I think I sound racist in this blog, but I'm not. I just want my son to see people who look like him in cartoon land to offset all the folks who don't.