Are all African-Americans famous, or just Jessica Simpson?

Every available Tuesday during the school year, I go to an elementary school near my office and read with a young child. I've been doing this for five years and have worked with four girls: Jephri, who was all attitude and closeness and too sassy for her own good; Daijah, who spelled my name "Suqanne" and who hugged me after the last of two years' worth of mentoring sessions; Marshelle, who was a little bit shy but smiled a lot; and Consuelo, with whom I'm working this year, and who is the first girl I've worked with under third grade (she's in second).

It's amazing to me how much children learn in short spaces of time. It's also a good exercise to remember that I didn't always know everything I know now.

Concepts, for example.

Last Tuesday, the kids had a little project to work on in the room to celebrate Black History Month. I told Consuelo that she was supposed to write down the name of a famous living African-American. She stared at me, clearly wondering what I was talking about. Famous like somebody on TV or in movies, we told her.

She shifted around in her chair. Nobody likes being wrong, and she seemed unwilling to hazard a guess without understanding what we were asking her.

"Do you like the Cheetah Girls?" I asked, familiar with the band from the past several years of working with third-graders and thinking of the equally popular Raven-Symone.

Her eyes lit up. "Yes!"

After more prompting, she came up with a name, Sabrina. She said Sabrina was a singer. None of the rest of us in the room had heard of this person, so we let it go. We wrote it on the main list and on the little piece of construction paper that Consuelo decorated.

As it turns out, Sabrina is in the Cheetah Girls. But she is as white as one of the other people whose name appeared before hers on the list: Jessica Simpson.

The other girl in the room looked confused about the assignment, too. Her mentor stood up and came over to the room coordinator.

"See how Miss Nancy's hand is darker than mine?" the mentor asked. "But they're still hands. We're really the same."

"Not all the same," I interjected. "That would be boring."

Consuelo stuck out her hand. "My hand is darker than yours..." she said.

So I think I spent most of the half hour last Tuesday helping to impart the impression that African-American is a synonym for famous and/or that anybody with skin darker than mine could be called African-American.

But then, it's good that those girls didn't seem to know why we were making such a fuss over skin color, anyway.