I like that girl!

I showed Kisae a photo of Tirunesh Dibaba, the Ethiopian runner who won two gold medals in Beijing. I told her Dibaba was really fast, "super fast," in Kisae speak.

Kisae seemed quite interested in the whole thing. "I like that girl!" she said. "Her pretty."

Oh, it made me happy to hear that. Not because pretty matters, in the shallow sense of the word, but because it does matter that so often black girls (at least by those depressing studies) don't really see themselves as pretty. And it terrifies me (in a way I can hardly articulate) that with white parents, Kisae will be particularly prone to thinking girls who look like her aren't pretty. Never mind that she is, hands down, the prettiest among us.

So whenever she points out that a black woman is pretty, my heart does a little leap.