Today I was trying to dive back into Livejournal by reading as many people’s blogs as I could, and one blog had a link to this article in Newsweek, about how, “Kids as young as 6 months judge others based on skin color. What’s a parent to do?”
The subtitle was ridiculously sensationalistic – the study with babies showed how white 6-month-olds will stare longer at a face that’s not white, which doesn’t imply “judging” as much as it implies babies will stare longer at something unfamiliar (hardly news to any parent) – but the article itself was fascinating. It turns out that what many of us are doing to raise our kids in a non-racist way is actually encouraging them to make judgments about others based on color:
The other deeply held assumption modern parents have is what Ashley and I have come to call the Diverse Environment Theory. If you raise a child with a fair amount of exposure to people of other races and cultures, the environment becomes the message. Because both of us attended integrated schools in the 1970s—Ashley in San Diego and, in my case, Seattle—we had always accepted this theory’s tenets: diversity breeds tolerance, and talking about race was, in and of itself, a diffuse kind of racism.
This is the essence of what our family, and most of the white families we know, have done to encourage our kids to embrace diversity; we try to expose them to as much color and diversity as possible, model how okay with it we are, and let that be the lesson. The problem is, that doesn’t work the way we thought.
For decades, it was assumed that children see race only when society points it out to them. However, child-development researchers have increasingly begun to question that presumption. They argue that children see racial differences as much as they see the difference between pink and blue—but we tell kids that “pink” means for girls and “blue” is for boys. “White” and “black” are mysteries we leave them to figure out on their own.
Apparently it takes very little for kids to form preferences for their own group, to make judgments about who they belong with and what that grouping means:
We might imagine we’re creating color-blind environments for children, but differences in skin color or hair or weight are like differences in gender—they’re plainly visible. Even if no teacher or parent mentions race, kids will use skin color on their own, the same way they use T-shirt colors. Bigler contends that children extend their shared appearances much further—believing that those who look similar to them enjoy the same things they do. Anything a child doesn’t like thus belongs to those who look the least similar to him. The spontaneous tendency to assume your group shares characteristics—such as niceness, or smarts—is called essentialism.
Basically, conversations about race need to start a lot earlier than most parents probably think they do, and they need to be specific and detailed. Instead of giving small children statements like, “Color doesn’t matter,” or “Everyone is equal,” we need to be talking instead about what color means. Why is someone white or black or “extra tan”, as my daughter puts it? Why does someone have red hair? What does ancestry mean? What did people believe about race before, and what do we believe about race now?
The article talks about a study in which white parents were asked to discuss race with their small children as part of the experiment, and how many of these families dropped out because they were uncomfortable bringing the topic up. I was shocked to read that, and yet when I thought about our own home, I realized we don’t discuss race in a very specific way. How can you understand why your parents are crying tears of joy that an African-American man has become President in our lifetime, when you don’t understand why his skin color is different in the first place?
My own kids have had some discussion of this in terms of Native Americans – my husband has dark skin and is often mistaken for being from the Middle East or India. In our house we talk about this, about how Daddy is darker because his family came from the Blackfeet tribe, and how that’s one of the Native American tribes, and how the kids have that heritage, too. But we’re surprisingly quiet about people with different ancestry than our own. Talking about someone else’s ancestry feels very personal, and almost taboo.
Yesterday, after Beth’s swimming lesson at the YMCA, we were walking out of the locker rooms past the gym, where she saw two men playing basketball. They were both African-American, and very tall (easily over seven feet), and Beth stopped in her tracks, staring, totally enthralled. “What are they doing?” she asked me, like they were leading unicorns around or teaching turtles how to fly.
“That’s basketball, babe. They’re just playing basketball.”
“I WANNA PLAY!” she yelled, so loud it echoed down the hall. I laughed.
“Seriously? You want to play basketball?”
“YES YES YES!”
I was ecstatic to see her wanting to do something that did not relate to Disney princesses. I asked her if she wanted to go inside. “You want to ask the guys if we can watch?”
“YES YES YES!”
So we went in, and said hello, and I asked if Beth could watch them for a few minutes. One of the guys said “Sure,” and then to Beth’s utter delight, walked over and handed her the ball. Here’s this giant guy towering over my midget kid, and I thought to myself, “Please, if she has to comment on how different he is, let it be his height rather than his color.” But she didn’t say anything. She was just happy. He even picked her up and showed her how to slam dunk, and then let her slam dunk, and as we walked out she was BEAMING, talking about how she was going to play basketball and become the best basketball player ever (we checked – basketball lessons start in the winter, and we’ll definitely sign her up).
The relief I felt leaving, that she hadn’t drawn attention to any, you know, COUGH COUGH, differences in ancestry, made me feel like a complete ass later. I’d let myself feel proud that she didn’t notice, when of course she noticed, how could she not? She didn’t ask about it not because she didn’t see it, but because she probably didn’t have the words. Daddy is the color of a perfectly toasted marshmallow because his family is Native American (and Irish, too), and Mama is white because her family is Irish and German, but why does this guy look different? What does that mean?
I understand why those parents dropped out of the study, although I think they did themselves a disservice by doing so. Kids say the most embarrassing things, especially when you’re a Good Liberal Parent and you do things like teach them the right words for their private parts (Liberal Parenting Manual Chapter #14: How To Explain The Body). Nothing like a discussion of what their brother’s penis looks like in the bath and how it’s SO DIFFERENT from a vagina – did you know how different? Can we talk about penises and vaginas for awhile? – as you’re checking out at the grocery store to make you want to OMG DIE. Here kids! HAVE SOME CANDY! Meanwhile the checkout girl is laughing so hard she’s giving you the wrong change, and everyone in a four block radius knows that your four-year-old daughter thinks her vagina is SUPER COOL, even though it doesn’t stick out like a penis does.
It’s mortifying when it’s body parts – as a child I once asked a relative whose lap I was sitting in whether she had false teeth, and I think I saw my mother die inside just a little bit – but what happens when it’s skin color? Can open, worms everywhere. People are conditioned to be sooooooo careful when discussing the experience of someone of a different ethnicity, that it’s incredibly daunting to imagine trying to discuss it with kids without them asking questions that would make us cringe. In public. With an audience. (Ironically, I think a lot white people fear the judgement of snarky white intellectuals a whole lot more than they fear people of color – I know I sure do.) It’s safer to just model how we don’t see color. See how we don’t notice it? SEE THAT? Do that, okay?
The implication of this, though, is that we’re essentially teaching kids how to appear as if they aren’t racist, rather than have the discussions with them that would lead to them actually not being racist. As horrifying as it might sound, we’re teaching them that our image is more important than our courage to communicate. Which certainly isn’t a lesson in line with my values.
From the article:
Is it really so difficult to talk with children about race when they’re very young? What jumped out at Phyllis Katz, in her study of 200 black and white children, was that parents are very comfortable talking to their children about gender, and they work very hard to counterprogram against boy-girl stereotypes. That ought to be our model for talking about race. The same way we remind our daughters, “Mommies can be doctors just like daddies,” we ought to be telling all children that doctors can be any skin color. It’s not complicated what to say. It’s only a matter of how often we reinforce it.
Here I thought I had it down, I’m so comfortable talking about bodies, fat and thin, straight and gay, transgender, rich, poor, and so many things in between. I wasn’t paying enough attention to how we acknowledged (or didn’t) color. I never thought an article in Newsweek would impact me in any real way (oh sorry, was that snarky and judgmental?), but this really has. We’ll be changing how we talk to our kids about color.
Care to join me? Here are some good links:
- 6 Tips to help parents talk to kids about racism
- How should we talk to kids about race? From antiracistparent.com (lots of good discussion material on that site)
- Parenting, preschool, and prejudice
- Teaching children about diversity
This is one of the greatest blog posts I have ever read. I am adding it to my “things to review if I ever end up having children” file.
Wow! Thank you!