I’m coming from a place of privilege here. My daughter is five years old and has grown up in a Caucasian family. She has friends that have different skin and hair colors, of course. We live in a city that is very diverse but in a neighborhood that is less so. While she has commented that certain friends have dark hair, she has never asked why. I have simply acknowledged that without categorizing people.
I didn’t want to bring up the idea of race. Yes, in very specific contexts we have discussed this, mostly in light of the human rights work I do. We’ve talked a little bit about the history in our own country and how it is connected to the history of aboriginal people. We’ve talked about being kind to others and helping people who need help.
It’s not like I’m afraid to talk about differences. My daughter is growing up with a parent who has a chronic illness and wears a medical device 24 hours a day, so she’s certainly aware of that. I have a friend who is a quadriplegic, and so my daughter has had plenty of discussions about our varying abilities to use different parts of our bodies and what happens if we can’t. But we haven’t talked about race.
I didn’t want to put up barriers. I didn’t want to create divisions in her mind. I didn’t want her to think of some of her friends as the same and some as different. However, reading an article on this topic I realized that I had it a little backwards. Children categorize. That’s what they do. And they tend to prefer people who look and act like them.
Now, certainly this preference doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Of course there are social pressures that our children are exposed to, whether we want them to be or not. However, children are constantly dividing people and trying to understand the divisions, and the essence of the article is that we need to talk about differences too.
We need to talk about differences and race because if we don’t, our children will make their own decisions about who is better and who is worse, who is good to play with and who is not. We need to talk about race and struggles and challenges and playing with everyone, because if we don’t, our children will pick up the dominant social messages about race and use them as their own.