Last night, I was fooling around on YouTube looking for video clips of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King to use in my theory class. As I listened to their speeches, Jonah, my eight year old, paused his video game on Steve’s computer and came over to my computer.
Jonah: What are you doing, mom?
Me: I’m listening to a speech by Martin Luther King. Do you know he was?
Jonah: Yeah. He was a very good man.
Me: Do you know anything else about him?
Jonah: No.
They discuss MLK every year in his class, but I suspect the lesson plans involve a lot of brown crayons and not much else.
Me: Well, Martin Luther King helped to change a very bad situation
in America. In the past, they didn’t allow black people to vote. They
had to use different bathrooms and water fountains from white people.
They didn’t let them use the same swimming pools.
Jonah’s jaw dropped to the floor.
Jonah: That’s crazy! You mean that George wouldn’t be allowed to go to the swimming pool with me.
Me: Well, honey, George is Indian.
And then I tried to think of an example of a black kid in Jonah’s class, and I couldn’t come up with anyone.
My little innocent boy has no concept of race. He doesn’t
understand the concept of grouping people together by their skin color.
He doesn’t even know what "black" is.
Part of me really loved Jonah’s shock and surprise at segregation
and race itself. Are we coming closer to a true color-blind society?
But part of me was a little sad that my boy had no classmates who were
black. I’m not sure how we can rectify de facto segregation without
some awareness of color.
Apt. 11d 
He’s what, a third grader? Once he’s in college, the cafeteria tables will be at least half tidily segregated. (Speaking of which, it would be interesting to know how much self-segregation correlates with college drop-out rates for African-Americans.)
Speaking of racial consciousness, when my daughter was in pre-K in DC, being conscious of race was literally a learning objective for that year. I don’t think it took.
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My 11-year old attends a school genuinely integrated by race and class, one of the few public schools like that in the country. Last year my son was born, and spent 2 days in the ICU with lots of babies who looked like they were genuinely in danger. So my daughter first saw him through a window into the ICU. She looked incredibly distraught, staring with horror thorugh the window. I asked her later whether she was worried. She said “No. I was worried, when I thought he was that tiny baby” (a 2 lbs premature baby who was next to him and seemed to have very poor chances from the conversations I was hearing the long hours I sat there with my malingering newcomer) “He didn’t look like he would live”. I stared at here and, eventually, just said, “Didn’t you notice that baby was black?”. “Yes”, she said, unblinkingly. “And you thought he was your brother?”. “Yes. Why not?” she said, mystified. Just to be clear, my children all look like they live in Leave it To Beaver Land, as do their parents.
I dunno what the point is, but it came to mind.
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Coincidentally, a class I was observing on Thursday viewed the entirety of MLK’s “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. I was surprised how attentive they were–mesmerized really–as this is generally a pretty unruly group. I wished they’d had more time at the end for discussion–though the teacher wasn’t very good at facilitating. The kids seemed split over whether we’ve come very far since MLK’s time.
Regarding kids and perception of race: when I was in kindergarten, I had a “boyfriend” who I talked about all the time and played with constantly at school. My mother came to pick me up and asked the teacher to point him out to her on the playground, and was shocked to learn he was black. I wasn’t hiding the fact (and she didn’t care), I just had no idea that this could in any way be a relevant or even interesting piece of information. Kids learn that the gradations of skin color are important socially, and they don’t learn it til they are exposed to or witness discrimination or racist comments. Up to that point, most kids view the difference in skin color like they see the difference in hair color, height, eye color–physical differences that aren’t particularly meaningful. Sad when they begin to get messages that tell them otherwise.
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Well, Indian George also wouldn’t have been allowed in the same swimming pool (whether he was Native American Indian or India Indian). My parents grew up in the south (near Memphis), and the tales were pretty striking to a child growing up in Seattle during the 1970’s – definitely seemed like a whole different, uglier world.
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My great grandfather was given silver nitrate by a quack for his arthritis, which turned his skin permanently purple. Old grandpa Norton, a big old racist and a drunk, wasn’t let into his favorite Irish bars in Chicago, because he was colored. Oh, life’s little ironies.
harry, how great that our kids are so innocent. Let’s hope they don’t learn otherwise.
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Lends a whole new meaning to “The Color Purple”.(Ducks, and runs away)
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I’ve been thinking about this recently because we have a lot of great picture books with black children, both stories explicitly about black families but also where the black and brown faces are just mingled into the general landscapes or crowd scenes– but. We’ve been reading chapter books before bedtime: Betsy-Tacy, Ramona, Little House. Notice the lack of racial diversity? Anyone got any good recommendations for 5 year old girls that are racially diverse?
And my girls aren’t black, or white– their father is Hispanic. Same story– we’ve got picture books, and Dora. The end.
However, my girls do go to a racially diverse urban public school, so there’s always that.
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I remember coming home from kindergarten having learned the counting rhyme, showing off for my mother, eenie meenie miney moe, catch a nigger by the toe, if he hollers let him go… and she said, “it’s TIGER, dear”. So, well, I was five, mommy said it was tiger, it was tiger. And I think all the other mommies were in cahoots, we had all been corrected within a few weeks. It was tiger from then on out. Only LONG afterward did it occur to me, HEY, tigers don’t have toes, and if you catch hold of them they EAT you, they don’t holler they GROWL this doesn’t make any damn sense at all…
My kids have no idea that it was ever anything but tiger, and I’m not going to enlighten them.
My six-year-old adores Betsy-Tacy. I don’t think it’s big news that the books are full of white kids, she doesn’t notice particularly. She sees a lot of movies with a variety of kids.
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I agree that is cute when 8-year-olds are innocent. But innocent (ignorant?) 18- and 28- and 38-years-olds (and older) are not so cute. They innocently can contribute to perpetuation of institutional racism. I think it is a priority for kids and young adults to learn about diversity based on abstract principles, and if possible to get first-hand experience. I find it unsurprising (and good) that colleges and universities (and elite private schools) emphasize this … they have the resources to work at instilling better skills for dealing with diversity in society based on both theory and for-real experience. (This mainly requires giving scholarships to students of color.)
I think that one learns more and perhaps loses ones innocence younger when the diversity is everywhere … and I think this is overall good. I didn’t grow up in a big city but in an Army town and am eternally grateful to have had hugely diverse schoolmates, neighbors, friends … Puerto Rican, African-American, many mixed race Army families (Afro-American-Korean, Anglo-Japanese, etc), and regular whites like my family. Not that there wasn’t racism. There was. I learned about both diversity and racism. I remember learning interesting lessons when I had a 3rd grade friend who was African American and lower income than my family. I also remember some mild teasing of my older sister when she dated a Puerto Rican boy; this was mostly only kidding, as his family was so nice and he was clearly such a smart boy … he even wound up being a classmate of mine when I went to an Ivy League school. There was more friction when my other sister married and had two biracial kids with a South-Asian man, but their eventual split up was blamed much more on substance abuse than on skin color or race.
For those in more homogeneous towns it is helpful that there are books and movies that show diversity (Pursuit of Happiness is a good one about both poverty and race … also see The Education of Little Tree. I was heartened that the former was such a hit since it was fairly harsh despite the happy ending). Literature, art, films are important but certainly not completely a substitute for day-to-day experience.
Finally, I keep marvelling about how great my son’s daycare was on teaching lessons well — simple and honest and age-appropriate: “Before Martin Luther King, brown kids like N and white kids like D weren’t allowed to go to the same school” or “Before Columbus (or the Pilgrims) this part of the country wasn’t empty, there were native Americans here who had to figure out how to live with the European people with their peachy skin.”
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Generally speaking, educated white middle class Americans have a successfully installed working PC module that keeps them from making major blunders, and when the module fails, it makes national news. At least from what I see on the internet, even under cover of anonymity, crude displays of anti-black racism are far less common than severe misogyny. (I get a lot from reading thehousingbubbleblog.com, but a lot of those guys really have it in for women as being stupid, materialistic gold-diggers. Or worse yet, real estate agents.) The absence of the PC module is quite noticeable when one is dealing with non-Americans, for instance Eastern Europeans.
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I wonder sometimes if I do my kids a disservice by so carefully avoiding a more realistic view of racism. This is another example of “I’m going to teach my kids the way I want to the world to be, not the way the world is,” that I sometimes stumble into.
Interestingly, as a child I clearly remember that my mother taught me that girls have as many opportunities as boys, and will be judged based upon their accomplishments and not just their looks. And then I went out into the real world, completely lacking in actual skills and a realistic way to deal with life! And I was convinced that my mother LIED TO ME!! Which she did, but she meant well.
And here I am, also meaning well just like my mom, and still unclear as to how to relate facts without reinforcing the message behind those facts.
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One of the early Betsy-Tacys has a Syrian girl (and community) who the girls befriend in the face of community suspicion. But those characters conspicuously disappear even before Betsy’s move to the big city (which itself is surely more diverse than it is represented).
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My guess is that in America, only white children have the privilege of being innocent/ignorant about race. Different children are different, but mine started noticing that “it seemed like it was the blonde girls who got all the good parts” when she was four or five. Non-white characters in books/movies/tv are fairly rare, and when present, usually play supporting roles. Smart children notice this, if they don’t already identify with the leader.
I also think that we have to be careful touting our innocence about race when we live in racially un-diverse environments. Does the person in North Dakota who believes, theoretically, that race won’t matter (but who has never met/worked with/praised a black person) really know how he feels about race?
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My daughter goes to an elementary school with more non-whites than whites. We get a lot of flak for going to this school (low test scores, low income student body, and so on…)
She’s only 8 but is borderline obsessed with racial equality and the civil rights movement. She is enthusiastically campaigning for Barak Obama. She can recite a time-line of Martin Luther King’s life and many of his speeches.
I think she is this way because most of her classmates are African-American, but I honestly don’t know. Maybe she’d be interested in this history no matter what.
But she isn’t shocked by racism. Our neighborhood is 99.9% white, but the apartments that her school bus stops at are 99.9% non-white.
I asked her why she was supporting Barak Obama for President over Hillary. She said that we need a change in how we decide who is rich and who is poor. She doesn’t think that people will take change seriously until it comes from the President.
I don’t know whether to be sad
that she doesn’t have any of that innocence…or to be proud that she is so actively trying to learn about our history and change it.
And Amy P., just a few months ago, I was walking through the local zoo with my daughter and a (non-white) friend. A mother and her son walked by. The son said, “Look, Mama, there’s a nigger!”
So, my very limited experience is that not everyone is over their racism yet.
Interesting discussion, though.
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K,
I was talking about “educated white middle class Americans,” which is the group I’ve had the most experience observing. You can bet they’d rather chew off their right hand rather than commit a racial pop-out. It’s actually rather entertaining to see how many ways there are of saying “that school doesn’t have many white kids and way too many Black and Hispanic kids,” without saying so in so many words, often with a lowered voice and quick pan of the room to see who is standing nearby. Last year one of the Eastern European moms at my kid’s old school in DC was wanting to know what the heck is the deal with the weird American racial nomenclature, and some of the parents agreed with her that it didn’t make a lot of sense, but you should have seen how quickly the subject was changed when one of the African-American moms came over!
I think racial innocence can go on quite a while (at least for white kids), even while registering the fact of difference. Part of the reason for this “innocence” is that younger kids are self-centered, interested in things rather than people, and not super observant (I certainly was both, probably until junior high). If you are a little kid and you are obsessed with dinosaurs or bugs or worms, you’re not particularly interested in the appearance of your fellow explorer or worm digger. (Princess mania does encourage girls to focus a lot more on appearance.)
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K — no question that you should be very proud and not at all sad.
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Agreed. Innocence is one more privilege for lighter skinned kids. I just would like that luxury spread around better.
I told my dad this story yesterday and he got choked up. When he was in college, he earned money for tuition by working in the steel mills and factories in the Southside of Chicago. He had a good buddy from the Kraft Food company. The buddy was black. My dad was allowed to go to the buddy’s house to listen to jazz records, but his friend wasn’t allowed to come to his house. There was too much fear about what the neighbors would say.
Sure, we have to deal with the legacy of racism and my kid will have to clean up a previous generation’s mess, but I still have to be happy that he’s made it to eight without judging a person based on the color of his skin and that his gut reaction to racism (“that’s crazy!”) is absolutely the right response.
Dad reminded me of a line from South Pacific, “you have to be taught how to hate.” I’m rather glad that my kid has been spared that horror.
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I agree that you have to be “taught” how to hate. But, don’t agree that you have to be taught how to discriminate and prejudge. I think that often comes naturally out of our own commitments to our families, and neighborhoods, and communities. That’s why simply being race blind isn’t the solution, unless societies are also fully integrated at almost the molecular level (the world is a different place when your own family contains different races). Otherwise, children will internalize the regularities in their environment (black people aren’t doctors, women aren’t presidents, Indians are doctors, . . . ). The age at which they do it will depend on their own personalities (and how much they interact with the world).
So, hatred needs to be taught (and we shouldn’t), but so does tolerance and respect and inclusion (and that requires being aware differences — race, but also other differences).
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Our extended family is multi-racial. Christimas Eve at my house will be a mix of Italian, Indian, Puerto Rican, Irish, and Jewish.
I honestly don’t think my kid has made any of those race/gender connections in his head yet. He also has never recognized that his brother is disabled in anyway. At least, he’s never verbalized it. I’ve tried to have the “why your brother is different” conversation with him, but it’s never gone very far, because he doesn’t recognize that his brother is different. And I like it that way.
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Suggestions for non-lily white books: Caddie Woodlawn. Captain Underpants.
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