Yesterday my daughter and I had our first serious conversation about race.
We had gone to the playground, which usually has a very racially diverse mixture of kids, but this time the only other kids on the playground were African-American.
Millie will usually get to the playground and fixate on one or two kids, following them around and joining in their play. This time she hung near me, reluctant to leave.
"Go on and play, sweetie," I said, pointing out a couple of kids her age, "There's a little girl, and there's a boy your size, you can play with them."
"But they all have black faces," she said very seriously.
Millie has never seemed to care about race before; one of the boys she likes best at her preschool is African-American. I knew when she was born that I was going to have an interesting time handling race issues with my pale-skinned, red-haired, Latina daughter, but I hadn't thought we'd be having this conversation quite so soon.
"Yes, they have brown skins. People come in lots of colors. We have peach skins. Abuelo and Bis-abuelo have brown skins too."
"No!" she said, incredulously.
"Yes, they do. People are lots of colors, but it doesn't mean anything about how we are inside."
I felt dissatisfied with that response, because of course race does inform how people are inside. Our experiences shape how we think and interact with the world, and race and ethnicity shape our experiences. But how much of that can you get across to a three-year-old?
"Andre has a brown skin, and you like to play with him."
"Yeah."
"So go and play, sweetie."
She ran off, and did play with an African-American boy, and later with an Asian boy as well, but when a blond-haired little girl showed up, Millie glommed onto her for the rest of our visit.
Later on, we talked about it with her father too.
"Aunt Jenny and Aunt Heather have darker skins too, because they're Japanese," he told her.
"No!" protested Millie.
It struck me that, although her family is racially diverse, Millie doesn't see it. Maybe that's a function of many of us having lighter skins, or maybe that's a function of the fact that we live out our ethnicities, but we don't necessarily talk about it with her as an aspect of skin color and race. Now that I know she's noticing skin color, we'll be more explicit about the different races and ethnicities of our family members and friends. Hopefully that will help her gravitate towards the kids on the playground who are her age, or doing things that look like fun, and not just the ones who look like she does.
I am 74 years old and very recently heard a presentation on race relations. I was tremendously impressed with the connection and validation of many little impressions and experiences I had had over my lifetime. Over these many years I have been confused, embarrassed, and amazed at my own changing thoughts about race.
More exciting though were the speakers other two categories.
Race was almost dismissed as irrelevant because there is almost no one that is of only one race.
Ethnicity is a greater determinent of difference, curiosity, attraction and interest.
Culture is the third category and may be the most attractive and exciting. These are the differences that we save our money and our leisure time to explore.
How much better that we learn to be excited about meeting a person that is different than we are, someone that has learned other ways of interpreting and using colors, clothing, games, words and so much more. Then maybe sometime learning how we all came to our various ways of being.
Posted by: Carolyn Negrete | February 23, 2009 at 10:40 PM