First a link to a hilarious parody of the genre of blog comments. Read it and weep.

The Easter Bunny came extra early to our house. Consequently he forgot to hide the Easter eggs. Fortunately AJ did not notice. He was too busy disemboweling his Easter basket. �Jelly beans! I love jelly beans! And look at this chocolate egg! And,� pulling a small space-themed pinball game from his basket, �how did the Easter Bunny know I love space?�

How indeed. He is a rodent of many mysteries.

After AJ pulled all the chocolate out of his basket and ate a bunny as big as his head, we made him take all his holiday and chocolate-fueled energy and bottle it up while he stood for an hour in the vestibule of the church and listened to the priest drone on about things he didn�t understand. �What is he talking about, Mommy? Why do you have to eat things? How come I don�t get any? I�m hungry!�

Clearly we�ve been falling down on the religious education part of the Catholic marriage contract. I�m only a little bit sorry about this, I have to admit. But then, I�m a heathen. But then I found that I really didn�t want to explain the Easter story to AJ. Despite a church filled with little girls in frilly dresses and overly-fragrant lilies, it is not a pretty story at all. It�s full of blood and violence and hatred and I really don�t want to tell him about it yet.

Instead our Easter turned out to be about another kind of ugly story. As we were heading from the nether-regions of the parking lot into the church, we saw a large Latino family quite a ways up ahead. AJ said, �I think that�s G.� G is the only Latino child in AJ�s otherwise almost entirely white school. I have been concerned about AJ�s lack of exposure to racial diversity, especially now that he�s beginning to comment on the physical differences between G and his other friends or, more often, about the marketing-driven racially diverse picture books like The Magic School Bus. I glanced briefly at the family. �No, I don�t think that�s G.� �But he has the same color hair and skin,� said AJ. �Just because he has the same color hair and skin doesn�t mean it�s the same person. Lots of people have the same color hair and skin. I don�t think that looks like his Mommy. Her hair is different.� AJ thought about that a while. �Maybe you�re right. But I still think it�s G.�

In my anxiety about AJ making snap judgments based on appearances, I had overlooked one major fact � I hadn�t bothered to look very closely. In fact, it turned out to be G. and his family after all (it�s true that his mother had got a perm since I last saw her, so I hadn�t recognized her). They were standing in front of us in the vestibule of the church for forty minutes before I realized it just as they were walking out. I had assumed AJ was making assumptions based on his limited experience but instead I was the one jumping to conclusions. I should have known better. In my anxiety about AJ jumping to conclusions based on racial profiles, I was the one who was prejudging.

rs536 once asked me about what I thought of AJ�s perceptions of race because she knew it was something I worried about. But AJ doesn�t think about race. He doesn�t know what race is. He knows what he sees � that people look different from one another. AJ, like most of the five-year-olds I know, is interested in cataloging things by category and color is one of his favorite categories. At a birthday party he attended this weekend, for example, he received a handful of little pellets that, when dropped in warm water, melted away to reveal animal-shaped sponges. He sorted them first by color, making piles of green and yellow and red and blue. Then he tried sorting them by type of animal � monkeys, wildebeests, lions, elephants.

When he describes his friends at school, he sorts them by gender, by who wears sneakers and who doesn�t, by who likes the Power Rangers and who doesn�t, by who has brown hair or yellow hair or some other color hair. He doesn�t bother to sort by skin color because, as he has figured out, there is G who has �dark brown skin� and then there is everyone else. AJ looks and notices and describes what he sees, but he doesn�t know anything about the history behind racial description and discrimination. He wouldn�t see the point. To AJ, it�s merely another descriptive factor about a person. To overlook it, would mean you weren�t really paying attention to the individual. To AJ the color of one�s skin carries no more or less weight than the type of T-shirt he wears or whether she is short or tall. This is, I think, as it should be. I seem to be the one messing it up.

So how and when do you talk about race with children? On the one hand, I want to preserve this state � AJ doesn�t think anything of it. On the other hand, I also wouldn�t want him to accidentally behave in a way that might be insensitive. I�m inclined to think the kids do better about these things when the adults stay out of it. We�ve been doing it wrong for years.

I�ve noticed at AJ�s school that the teachers always speak to G�s mother very slowly (and a little bit too loudly) as if she doesn�t understand English well (she�s from Mexico). But we talked this morning before school about how well the boys behaved in church, despite having to stand for an hour, about how many people were there, about how all the bad Catholics show up on Easter and crowd all the better-intentioned church goers out, about how her daughter broke two fingers the day before Easter trying to do a handspring. Her English, although accented, was perfect and came easily. It seems I�m not the only one making assumptions. I�m thinking we should let the five year olds take charge. They seem to have a better idea of the world order.

7 people said it like they meant it