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Comments:
Claudia - 2006-04-17 16:37:49
Dusty describes non-whites as having "brown skin" - not by a "place of origin." We discuss these things as they come up but she has friends of many backgrounds and races. All her favorite teachers so far have been African-American. She doesn't view "others" as different from "us" other than the visual differences in skin color. At least not yet. One of her good friends is Turkish. She notices how people pronounce words differently and we talk about accents - non-native speakers versus regional US accents. But, otherwise, she doesn't see race they way we do, she hasn't been conditioned to be prejudiced. I hope she never is.
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elgan - 2006-04-17 17:44:05
I enjoyed your blog-comment link, but couldn�t read to the end, there was just too much of it! As for the racial/physical difference issue, our white, middle-class children (that�s your and mine) have all grown up in suburbia and been exposed to a paucity of racial types. Mine, at least, have gotten more of an exposure through television and since this is a university town, they see lots of foreign exchange students. I would suggest that you start taking AJ to an innercity playground. That would be an eye opener, for both of you, and it would be interesting to gauge your own reaction. I think you�re right. The 5-year-olds should be running things, at least in that area.
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Anna - 2006-04-17 17:56:36
This is one of my big concerns too, especially as the mother of two non-white kids. The bottom line is that non-whites ARE valued less in our societies, just as females are. We're moving in the right direction but it's a long haul. My two have both ended up defining themselves as black, saying it's a political description of their life experiences so far. I often feel that if the terms were brown and pink we'd be in a better place as they lack the connotations of black and white. Those are too powerful to be applied to skin.
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Chris - 2006-04-17 17:57:37
I remember taking my kids, who were probably 6 and 4, to church for the first time for a wedding. I'd never really thought about how really ghastly catholic churches are until them. They did not like the crucifix at all, and who could blame them. Looking at it as a heather the whole thing seems pretty ghoulish.
About race, I think you're quite right -- left to themselves, kids don't really make distinctions. Or they do (G has darker skin), but the distinctions don't mean anything. So the important thing is not to freak out and cause them to think there's some meaning to superficial differences. Which is, of course, hard to do. Many of M's good friends are black, but it's easy to not make much of a deal about it because their parents are pretty much middle class professionals who think about things pretty much the way I do -- there's no huge class or social difference. I think it must be really hard for them, though, since they obviously want to raise their kids to not think too much about race, or to be limited by race, but at the same time they sort of have to be thinking about it all the time -- they wouldn't want to send their kids, for example, to a school where they'd be the only kid of color. Kind of a thinking about it all the time while pretending to not be thinking about it at all sort of thing. And I htink it does affect at least one of M's friends. She's really shy in situations where she doesn't know anyone, and M and I both think it has to do with some level of discomfort with being in a situation where she's the only black kid. Which is completely understandable, of course. Another friend, whose mother is white, doesn't actually seem to care at all. And a third friend, whose father is mixed race and from Ghana, -- I think her feelings may be somewhat complicated. It's one of the very nice things about living where we do, though -- things are pretty mixed up in a good way.
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chris - 2006-04-17 18:03:34
I don't know about taking AJ to an inner city playground. That's kind of a heavy burden to put on a kid. Also, there you're not just dealing with a race difference but a fairly huge class difference. There's no way he would know off hand the rules by which things work there -- I think you might end up convincing him that people of color really are quite different from him, which is probably not what you had in mind. Life is complicated --
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Harriet - 2006-04-17 21:43:09
Claudia, that is exactly AJ's point of view too. And it's a very self-centered point of view -- what aspects are my friends like or unlike myself? There is none of the cultural associations with race or racial meaning. It is purely visual (with regards to skin-color) or aural (with regards to accents, which AJ also notices) observation. And race is not, by any means, the only sensitivity issue we run into with such a focus on sensory description. Weight, for instance, comes up -- AJ does, I hope, know that it's not nice to say that someone is fat even if it's true, but I'm not sure he really understands why. I remember when we first talked about it after he had pointed at someone and said, "that man is really, really fat." He truly did not understand why it was be a problem to mention it. If it's true, why not say it? "How would you feel if someone called you fat?" I asked. "But I'm not fat." he replied. But he does know what it is like for someone to call him names and I was able to explain it that way. As for the inner city playground issue, while I hope that AJ will soon be in a more ethnically diverse environment, I'm inclined to agree with Chris that that is not the way I'd choose to go about it. Having lived for a decade on the south side of Chicago where different races coexist on the same streets and in the same buildings, but might as well live in different countries for all the interaction that takes place, where an already tense town/gown situation is made worse by a marked difference in socio-economic and educational backgrounds that falls on racial lines, just exposing people to people of other races or ethnicities doesn't mean interaction and understanding. It might have the opposite effect. And he's too young to understand what's really going on (and quite possibly so am I). For now, I think, letting him interact in a way that is largely free of the assumptions adults tend to make about each other is about all I could ask for. There's time for history and politics later. It's not like we're doing such a great job of it that I feel like I have something constructive to say to help him make the world a better place.
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Smed - 2006-04-18 09:37:25
A little late here, but Katie has noticed that she's a little darker than other kids, and her best friend at the moment is Justice, who is half-Indian, but she gets along well with all of the kids, and so far we haven't had any looks. This burgh is a little more diverse thanks to the College, which is always nice.
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