THINK OF YOUR EARLIEST RACE-RELATED MEMORY. HOW OLD WERE you? When I ask adults in my workshops this question, they call out a range of ages: “Three,” “Five,” “Eight,” “Thirteen,” “Twenty.” Sometimes they talk in small groups about what they remember. At first they hesitate to speak, but then the stories come flooding forward, each person’s memory triggering another’s.
Some are stories of curiosity, as when a light-skinned child wonders why a dark-skinned person’s palms are so much lighter than the backs of his hands. Some are stories of fear and avoidance, communicated verbally or nonverbally by parents, as when one White woman describes her mother nervously telling her to roll up the windows and lock the doors as they drove through a Black community. Some are stories of active bigotry, transmitted casually from one generation to the next through the use of racial slurs and ethnic jokes. Some are stories of confusing mixed messages, as when a White man remembers the Black maid who was “just like family” but was not allowed to eat from the family dishes or use the upstairs bathroom. Some are stories of terror, as when a Black woman remembers being chased home from school by a German shepherd, deliberately set loose by its White owner as she passed by. I often ask audience members, “What do you remember? Something someone said or did? A name-calling incident? An act of discrimination? The casual observation of skin color differences? Were you the observer or the object of observation?”
In large groups, I hesitate to ask the participants to reveal their memories to a crowd of strangers, but I ask instead what emotions are attached to the memories. The participants use such words as anger, confusion, surprise, sadness, embarrassment. Notice that this list does not include such words as joy, excitement, delight. Too often the stories are painful ones. Then I ask, “Did you talk to anyone about what happened? Did you tell anyone how you felt?” It is always surprising to me to see how many people will say that they never discussed these clearly emotional experiences with anyone. Why not? Had they already learned that race was not a topic to be discussed?
If they didn’t talk to anyone else about it, how did these three- or five- or eight- or thirteen-year-old children make sense of their experience? Has the confusion continued into adulthood? Are we as adults prepared to help the children we care about make sense of their own race-related observations?
Like many African Americans, I have many race-related memories, beginning when I was quite small. I remember being about three years old when I had an argument with an African American playmate. He said I was “black.” “No I’m not,” I said, “I’m tan.” I now see that we were both right. I am Black, a person of African descent, but tan is surely a more accurate description of my light-brown skin than black is. As a three-year-old child who knew her colors, I was prepared to stand my ground. As an adult looking back on this incident, I wonder if I had also begun to recognize, even at three, that in some circles it was better to be tan than to be black. Had I already started internalizing racist messages?
Questions and confusion about racial issues begin early. Though adults often talk about the “color blindness” of children, the fact is that children as young as three do notice physical differences such as skin color, hair texture, and the shape of facial features.1 Certainly preschoolers talk about what they see, and often they do it in ways that make parents uncomfortable. How should we respond when they do?
My own children have given me many opportunities to think about this question. For example, one winter day, my youngest son, David, observed a White mother helping her brown-skinned biracial daughter put on her boots in the hallway of his preschool. “Why don’t they match, Mommy?” he asked loudly. Absentmindedly collecting his things, I didn’t quite understand what he was talking about—mismatched socks, perhaps? When I asked, he explained indignantly, “You and I match. They don’t match. Mommies and kids are supposed to match.”
David, like many three-year-olds (and perhaps some adults), had overgeneralized from his routine observations of White parents with White children, and Black parents, like his own, with Black children. As a psychologist, I recognized this preschool tendency to overgeneralize as a part of his cognitive development, but as a mother standing with her child in the hallway, I was embarrassed, afraid that his comment might have somehow injured the mother-daughter pair standing in the hallway with us. I responded matter-of-factly, “David, they don’t have to match. Sometimes parents and kids match, and sometimes they don’t.”
More often, my children and I have been on the receiving end of a preschooler’s questions. The first conversation of this type I remember occurred when my oldest son, Jonathan, was enrolled in a day-care center where he was one of few children of color, and the only Black child in his class. One day, as we drove home from the day-care center, Jonathan said, “Eddie says my skin is brown because I drink too much chocolate milk. Is that true?”* Eddie was a White three-year-old in Jonathan’s class who, like David, had observed a physical difference and was now searching for an explanation.
“No,” I replied, “your skin is brown because you have something in your skin called melanin. Melanin is very important because it helps protect your skin from the sun. Eddie has melanin in his skin, too. Remember when Eddie went to Florida on vacation and came back showing everybody his tan? It was the melanin in his skin that made it get darker. Everybody has melanin, you know. But some people have more than others. At your school, you are the kid with the most!”
Jonathan seemed to understand the idea and smiled at the thought that he was the child with the most of something. I talked more about how much I liked the color of his pecan-colored skin, how it was a perfect blend of my light-brown skin and his father’s dark-brown complexion. I wanted to affirm who Jonathan was, a handsome brown-skinned child. I wanted to counter the implication of Eddie’s question—that there was perhaps something wrong with brown skin, the result of “too much” chocolate milk.
This process of affirmation was not new. Since infancy I had talked about how much I liked his smooth brown skin and those little curls whenever I bathed him or brushed his hair. I searched for children’s books depicting brown-skinned children. When Jonathan was one year old, we gave him a large brown rag doll, complete with curly black hair made of yarn, a Marcus Garvey T-shirt, and an African name. Olayinka, or Olay for short, was his constant companion at home and at the day-care center during nap time. Especially because we had lived in predominantly White communities since his birth, I felt it was important to make sure he saw himself reflected positively in as many ways as possible. As many Black families do, I think we provided an important buffer against the negative messages about Blackness offered by the larger society.2
But Jonathan continued to think about the color of his skin, and sometimes he would bring it up. One Saturday morning I was cooking pancakes for breakfast, and Jonathan was at my side, eagerly watching the pancakes cook on the griddle. When I flipped the pancakes over, he was excited to see that the cream-colored batter had been transformed into a golden brown. Jonathan remarked, “I love pancakes. They are brown, just like me.” On another occasion when we were cooking together, he noticed that I had set some eggs out on the kitchen counter. Some of the eggs were brown, and some of them were white. He commented on the fact that the eggs were not all the same color. “Yes,” I said, “they do have different shells. But look at this!” I cracked open a brown egg and emptied its contents into a bowl. Then I cracked open a white egg. “See, they are different on the outside, but the same on the inside. People are the same way. They look different on the outside, but they are the same on the inside.”
Jonathan’s questions and comments, like David’s and Eddie’s, were not unusual for a child of his age. Preschool children are very focused on outward appearances, and skin color is the racial feature they are most likely to comment on.3 I felt good about my ability as a parent to respond to Jonathan’s questions. (I was, after all, teaching courses on the psychology of racism and child development. I was not caught completely off guard!) But I wondered about Jonathan’s classmates. What about Eddie, the boy with the chocolate-milk theory? Had anyone set him straight?
In fact, Eddie’s question, “Is your skin brown because you drink too much chocolate milk?” represented a good attempt to make sense of a curious phenomenon that he was observing. All the kids in the class had light skin except for Jonathan. Why was Jonathan’s skin different? It didn’t seem to be dirt—Jonathan washed his hands before lunch like all the other children did, and there was no change. He did often have chocolate milk in his lunch box—maybe that was it. Eddie’s reasoning was first-rate for a three-year-old. The fact that he was asking about Jonathan’s skin, rather than speculating about his own, reflected that he had already internalized “Whiteness” as the norm, which it was in that school. His question did not reflect prejudice in an adult sense, but it did reveal confusion. His theory was flawed, and he needed some help.
I decided to ask a staff member how she and the other preschool teachers were handling children’s questions about racial differences. She smiled and said, “It really hasn’t come up.” I was amazed. I knew it had come up; after all, Jonathan had reported the conversations to me. How was it that she had not noticed?
Maybe it was easy not to notice. Maybe these conversations among three-year-olds had taken place at the lunch table or in the sand box, away from the hearing of adults. I suspect, too, that there may have been some selective inattention on the part of the staff. When children make comments to which we don’t know how to respond, it may be easier simply not to hear what has just been said or to let it slip from our consciousness and memory. Then we don’t have to respond, because it “hasn’t come up.”
Many adults do not know how to respond when children make race-related observations. Imagine this scenario. A White mother and preschool child are shopping in the grocery store. They pass a Black woman and child, and the White child says loudly, “Mommy, look at that girl! Why is she so dirty?” (Confusing dark skin with dirt is a common misconception among White preschool children.) The White mother, embarrassed by her child’s comment, responds quickly with a “Ssh!”
An appropriate response might have been: “Honey, that little girl is not dirty. Her skin is as clean as yours. It’s just a different color. Just like we have different hair colors, people have different skin colors.” If the child still seemed interested, the explanation of melanin could be added.4 Perhaps afraid of saying the wrong thing, however, many parents don’t offer an explanation. They stop at “Ssh,” silencing the child but not responding to the question or the reasoning underlying it. Children who have been silenced often enough learn not to talk about race publicly. Their questions don’t go away, they just go unasked.
I saw the legacy of this silencing in my Psychology of Racism classes. My students had learned that there is a taboo against talking about race, especially in racially mixed settings, and creating enough safety in the class to overcome that taboo was the first challenge for me as an instructor. But the evidence of the internalized taboo is apparent long before children reach college.
When addressing parent groups, I often hear from White parents who tell me with pride that their children are “color-blind.” Usually the parent offers as evidence a story of a friendship with a child of color whose race or ethnicity has never been mentioned to the parent. For example, a father reported that his eight-year-old daughter had been talking very enthusiastically about a friend she had made at school. One day when he picked his daughter up from school, he asked her to point out her new friend. Trying to point her out of a large group of children on the playground, his daughter elaborately described what the child was wearing. She never said she was the only Black girl in the group. Her father was pleased that she had not, a sign of her color blindness. I wondered if, rather than a sign of color blindness, it was a sign that she had learned not to be so impolite as to mention someone’s race.
My White college students would sometimes refer to someone as Black in hushed tones, sometimes whispering the word as though it were a secret or a potentially scandalous identification. When I detected this behavior, I liked to point it out, saying it is not an insult to identify a Black person as Black. Of course, sometimes one’s racial group membership is irrelevant to the conversation, and then there is no need to mention it, but when it is relevant, as when pointing out the only Black girl in a crowd, we should not be afraid to say so.
Of course, when we talk to children about racial issues, or anything else, we have to keep in mind each child’s developmental stage and cognitive ability to make sense of what we are saying. Preschool children are quite literal in their use of language and concrete in their thinking. They talk about physical differences and other commonly observed cultural differences such as language and style of dress because they are tangible and easy to recognize. They may be confused by the symbolic constructs that adults use.5
This point was brought home to me in another conversation with my son Jonathan. As a working mother, I often found trips to the grocery store to be a good opportunity for “quality” time with my then four-year-old. We would stroll the grocery aisles, chatting, as he sat in the top part of the grocery cart and I filled the bottom. On such an outing, Jonathan told me that someone at school had said he was Black. “Am I Black?” he asked me. “Yes, you are,” I replied. “But my skin is brown,” he said. I was instantly reminded of my own preschool “I’m not black, I’m tan” argument on this point. “Yes,” I said, “your skin is brown, but Black is a term that people use to describe African Americans, just like White is used to describe people who came from Europe. It is a little confusing,” I conceded, “because Black people aren’t really the color black, but different shades of brown.” I mentioned different members of our family and the different shades we represented, but I said that we were all African Americans and in that sense could all be called Black.
Then I said, “It’s the same with White people. They come in lots of different shades—pink, beige, even light brown. None of them are white like this piece of paper.” I held up the white notepaper on which my grocery list was written as proof. Jonathan nodded his agreement with my description of Black people as really being varying shades of brown but hesitated when I said that White people were not really white in color. “Yes they are,” he said. I held up the paper again and said, “White people don’t really look like this.” “Yes, they do,” he insisted. “Okay,” I said, remembering that children learn from actual experiences. “Let’s go find one and see.” We were alone in the grocery aisle, but sure enough, when we turned the corner, there was a White woman pushing her cart down the aisle. I leaned over and whispered in Jonathan’s ear, “Now, see, she doesn’t look like this paper.” Satisfied with this evidence, he conceded the point, and we moved on in our conversation. As I discovered, we were just getting started.
Jonathan’s confusion about society’s “color” language was not surprising or unusual. At the same time that preschoolers are identifying the colors in the crayon box, they are also beginning to figure out racial categorizations. The color-coded language of social categories obviously does not match the colors we use to label objects. People of Asian descent are not really “yellow” like lemons; Native Americans don’t really look “red” like apples. I understood the problem and was prepared for this kind of confusion.
What was of most concern to me at that moment was the tone of my son’s question. In his tone of voice was the hint that maybe he was not comfortable being identified as Black, and I wondered what messages he was taking in about being African American. I said that if he wanted to, he could tell his classmate that he was African American. I said that he should feel very proud to have ancestors who were from Africa. I was just beginning to talk about ancient African civilizations when he interrupted me. “If Africa is so great, what are we doing here?” he asked.
I had not planned to have a conversation about slavery with my four-year-old in the grocery store that day. But I didn’t see how I could answer his question otherwise. Slavery is a topic that makes many of us uncomfortable. Yet the nature of Black-White race relations in the United States has been forever shaped by slavery and its social, psychological, and economic legacies. It requires discussion. But how does one talk to a four-year-old about this legacy of cruelty and injustice?
I began at the beginning. I knew his preschool had discussed the colonial days when Europeans first came to these shores. I reminded him of this and said:
A long, long time ago, before there were grocery stores and roads and houses here, the Europeans came. And they wanted to build roads and houses and grocery stores here, but it was going to be a lot of work. They needed a lot of really good, strong, smart workers to cut down trees, and build roads, and work on farms, and they didn’t have enough. So they went to Africa to get the strongest, smartest workers they could find. Unfortunately they didn’t want to pay them. So they kidnapped them and brought them here as slaves. They made them work and didn’t pay them. And that was really unfair.
Even as I told this story I was aware of three things: (1) I didn’t want to frighten this four-year-old, who might worry that these things would happen to him (another characteristic of four-year-old thinking); (2) I wanted him to know that his African ancestors were not just passive victims but had found ways to resist their victimization; and (3) I did not want him to think that all White people were bad. It is possible to have White allies.
So I continued:
Now, this was a long, long time ago. You were never a slave. I was never a slave. Grandmommy and Granddaddy were never slaves. This was a really long time ago, and the Africans who were kidnapped did whatever they could to escape. But sometimes the Europeans had guns and the Africans didn’t, so it was hard to get away. But some even jumped off the boats into the ocean to try to escape. There were slave rebellions, and many of the Africans were able to escape to freedom after they got here, and worked to help other slaves get free. Now, even though some White people were kidnapping Africans and making them work without pay, other White people thought that this was very unfair, which it was. And those White people worked along with the Black people to bring an end to slavery. So now it is against the law to have slaves.
Jonathan was paying very close attention to my story, and when I declared that slavery had ended a long time ago, he asked, “Well, when they weren’t slaves anymore, why didn’t they go back to Africa?” Thanks to the African American history classes I took in college, I knew enough to say, “Well, some did. But others might not have been able to because they didn’t have enough money, and besides that, by then they had families and friends who were living here and they might have wanted to stay.”
“And this is a nice place, too,” he declared.
“Yes it is.”
Over the next few weeks, an occasional question would come up about my story, and I knew that Jonathan was still digesting what I had said. Though I did not anticipate talking about slavery with my four-year-old, I was glad in retrospect that it was I who had introduced him to the subject, because I was able to put my own spin on this historical legacy, emphasizing both Black resistance to victimization and White resistance to the role of victimizer.
Too often I hear from young African American students the embarrassment they have felt in school when the topic of slavery is discussed, ironically one of the few ways that the Black experience is included in their school curriculum. Uncomfortable with the portrayal of their group as helpless victims—the rebellions and resistance offered by the enslaved Africans are rarely discussed—they squirm uncomfortably as they feel the eyes of White children looking to see their reaction to this subject.
In my professional development work with White teachers, they sometimes remark how uncomfortable they, too, are with this and other examples of the painful history of race relations in the United States. As one elementary school teacher said,
It is hard to tell small children about slavery, hard to explain that Black young men were lynched, and that police turned firehoses on children while other men bombed churches, killing Black children at their prayers. This history is a terrible legacy for all of us. The other day a teacher told me that she could not look into the faces of her students when she taught about these things. It was too painful, and too embarrassing.… If we are all uncomfortable, something is wrong in our approach.6
Something is wrong. While I think it is necessary to be honest about the racism of our past and present, it is also necessary to empower children (and adults) with the vision that change is possible. Concrete examples are critical. For young children these examples can sometimes be found in children’s picture books. One of my favorites is Faith Ringgold’s Aunt Harriet’s Underground Railroad in the Sky.7 Drawing on historical accounts of the Underground Railroad and the facts of Harriet Tubman’s life, this story is told from the point of view of a young Black girl who travels back in time and experiences both the chilling realities of slavery and the power of her own resistance and eventual escape.
White people are present in the story both as enemies (slave owners) and as allies (abolitionists). This dual representation is important for children of color, as well as for White children. I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with a White friend who often talked to her then-preschool son about issues of social justice. He had been told over and over the story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott, and it was one of his favorites as a four-year-old. But as he got a little older she began to notice a certain discomfort in him when she talked about these issues. “Are all White people bad?” he asked her. At the age of five, he seemed to be feeling badly about being White. She asked me for some advice. I recommended she begin talking more about what White people had done to oppose injustice. Finding examples of this in children’s literature can be a challenge, but one example is Jeanette Winter’s book Follow the Drinking Gourd.8 This too is a story about the Underground Railroad, but it highlights the role of a White man named Peg Leg Joe and other White allies who offer assistance along the escape route, again providing a tangible example of White resistance to injustice.
All of these preschool questions reflect the beginning of a developing racial identity. The particular questions my child asked me reflected his early experience as one of few Black children in a predominantly White community. Even in the context of all-Black communities, the color variations in the community, even within families, can lead to a series of skin-color-related conversations. For example, it is common to hear a preschool child describe a light-skinned Black person as White, often to the chagrin of the individual so identified. The child’s misclassification does not represent a denial of Blackness, only the child’s incomplete understanding of the adult world’s racial classifications. As preschoolers, my own children occasionally asked me if I was White. When I am misidentified by children as White, I usually reply matter-of-factly, “I am an African American person. We come in all shades of brown, dark brown, medium brown, and sometimes light brown—like me.”
The concept of race constancy, that one’s racial group membership is fixed and will not change, is not achieved until children are six or seven years old. (The same is true of gender constancy.)9 Just as preschool boys sometimes express a desire to have a baby like Mom when they grow up (and are dismayed when they learn they cannot), young Black children may express a desire to be White. Though such statements are certainly distressing to parents, they do not necessarily mean that the child has internalized a negative self-image. It may, however, reflect a child’s growing awareness of White privilege, conveyed through the media. For example, in a study of children’s race-related conversations, one five-year-old Black boy reportedly asked, “Do I have to be Black?” To the question of why he asked, he responded, “I want to be chief of paramedics.” His favorite TV show at the time featured paramedics and firefighters, all of whom were White.10
Though such comments by young children are not necessarily rooted in self-rejection, it is important to consider what messages children are receiving about the relative worth of light or dark skin. The societal preference for light skin and the relative advantage bestowed on light-skinned Blacks historically, often referred to as colorism, manifests itself not only in the marketplace but even within Black families.11
A particular form of internalized oppression, the skin-color prejudice found within Black communities is toxic to children and adults. A by-product of the plantation hierarchy, which privileged the light-skinned children of enslaved African women and White slave owners, a postslavery class system was created based on color. Historically the Black middle class has been a light-skinned group. But the racially mixed ancestry of many Black people can lead to a great deal of color variation among siblings and extended family members. The internalization of White-supremacist standards of beauty and the desire to maintain what little advantage can be gained in a racist system leads some families to reject darker-skinned members. Conversely, in some families, anger at White oppression and the pain of colorism can lead to resentment toward and rejection of lighter-skinned members. According to family therapist Nancy Boyd-Franklin, family attitudes about skin color are rarely discussed openly, but the messages are often clearly conveyed when some children are favored over others, or when a relative teasingly says, “Whose child are you?” to the child whose skin color varies from other family members. Boyd-Franklin writes,
All Black people, irrespective of their color, shade, darkness, or lightness, are aware from a very early age that their blackness makes them different from mainstream White America. It sets them apart from White immigrant groups who were not brought here as slaves and who have thus had a different experience in becoming assimilated into mainstream American culture. The struggle for a strong positive racial identity for young Black Afro-American children is clearly made more difficult by the realities of color prejudice.12
We need to examine not only our behavior toward our children but also the language we use around them. Is black ever used as a derogatory term to describe others, as in “that black so-and-so?” Is darkness seen as an obstacle to be overcome, as in “She’s dark, but she’s still pretty,” or avoided, as in “Stay out of the sun, you’re dark enough already?” Is lightness described as defective, as in “You need some sun, girl?” Do we sing hymns in church on Sunday proclaiming our wish to be washed “white as snow”? Even when our clear desire is to reflect positive images of Blackness to young Black children, our habits of speech may undermine our efforts unless we are intentional about examining the color-coded nature of our language.
Related to questions of color are issues of hair texture, an especially sensitive issue for Black women, young and old. I grew up with the expression “good hair.” Though no one in my household used that phrase often, I knew what it meant when I heard it. “Good hair” was straight hair, the straighter the better. I still remember the oohs and aahs of my White elementary school classmates when I arrived at school for “picture day” with my long mane of dark hair resting on my shoulders. With the miracle of a hot comb, my mother had transformed my ordinary braids into what I thought was a glamorous cascade of curls. I received many compliments that day. “How pretty you look,” the White teacher said. The truth is I looked pretty every day, but a clear message was being sent both at home and at school about what real beauty was.
I now wear my hair in its natural state of tiny curls. It has been that way since 1971. My sons are unfamiliar with Saturday afternoon trips to the beauty parlor, the smell of hot combs and chemical straighteners. Instead they grew up going with me or their father to the Black-owned barber shop where Black men and some women waited their turn for a seat in the barber’s chair. I admire their neatly trimmed heads, and they admire mine. I genuinely like the way my short hair looks and feels, and that sends an important message to my sons about how I feel about myself as a Black woman and, by extension, how I feel about them.
Though a woman’s choice to straighten her hair is not necessarily a sign of internalized oppression, it does reinforce the notion to an observant child that straight is better. In her book Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, bell hooks relates a conversation she had with a Black woman frustrated by her daughter’s desire for long blond hair, despite the family’s effort to affirm their Blackness. Observing the woman’s dark skin and straightened hair, she encouraged the mother to examine her own attitudes about skin color and hair texture to see what messages she might be communicating to her child by the way she constructed her own body image.13
Countering the images of the dominant culture is a challenge, but it can be done. Finding images that reflect the range of skin tones and hair textures in Black families is an important way to affirm a positive sense of Black identity. A wonderfully illustrated book for children that opposes the prevailing Eurocentric images of beauty is John Steptoe’s Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters: An African Tale.14 As the story states on the opening page, “Everyone agreed that Manyara and Nyasha are beautiful.” These lovely brown-skinned sisters have broad noses and full lips, with hair braided in short cornrows.
Though it is easier than it used to be to find children’s picture books depicting Black children authentically rather than as White children painted a darker shade, it may still be hard to find children’s books depicting Black children with very dark or very light skin. A medium brown seems to be the color of choice. Decorating one’s home with photographs of family and friends who represent a range of skin tones and hair textures is one way to begin to fill this representational gap.
From the time my children were infants, reading has been a shared activity in our family. I have always loved to read, and that love of books has been imparted to my children, who rarely leave home without a book to read on the way. I worked hard to find good children’s literature featuring African Americans and other children of color, but I also introduced my children to some of the books I liked when I was a child, most of which included only White children.
When Jonathan was just learning to read on his own and had advanced to “chapter books,” I introduced him to the Boxcar Children series of easy-reading mysteries, which I’d loved as a child.15 Written in the 1940s, these books feature four White children, two boys and two girls, orphaned and homeless, who lived in an abandoned railway car until they were found by their wealthy grandfather. From then on, they traveled with Grandfather and solved mysteries wherever they went.
Reading these volumes again with Jonathan, I had a new perception of them: how sexist they seemed to be. The two girls seemed to spend most of their time on these adventures cooking and cleaning and setting up house while the boys fished, paddled the canoe, and made the important discoveries. After reading several pages of this together, I decided to say something about it to my then-seven-year-old son. I asked if he knew what sexism was. He did not, so I explained that it was when girls were treated differently than boys just because they were girls. I said that the girls in this story were being treated differently than the boys, and I pointed out some examples and discussed the unfairness of it. Jonathan wanted to continue the story, and I agreed that we could finish it, despite my new perception. What pleased and surprised me as we continued to read was that Jonathan began to spot the gender bias himself. “Hey Mom,” he interrupted me as I read on, “there’s that stuff again!”
Learning to spot “that stuff”—whether it is racist, or sexist, or classist—is an important skill for children to develop. It is as important for my Black male children to recognize sexism and other forms of oppression as it is for them to spot racism. We are better able to resist the negative impact of oppressive messages when we see them coming than when they are invisible to us. While some may think it is a burden to children to encourage this critical consciousness, I consider it a gift. Educator Janie Ward calls this child-rearing process “raising resisters.”16 And there are infinite opportunities to do so.
One such opportunity came in the form of a children’s book of Bible stories, a gift from a friend. My son and I sat down to read the story of Moses together. We hadn’t gotten very far when I said, “You know, something is bothering me about this book.” “What is it?” he replied. “You know, this story took place in Egypt, and the people in these pictures do not look much like Egyptians.” “Well, what do Egyptians look like?” he asked. We turned to a children’s world atlas and found that the photographs of the Egyptians in the atlas had noticeably darker skin and hair than the drawings in the book. Though we did not discard the book, we did discuss the discrepancy.
I did not point out every omission or distortion I noticed (and I am sure that a lot got by me unnoticed), and sometimes my children didn’t agree with my observations. For example, when discussing with them my plans to talk about media stereotyping in this book, I offered the example of the Disney film The Lion King. A very popular family film, I was dismayed at the use of ethnically identifiable voices to characterize the hyenas, clearly the undesirables in the film. The Spanish-accented voice of Cheech Marin and the Black slang of Whoopi Goldberg clearly marked the hyenas racially. The little Lion King is warned never to go to the place where the hyenas live. When the evil lion (darker in shade than the good lions) takes over and the hyenas have access to power, it is not long before they have ruined the kingdom. “There goes the neighborhood!”
My sons, then ten and fourteen, countered that the distinguished Black actor James Earl Jones as the voice of the good lion offset the racial characterizations of the hyenas. I argued that to the target audience of young children, the voice of James Earl Jones would not be identified as a voice of color, while the voices of the hyenas surely would. The racial subtext of the film would be absorbed uncritically by many young children, and perhaps their parents. Whether we agreed or not, the process of engaging my children in a critical examination of the books they read, the television they watched, the films they saw, and the computer and video games they played was essential.
And despite my best efforts, the stereotypes still crept in. One Saturday afternoon, after attending choir rehearsal at our church, located in a Black section of a nearby city, my oldest son and I drove past a Black teenager running down the street. “Why is that boy running?” my son asked. “I don’t know,” I said absentmindedly. “Maybe he stole something,” he suggested. I nearly slammed on the brakes. “Why would you say something like that?” I said. “Well, you know, in the city, there’s a lot of crime, and people steal things,” he said. He did not say “Black people,” but I knew the cultural images to which he was responding. Now, this neighborhood was very familiar to us. We had spent many Saturdays at choir rehearsal and sat in church next to Black kids who looked a lot like that boy on the street. We had never personally experienced any crime in that location. In fact the one time my car was broken into was when it was parked in a “good neighborhood” in our own small town. I pointed out this contradiction and asked my son to imagine why he, also a Black boy, might be running down the street—in a hurry to get home, late for a bus, on his way to a job at the McDonald’s up the street? Then we talked about stereotyping and the images of urban Black boys we see on television and elsewhere. Too often they are portrayed as muggers, drug dealers, or other criminals. My sons knew that such images were not an accurate representation of themselves, and I had to help them see that they are also a distorted image of their urban peers.
Children can learn to question whether demeaning or derogatory depictions of other people are stereotypes. When reading books or watching television, they can learn to ask who is doing what in the story line and why, who is in the role of leader and who is taking the orders, who or what is the problem and who is solving it, and who has been left out of the story altogether.17
But not only do children need to be able to recognize distorted representations, they also need to know what can be done about them. Learning to recognize cultural and institutional racism and other forms of inequity without also learning strategies to respond to them is a prescription for despair. Yet even preschool children are not too young to begin to think about what can be done about unfairness. The resource book Anti-Bias Education for Young Children and Ourselves includes many examples of young children learning to recognize and speak up against unfairness.18 The book suggests increasing levels of activism for developing children. Two- and three-year-olds are encouraged to use words to express their feelings and to empathize with one another. With adult guidance, four- and five-year-olds are capable of group activism.
When I was living in Massachusetts, I read about a group of seven-year-olds in a second-grade class in Amherst, Massachusetts, who wrote letters to the state Department of Transportation protesting the signs on the Massachusetts Turnpike depicting a Pilgrim hat with an arrow through it. This sign was certainly a misrepresentation of history and offensive to American Indians. The children received national recognition for their efforts, and more important, the signs were changed.19 I am sure the lesson that collective effort can make a difference will be remembered by those children for a long time. As early childhood educator Louise Derman-Sparks and her colleagues write:
For children to feel good and confident about themselves, they need to be able to say, “That’s not fair,” or “I don’t like that,” if they are the target of prejudice or discrimination. For children to develop empathy and respect for diversity, they need to be able to say, “I don’t like what you are doing” to a child who is abusing another child. If we teach children to recognize injustice, then we must also teach them that people can create positive change by working together.… Through activism activities children build the confidence and skills for becoming adults who assert, in the face of injustice, “I have the responsibility to deal with it, I know how to deal with it, I will deal with it.”20
When we adults reflect on our own race-related memories, we may recall times when we did not get the help we needed to sift through the confusing messages we received. The task of talking to our children about racism and other isms may seem formidable. Our children’s questions may make us uncomfortable, and we may not have a ready response. But even a missed opportunity can be revisited at another time. It is never too late to say, “I’ve been thinking about that question you asked me the other day…” We have the responsibility, and the resources available, to educate ourselves if necessary so that we will not repeat the cycle of oppression with our children.
* With the exception of my own children’s names, all names used in these examples are pseudonyms.