Over the years, my kids have shattered some of the fantasies I used to have about children and their racial attitudes. I held these ideas, as many parents do, in the optimism that our children will quiet the racial tensions our country has experienced. I’m hopeful that the next generation will be free of so many of the racial barriers still present in society today. I still have that hope, but I’ve also had to put to death the following two widely-held beliefs:
1. Children are colorblind
2. Children are only prejudiced if they are taught to be prejudiced In this post,
I am going to talk about how my kids killed my colorblind dreams, and why I think it may have been a naive and even dangerous notion. Next week, I will share my mortified reaction to my own daughter’s racially biased behavior, at the ripe age of three. I used to subscribe to the idea that children are colorblind.
As a mom of children through birth and transracial adoption, I loved the idea of my kids growing up with each other blinded to their color differences. I love the vision of American being this great melting pot where kids of every race play together in perfect harmony. But the truth is, at the age that most children begin to notice gender differences, they also begin to notice race. I thoughts I had done a good job of exposing my kids to lots of cultural diversity, and as such I expected that I was raising them to be “colorblind”. But they let me know in subtle ways that they noticed. I was horrified when my son pointed to a Mexican man who was bagging our groceries and asked what that gardener was doing. And my daughter? At only 18 months old, she displayed her observation of racial differences. We attend a gospel choir rehearsal at an African American church, and my daughter begins enthusiastically singing one of the songs every time she sees a group of Black people.
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