I’ve never really talked to my kids about race-related topics. My wife and I figured we don’t need to, at least not any time soon. We figured that interaction with non-white people (we’re white btw) will seem perfectly normal and unremarkable to our kids, given the fact that they do regularly interact with non-white kids and see us socializing with non-white people. We haven’t been making remarks about this to our kids, we just figured they’ll pick it up as their natural way of doing things.
But there is, I am told, a new book out that talks about what research seems to show about raising kids wrt various issues. (Sorry, I don’t recall the title of the book.) And, I am told, in that book the authors argue that not talking about race, even in a situation like mine, has much the same effect as not talking about drugs–to wit, a negative effect.
Well shit.
Does anyone know if that’s true? What are the relevant studies? Are there good summaries of the available information available online somewhere? Good advice as to just what kinds of things one ought to be saying to their kids?
I think the research you’re talking about is discussed in a Newsweek article from about a month ago - you can try searching their web site for it. The cover headline was “Why your baby is racist” or something like that.
The bottom line is that kids learn by watching what you do and how you react. If a door to door salesman comes by and you come back in the house saying “No way we’ll buy from that ni—er” then you’ve pretty much made your position clear to the kids. They’ll pick up on more subtle clues as well.
What points are you trying to impart to your kids?
There are hundreds of websites dedicated to studying race and the relationships between them. I can’t think of any that are suitable for work for one reason or another.
To me there are only two points:
Nothing about a persons skin/hair/eye… color will tell you anything about the person, so don’t make any assumptions, connections, judgements based only on their race.
Most people are not capable of fully embracing the idea of point 1. It seems everyone still believes that some genetic traits dealing with personality, intelligence or sports capability are riding along with the skin color genes. Since none of these supposed trait pairings are true anywhere close to 100% of the time, its best to not put any stock in them.
Bill Nye (The Science Guy) provided the best starting point (In his “Skin” video)
(Paraphrasing):
And don’t think that you are not already following the book’s advice. Meaningful, age-appropriate conversations about race/drugs are far less important than years of seeing you not abuse people or substances.
We started talking to our kids about it when they were about 3-4. Initially we couched it in terms of “People used to believe some silly things, but now we know better.” (We also started explaining sexism at about the same time.) It helps if you start out with some frankly ridiculous examples to drive home early on that you think it’s a very foolish thing to believe in: “Some people used to think that women couldn’t learn how to read. Isn’t that silly? But now we know better.” or “Some people used to to think that people whose ancestors came from Africa shouldn’t be allowed to vote. But that’s not fair at all. Now we know that everyone should be treated equally.” Even a really little kid can understand examples like that.
We also try avoid categories like “black” or “white”. Instead we talk about someone’s ancestors: “Taylor’s ancestors came from China, just like our ancestors came from Europe.” We try to emphasize that your ethic background is interesting information about the history of your family, **not **information about who you are as a person.
Of course, it helped that we live in a pretty diverse section of L.A. so our kids are growing up interacting with people from a wide variety of backgrounds.
I think this is a good place to start, but there’s also a danger here of implying that we now live in a post-racial society or something like that. Not everyone in this country does know that people should be treated equally, and many people are still treated very unequally. In the U.S. black (and latino) women and children bear the burden of poverty and domestic violence statistics, and the infant morality rate for blacks is twice as high as whites. The average white person has 12x the net value of the average black person.
Maybe a 3-4 year old can’t quite grasp that, but most older children can, and I think the number one problem with race education in the U.S. today is that a lot of people go around talking about how ‘‘things are different now’’ when in some very key ways, they aren’t. There’s no use pretending we don’t see race when it’s still one of the greatest statistical indicators of quality of life.
(I’m not trying to single you out in particular, I’m just using this as a jumping off point to address what I see as the way well-meaning progressive people can perpetuate the myth that we live in a color-blind society.)
pan1, no, I don’t think it’s racism, but rather the frank acknowledgment that race matters–if anything I’d say it is the opposite of racist. Not that it ought to be the final word, but it’s certainly worthy of dialogue.
Oh absolutely. Our kids are much older now and we talk to them in much more nuanced terms. They know that racism still exists.
But I think that an early age it’s good to treat it is as something transparently silly: “The idea that the color of your skin could have some influence on your intelligence! What a nutty idea!”
Echoing The Hamster King, just with the alteration that because so many of the kids around here are from families of recent immigrants it’s more “Mandy’s *family *came from China”. I guess we’re fortunate that “black” and “white” (and “brown”) don’t tend to get used here as terms… you are much more likely to hear “Maori” or “Tongan” or “Polynesian”.
My son is part of the only 3% of European-ancestry kiwi kids at his school; he asked me one night why he was so pale compared to his friends and the other kids in his class. I got out an atlas (he likes maps) and we had a chat about parts of the world and where the people he knows come from.
Maybe not ideologically, but it’s still being an accessory to racism. If you encourage racism to foster because of your fear of racists, does it matter whether you yourself do not have racist thoughts? And wow it’s really pessimistic and defeatist. And probably most of these people are just fooling themselves. Like the Mom who claims she loves gay people, she just doesn’t want her kids to be gay because it’s a ‘hard life’. So, maybe not racist, technically, but it’s still really bad, so who cares what it’s called?
As to the OP, discussion is always good, at an age appropriate level, but kids learn more from how you behave than from what you say. I would neither avoid nor make a special point of discussing it - when they need to know about it, they will ask, or there will be a relevant context like something that happens in a movie you both see, or something in the newspaper, or a bully at school.
I got out an atlas (he likes maps) and we had a chat about parts of the world and where the people he knows come from.