Should young children be taught about racism (Black History day)?

Great Debates
1

I called my UK based 8 year old niece and asked her about school. She said that her school had a “black history day”. She was taught about Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama and Martin Luther King. She was also taught about the slave trade.

I was shocked to her say words like “black” and “white” to describe people. My brother and sister-in-law never talk about race in front of their kids & it surprised me to hear somebody so young use these terms.

I understand that teaching kids and about racism and civil rights is a good thing, but she only just turned 8! Don’t you think that it’s a bit too young? Personally I don’t think it’s a good idea to put ideas in very young kids heads about race - they begin to see others in different ways.

How old were you when you were taught about race and civil rights in school?

2

The teaching of racial issues in primary school tends to focus on how things changed toward equality. The Rosa Parks topic being a case in point.

what are you worried about? - that the kids might say “hey, maybe we SHOULD segregate people on buses!” ?

3

I don’t, and doubt I ever will, understand the “too young!” argument. It’s never, ever used by people who are concerned for children, it’s used by people who don’t want to face their own embarrassment, guilt, or other complicated feelings about the topic at hand.

Guess what? If a kid is too young for a topic, she won’t talk about it. Seriously. If she’s bringing it up, she wants to talk about it, and if she’s capable of stringing three sentences about it together, she’s capable of understanding several more.

8 is not a baby. Not biologically, not religiously, not neurologically, not intellectually. 8 year old girls, once upon a time, were learning to run households, were cooking over open fires and were raising their little brothers and sisters. 8 year old boys were speaking Latin and working algebra and could tell you the European succession for hundreds of years back. We way, way underestimate children’s intellectual capacity (as well as capacity for hard work) these days.

How old was I when I first became aware of racial differences? I don’t remember. Mom tells me I was about 3 or 4, and asked her in a very loud voice in public, “Why is that lady all dirty?!” I got some educatin’ that day when Mom discovered that a giant hole would not, in fact, open in the earth and swallow her up no matter how much she wished it would.

When did I learn about Rosa Parks? 2nd grade, Miss Walsh’s class. Many of us were actually crying real tears because “it just isn’t fair!” that Mrs. Parks was treated like that. So that would be 7 or 8 years old.

When did I get a full and nuanced understanding of race relations? I’ll let you know when it happens. I’ll be 38 in a month, and I’m often still stuck at “It just isn’t fair!”

4

I first remember it being discussed in kindergarten, so we were all 5 or 6. We were all kind of baffled by the idea of people being treated differently based on their appearance and felt good about ourselves for not partaking in such silly notions. I’m puzzled as to what the OP is concerned about.

5

I’ll assume you aren’t joking, but this reads like a right-wing parody of liberal political correctness. That billions of people the world over self-identify as white, black, etc. isn’t really groundbreaking information that need to be withheld.

As to your question, I don’t remember mention of Black History Month when I was that age, but we did at least have some rudimentary introduction to the ideas of slavery, Indian removal, etc. and how bad they were. This was (full disclosure) in 1970s suburban Chicago, in a town and school that were roughly 98% white.

6

I actually don’t remember when I learned. It’s like I was born into the knowledge or something.

It doesn’t make sense to not teach something that is still a factor in our lives.

7

Eight is certainly not too young.

To introduce those concepts to a four year old is probably too young, but by eight, my Asian son had experienced racism, he didn’t need to be taught it exists.

And WhyNot, I’m a decade older than you, have taught Civil Rights in Sunday School for five years, was personally involved in busing in the 1970s, have an Asian son, - and being white I know that I’ll NEVER understand racism the same way a person of color does. Frankly, for a white person, racism is like the rainbow to someone colorblind…you know there are colors you can’t see - the real question is are you aware that you don’t see everything.

8

That’s exactly how my high school students react, and then go to the cafeteria where they sit at tables that look like we’ve assigned seating by race and class.

Then I feel smug about their lack of self awareness and go have lunch in a teacher’s lounge where we tend to do the same thing.

9

This. I live in the rural south. My son is five and I’ve been talking about racism, inequality, and privilege for years. He hears so much bigotry on any given day, just by going to, say, the grocery store, that I had to start fighting it early.

10

Right. Racism doesn’t even exist, and it hasn’t for such a long time that we have no need to need to be exposed to the concept, ever.

11

This is the most accurate and succint explanation of this subject I have ever read.

12

Studies have shown (sorry, no cite – from memory) that kids notice these differences on their own. If adults refuse to talk about it, it sends the message that race is a taboo topic and there is something wrong and shameful about racial differences.

13

I wondered about this - the OP read as if there’s a subtext of “but everyone is exactly the same!”. Of course, we’re not all the same - or racism itself would never have existed.

Racism isn’t noticing that people are different from one another, or talking about how people are different from one another.
Racism is when people are excluded, singled out, or otherwise put at a disadvantage, just because of those differences.

14

When I was 8 years old I memorized the Gettysburg address. I certainly had a basic understanding of slavery, the Civil War, and the underlying roots of racism in the U.S. I know that we observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in my elementary school – I remember the pageant with the school bus and the Rosa Parks story. I also remember being powerfully impacted at that age by Norman Rockwell’s painting The Problem We All Live With and understanding what it represented. Oh, and I remember how desperately I wanted to appear in that year’s musical South Pacific (you had to be 9 to appear in the musical), and being deeply impacted by the song “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught”. I can’t imagine an 8-year-old not understanding the difference between black and white, or the concept of racism, unless she was extremely sheltered.

15

I know things are different in the UK than in the US (where racism has been prevalent so long and so forcefully that, as others have said, you need to start telling kids what’s going on with all of that at a very early age if you want to give them a fighting chance), but I didn’t think the were THAT different. I mean, look at all the race-related stuff going on with the Football leagues.

16

A little bit more info - my niece is ethnically Indian (as am I) and I have relatives who are black, white, Hispanic etc.

I’ve no problem with anybody’s race, I’ve never heard her say anything about race ever, and now she’s thinking about it. I’d rather kids just see people as people - I’m not denying that there’s race, but I’d rather they focus on other aspects of people.

I never mention race to my brothers’ kids, I’ll saying something like ‘the guy in the blue shirt’ rather than the 'black guy.

I might be a bit touchy on the subject because my niece was racially abused by a white girl a year ago, the girl told her that Muslims should go back to their country. We’re not Muslim BTW

17

If she was racially abused, she was thinking about it before it was touched on in school and she is past due for The History of Civil Rights and how racial abuse is Not OK…not that it ever was OK, but there was a time when society was not in agreement on that point, and gaining agreement was a battle other people fought so your niece has a leg to stand on when abused - because in Alabama in the 1950s, it WAS “suck it up.”

18

But that really is Political Correctness Gone Mad™. Sometimes, the distinguishing characteristics of a person’s appearance are exactly the right way to point them out - sometimes, “the black guy over there” really is the easiest and best way of identifying someone.

Otherwise you get “Jim’s the guy over there in the blue shirt… no the other one, next to the… guy with the white shirt… no not the one sitting down - the guy over there a little way away from the door, not very close to the table next to the two people with short hair…” etc. It’s embarrassing.

19

I agree it should be taught in schools, for a bunch of reasons, but I do get where the OP is coming from. Racial tensions mostly start happening for real later in life (when people start getting no-holds-barred competitive with each other), so there is something a little icky about teaching younger kids about a more “advanced” type of pathology.

Kind of like that commercial where it had the kid talking about “cholesterol” - people quite rightly felt that was inappropriate (for different reasons obviously)

I still think it should be taught in schools, regardless, but I get the sentiment.

20

And the problem with that is that if done often or obviously enough, it actually calls attention to the thing it’s intended to pretend doesn’t exist.