Dulce de leche, of course! 
Well, I can tell you that at the age of 3, I didn’t notice there WAS a difference in skin color.
My parents always loved telling the story about when my brother was born (I was 3 at the time), and they hired a nurse to help out for the first week or two.
We are White. She is Black.
When she was getting ready to leave, and saying her goodbyes, I noticed that she had her suitcase and all of her belongings at the door, but I was very confused about why she wasn’t taking HER baby home.
As was told to me, my exact words were “Hey, you forgot your baby!”
I grew up in an integrated neighborhood and went to an integrated school. I never had any feelings of people of different colors being different. I still can’t figure out what different it makes.
When I was little, we lived in a pretty mixed area. The family two doors down from us was black, and we played together all the time (I can only remember a few houses on the street, so I’m not entirely sure about a lot of the other neighbors). Anyway I was probably 4-5 when I asked my playmate if he could get sunburn. He thought this was a very stupid question, and I couldn’t figure out how dark brown skin could turn bright red, which was the major symptom of sunburn as far as I knew, being a very fair-skinned kid who got sunburned a lot.
I grew up in a rural Dutch village in the 70’s. We didn’t know any black people personally, and seldom saw them “live”. All I knew about black people was that they lived in Africa, were hungry all the time, had eyes covered in flies, yada yada, all the images generally used in Red Cross ads. I remember not being able, though, as a small kid, to make sense of the big protruding bellies these so called starved kids had. (Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos)
No black people lived in our village. My friend in third grade was a little Indonesian boy. I just thought he was really pretty, with his black hair, long black eyelashes, dark brown skin and white teeth.
Back to black people; so, on a diet of Red Cross ads and a dad working for poor Africe, I thought of black people about the same as I saw people in wheelchairs. You were supposed to help them, (so they were …incapable, in some way, right?) but it wasn’t good manners to reflect on that fact, just like I was supposed to keep to myself my remarks to an invalid about his wheelchair, wooden leg, crutches, speech deficiency, or whatever.
Racists, in my mind, were mean. It didn’t occur to me untill well in my teenage years that racists aren’t mean, but simply wrong.
Not my story, but I like to tell it anyway:
As a small child, my sister-in-law was taught by her (rather insane) mother that black people are made of chocolate. Why any mother would teach her child this, I do not know.
One day, back in the early 60’s, this child and her mother entered an elevator with a black man operating it. Bursting with curiosity, and a mad sweet tooth, the wee child had to find out for herself. She gave the poor unsuspecting man a big lick on the arm, turned to her mother, hands on her hips, and announced, “Mom, he is NOT made of chocolate!”
I imagine the mother turned a bright shade of strawberry. I also like to imagine it was a long, long ride to the highest floor of a skyscraper, in which her level of embarrassment was a sufficient punishment for her bad parenting.
Starting from early on (preschool) every place I’ve ever gone to school had people of all hues (Berkeley, 1970s) so I never thought anything of it. I remember one of my best friends in 2nd grade was a black girl named Tawanna (I bumped into her at my 20th HS reunion just recently). At some point, sadly, little kids start absorbing the idea that “Those people are different” instead of just sticking with the fact that everybody has different colored skin, hair, different heights, etc. It’s a shame.
When I was very young, about four or five, I desperately wanted my hair to do this:
(Best picture I can find). I was really upset that my mother wouldn’t do this for me. I even pointed out the especially-for-African-hair products in the shop because my mother always complained about dealing with my very curly hair.
I first started differentiating when I realized the black girls’ hands were colder. When we played Seven-Up this became a strategic advantage.
I grew up in a suburb of Boston in the 50s there were no black people living in my city. On the corner there was a laundry with a picture window looking in on a black man pressing clothes. It was always hot and he was always sweating, so I thought I was looking at the Devil in Hell.
I grew up in a pretty rural area of England, and we were the only Indian family for miles. Then we moved to Bahrain, where we were… well, still the only Indian family for miles, because the other ones all lived in one corner of the island.
I sort of assumed I was a white person until I was about seven.
I remember being with a friend and his mother one day when he saw his first black person. I, being a football fan, was already familar with black people because of John Barnes, but he wasn’t…
“Look, Mummy, a chocolate man!” he shouted.
It was my first experience of embarrassment (but probably not his mother’s).
When my older kids were young we lived in a very mixed neighborhood, but with my youngest we had moved to a neighborhood that was mostly white. He saw black people on TV, playing football.
When he was about 3 we went to the pool, and there were a lot of kids, mostly black, in the pool playing with …a little football. So, unbeknowst to me, he got the idea that all black people were football players, and came by it naturally.
I did not realize this until I took him to the doctor and he asked the doctor if he was a football player. Except he phrased it more as, “When you’re not being a doctor, what position do you play?”
Bill Cosby. When I was a youth, I lived in what is essentially Mayberry. My sole experience with black people was the Cosby show. At the time, I didnt even know that asians or mexicans or anything else was even an option.
So, I thought all black people wore pullover sweaters and danced funny. Later on, my parents got DirecTV, and I watched MTV, which made me revise my belief about the sweaters.
You know… I’ve never really realized this until just now, but I didn’t even meet, yet alone talk to, someone of any other ethnicity until my first day of boot camp… Wow… I guess I didnt think much of it at the time because I was far too busy wondering what in the hell I had just got myself into and trying to keep Chief and MM1 from noticing I even existed. What a sheltered Mayberry youth I had.
A native American once called me a ghost in his tribal tongue.
“Gwei Lo” or literally “ghost man” is current for “white guy” in Cantonese. I have been called “Gwei Lo” in workaday, everyman speech with no more pejorative overtones than the word “caucasian” by Chinese friends and colleagues, that I was surprised when I learned I was supposed to be offended. I’m not.
I grew up listening to my parents’ old Bill Cosby records from the '60s. In his “Tonsils” routine he talked extensively about the ice cream he would get after he got his tonsils removed, and in one portion described what he said to his hospital roommates:
“When I get my first bowl of chocolate ice cream, I’m not even gonna eat it. I’m gonna smear it … all over my body! And then I’ll put a green cherry in my navel, and I’ll be the most BEAUTIFUL chocolate sundae YOU ever saw in your LIFE!”
It never even occurred to me until much later in life that he was making a subtle joke there about being black.
I grew up in a predominantly white area. When I was in kindergarten my mom babysat a black boy who was a year younger than me, so he and his mother were the first non-whites I was aware of meeting, but I don’t recall it making any difference to me at the time. I was more interested in the fact that the little boy had the same name as my dad. My parents, to the best of my recollection, never said anything about race and so as a kid people’s skin color never really registered or made any difference to me. All my elementary school classmates were white, but once I got into junior high there were a few Asians and a handful of blacks, and I never really noticed anybody treating them any differently because of their race. Even when my family took a vacation to Arizona when I was 12 and made a brief trip across the border to Mexico (El Centro, across the border from Yuma), it never even registered that the people there looked any different. My most distinct memory of Mexico was that every time we walked around a corner, there was a young boy offering to shine my dad’s boots.
It wasn’t until my senior year of high school, when my family moved to an agricultural town that I first saw widespread prejudice. Every Spring, there would be an influx of migrant workers looking for jobs in the orchards, and I discovered there was a lot of prejudice against “those Mexicans”. After living here for 25 years the Hispanic population of my town has changed from being simply migrant workers to year-round permanent residents who now make up nearly 30% of the population. I’ve met a lot of cool Mexicans, and a lot of less-than-cool Mexicans - in about the same proportions as the white people I’ve met, and so I take them as individuals just like I would anybody else. My dad, on the other hand, after scarcely saying a word about race when I was growing up, has turned into a real bigot (or is finally letting it show), which is one reason I don’t talk to my dad much anymore.
Wait…that’s not true, is it? I mean, of black people as a whole? Is that really a side effect of having dark pigmentation or something your childhood brain made up?
I grew up in Madison, WI in a fairly white part of the city. I didn’t really have much interaction with people that weren’t white until I got to Middle School.
My parents love to tell this story:
Apparently, when I was 3 or 4 years old we were at the grocery store and the bagger was black.
Upon seeing him, I am told that my jaw dropped, I pointed directly at him, and screamed “MICHAEL JACKSON!”
I’m told the bagger got a good laugh out of it.
…this was mid 1980s, when Jackson was still a mega-star and not a creepy pedophile.
I don’t remember ever not being familiar with other races. I’ve always gone to school with children of all ethnicities–except Asian. For some reason there weren’t many Asian kids around. But I was born in Japan, so had plenty of exposure to that particular culture via the parents’ memories of that time.
I remember that in my white neighborhood there was an elementary school that had one black girl, Robin, who lived with a white family. But, from third grade through fifth grade all of my teachers were black women. Miss Simmons ( she was cute, had big afro hair and wore bell bottoms) Mrs. Reddick and Mrs. Cunningham. They were all awesome teachers and I always wondered why their kids didn’t didn’t come to my school too.