Back last summer, Bean started making comments about skin color. I said a word in Spanish to her, and she sharply rebuked me: “Don’t say Spanish. Pink people don’t speak Spanish!” I was taken aback. I asked her what skin color people have who speak Spanish, and she replied “Brown skin.” I pointed out that her Aunt Kristen and cousin Penelope speak Spanish very fluently, and they have pink skin. I also pointed out that our friends Sharon, Edu, Torben and Sonia speak German as well as English, and that people of all different skin colors speak different languages. <\/p>\n
Still, I found the intensity of her response a little unsettling.<\/p>\n
Then, last October, I wrote the following to her preschool teacher as well as to my mentor, Karen, because Bean had ramped up her opinions:<\/p>\n
I\u2019m looking for your reflections on a recent development in Bean. She is beginning to sort and classifying things, and in the past few months this has extended to people\u2019s skin color. I\u2019ll share some examples and how we\u2019ve responded. I\u2019m wondering if there is something \u201cmore\u201d we could\/should do.<\/p>\n
Last year in school there were a majority of darker-skinned kids in class \u2014 Indian, Chinese, Pakistani, etc. Sometimes Bean said she worried kids would laugh at her because she had the wrong color hair and skin. She played well in general, but this was an occasional comment.<\/p>\n
During summer we were doing a craft and I said \u201cpor favor\u201d to her. Bean said: \u201cDon\u2019t speak Spanish! Pink people don\u2019t speak Spanish.\u201d I asked her who does, and she replied \u201cbrown people.\u201d I reminded her that her Aunt Kristen and cousin Penelope speak Spanish and they are very pink (Caucasian), and also she has other friends who are brown-skinned and speak German. People can speak all types of language. (She has, by the way, taken Let\u2019s Play in Spanish class and also likes to pretend to speak Spanish at times.)<\/p>\n
Recently I showed Alex and Bean a photo of an African American baby adopted by a friend. Bean said she didn\u2019t like that baby. Why? Because her skin is too dark. So we talked with her about melanin, and how it\u2019s in everyone\u2019s skin and the amount makes skin color lighter or darker, but that everyone is otherwise the same. We reminded her she has \u201cbrown friends\u201d (from Guatemala and Mexico). She said that those friends weren\u2019t very brown.<\/p>\n
Same thing happened in a book about getting dressed: she said the didn\u2019t like the girl with the dark skin because \u201cshe is not as good as pink.\u201d<\/p>\n
The most egregious example happened the other day in Popeye\u2019s. We were eating and a man and little girl came in. The girl looked very slightly Hispanic. A moment after they entered, Bean said, \u201cI don\u2019t like that girl. I want to cover her head with a bag.\u201d I replied sharply to this, telling her what an unkind remark that is. I said I thought the girl looked cute in her ponytail. Bean said, \u201cWell I\u2019m cute too.\u201d I replied: \u201cNot when you say ugly things about the way people look. That takes away from cuteness.\u201d I followed up on how people are all good even when they look different from each other, and that is what makes people especially who they are. The subject got changed and she said nothing more.<\/p>\n
Alex and I have talked about how to respond. Bean may be testing the limits of what is socially acceptable to say. She might really feel rejecting of anything different from her. She doesn\u2019t spend a lot of time unsupervised by us, so we can\u2019t imagine she picked this up from other people, and certainly not from us. We don\u2019t want to overreact with attention and thus give her the excitement of having a big deal made over it and her, providing incentive to continue. At the same time, it doesn\u2019t feel appropriate to ignore this, or let such comments pass without discussion (or when they\u2019re really bad, some kind of rebuke). I admit I\u2019m a little worried about her saying such things without us around and people judging me and Alex as a result. I\u2019m also mystified. Can a person just be naturally racist? What\u2019s going on with my sweet daughter?<\/p>\n
She\u2019s been doing the same thing about boys since this summer: boys aren\u2019t good, they aren\u2019t as gentle, etc. We\u2019re working on countering this too, as you know. Yet this skin color judgment is really disconcerting. <\/p>\n
Your advice is welcome!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The following is the reply from Teacher Carrie:<\/p>\n
Thank you for your detailed email. I find this topic very interesting. I would like to first respond by saying I think you are\u00a0doing a\u00a0great job\u00a0handling her comments. Especially when you explained\u00a0why skin color is different. \u00a0I think it’s very important to have the discussion when these issues come up and not to ignore it. Giving a clear,\u00a0appropriate explanation is good. \u00a0I\u00a0understand your concern\u00a0and I went through it myself with my daughter.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I\u00a0then read\u00a0a book that I think will put your mind at ease. It’s called Nurtureshock, by PO Bronson & Ashley Merryman. Have you heard of it? \u00a0I will bring it to class tomorrow. It’s all about nurture vs. nature, with a chapter titled “Why white parents don’t talk about race”, questioning whether we\u00a0make\u00a0it worse or better by calling attention to race. I need to reread the chapter, but through their studies they believe that\u00a0children\u00a0naturally prefer people who they can most identify with and skin color is one of the things that is clearly visible to children. Gender is also clearly visible to children. After I read it we starting talking with our\u00a0children more about race & gender.
\nLets talk after you read the chapter. I think you will feel a lot better knowing that this is something all\u00a0children are trying to figure out.
\nSee you tomorrow,
\nCarrie<\/p><\/blockquote>\nAnd this was Karen’s reply:<\/p>\n
First, nothing to worry about.<\/p>\n
Bean is demonstrating her developing facility with “critical thinking,” the function of the mind that sorts, labels, analyzes and judges. She can see difference, so there’s no sense trying to convince her that there isn’t a difference. She is probably also exercising this function in ways that are appropriate and even encouraged: having a favorite doll, toy, pair of shoes, clothing, color, song, flavor of ice cream, etc. Four-year-olds can be infuriating in this way because they might refuse to wear anything but favorite colors, clothing and shoes, whether they are appropriate or not. But it is part of self-identification and self-mastery. She’ll move on by age 5.<\/p>\n
In this way, yes, “racism” is natural in that we see and categorize and thus respond to things differently. She will be socialized, through school experience, to change the attitudes and expressions that cause other people harm. I can remember that this would be done in group lessons in Georgia’s pre-kindegarten (so age 4-5) when the recognition of different skin color emerges. The teacher used a “persona doll,” a fabric doll with African American or Hispanic features, to play lessons out.<\/p>\n
Your explanations are too lofty for her to grasp and although this causes you social discomfort, it is only passing. We are never rid of racism, that is, fear of other people and things who are different than we are, but we learn to keep it to ourselves. If I were you I would mention it to the preschool teacher and see if they have any curriculum to address it. I bet they do, and that way you aren’t putting yourself in an adversarial role.<\/p>\n
Georgia had an African American teacher in preschool and Georgia was afraid of him because of his dark skin. He laughed about it to me, saying he understood that all the kids had that difficulty. What a good place and good way to both express it, and to learn otherwise.<\/p>\n
Hope this helps.<\/p>\n
Maezen<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So Alex and I re-read the chapter in Nurtureshock and comforted ourselves a bit that we aren’t alone in this, and that it is normal behavior. However, it continues. Bean has Disney princesses: Snow White, Pocahontas, Belle, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Tiana, Aurora, Jasmine, Ariel, and Mulan. In her pretend play, Bean consistently makes the non-Caucasian princesses — Tiana, Mulan, Pocahontas, and Jasmine — play the “naughty” role, or the role in which they aren’t as smart as the white princesses. I have consistently refused to play the games this way; sometimes she accommodates me, and other times she prefers to play alone with these roles. I try not to push back too hard on this, because Bean is persevering and strong-willed, and my effort is likely to backfire on me and entrench her more firmly against brown skin. I can only hope to keep talking about differences, and how skin color is real but that goodness and badness is not determined by it — and hope over time she comes to understand and accept. Or, at the very least, stops verbalizing<\/em> it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back last summer, Bean started making comments about skin color. I said a word in Spanish to her, and she sharply rebuked me: “Don’t say Spanish. Pink people don’t speak Spanish!” I was taken aback. I asked her what skin color people have who speak Spanish, and she replied “Brown skin.” I pointed out that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,28,34,16,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-community","category-humanities","category-motherhood","category-nature","category-social-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7120"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13512,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7120\/revisions\/13512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}