Printed with permission from Dr.
Marguerite A. Wright's book I'm Chocolate, You're
Vanilla, available
here.
Note: This section, titled "Do White Children
See Race Differently?" concludes the first section
of Dr. Wright's book, in which she outlines the developmental
steps in which young children first perceive skin color
and race, and the meanings they attach to these attributes.
Dr. Wright has outlined her advice on how to raise black
and biracial children (and indeed, all children) with
as little racial bias as possible in our race-conscious
world, and ends her section on preschoolers with this
passage. We highly recommend the book to parents of
every ethnic background.
Johnny Lee, a white man who was a former imperial
wizard and a founder and recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan
Youth Corps, vividly remembers his experience when he
was five and saw a black man for the first time. Johnny
said to his father, "Look, Daddy, there's a chocolate-covered
man." Daddy replied, "No, son, that's a nigger."
Lee said that it was at that moment that "the seeds
of hatred" were planted that resulted in his life
in the Klan, a life he later repudiated.
Unlike young Johnny, white children who have not been
sensitized to race ascribe little importance to skin
color.
Relatively few studies have been done on how children
of other races, including whites, become aware of racial
differences. Those available suggest that skin color
is not as salient an issue for white children at the
early grade-school stage of development as it is for
blacks. It is understandable that young white children
do not tend to regard skin color as important, since
racial prejudice is generally not a factor in their
lives.
I am impressed by how little race seems to matter
to many of the white young grade-schoolers I encounter.
Most of them, from families of friends and acquaintances,
attend integrated schools or live in mixed-race communities.
Their answers to my question about race are similar
to Ian's, a six-year-old white youngster. Ian described
the colors of the white and black people as, respectively,
"whitish" and "brownish"; he can
identify the "Chinese" people and says that
he has friends who speak Spanish, although he doesn't
have a special name for them. Like black children who
do not come from racially obsessed families, Ian did
not spontaneously describe or categorize people by skin
color or race. Despite my repeated promptings, Ian could
not think of a single way, other than skin color, in
which blacks and whites differed. Although his level
of understanding about how people get their color and
his awareness of the existence of different racial groups
was similar to that of black children, skin color did
not seem as emotional an issue for him as it was for
some blacks.
I have heard of Latino and Asian children for whom
"race" became an emotional issue when they
were subjected to teasing and other mean behavior because
of their accents, their limited fluency in English,
their different types of dress or the lunches they bring
to school. Fortunately, however, most early grade-schoolers,
regardless of race, do not seem to have stereotypes
of themselves or of people who are different colors.
Like preschoolers, they are inclined to see people as
individuals rather than as members of a group--color,
racial or otherwise. Because of this developmental advantage,
these early years are an optimum time for children of
different races to get to know each other, before they
become aware of the stereotypes that in time will rob
them of their racial innocence.
I suspect that children in other countries with a
history of racial discrimination develop race awareness
in ways similar to American children. Several years
ago, I met a lovely white six-year-old at the home of
friends of friends while visiting Australia. From the
start, she seemed very comfortable with me, unlike a
few of the adults, all gracious people, who it seemed
to me were trying a little too hard to appear at ease
with a black person. Circumstances led to my spending
much of the afternoon talking and playing games with
her. It wasn't until much time had passed and we rejoined
the adults' conversation that she began to ask me about
myself.
First, she asked questions about my skin color (like
"How did your skin color become brown?" and
"Will it change back?"). Next, she asked me
about my full lips. Her parents understandably were
discomfited by her questions and took turns trying to
dissuade her from asking me anything else. Actually,
it was quite amusing. The parents were growing increasingly
tense trying not to offend me, while their daughter,
oblivious to their discomfort, became increasingly more
persistent in her questioning. To make matters worse,
their guest was not being very cooperative with the
parents' efforts to restrain their daughter.
In spite of my assurances that I didn't mind answering
the questions, the parents continued to try various
strategies to silence their daughter, all the while
doing their utmost not to appear anxious. Eventually,
they found some pretext to escort her from the room.
She had never seen, much less talked to, a black person
before, and her curiosity was perfectly normal. I knew
that to her, skin color and lip shape were just physical
attributes, not the hot potatoes they were to her parents.
When we said good-bye later that day, I felt a tinge
of sadness; I wondered if I visited her again several
years in the future whether she would see my color more
than she would see me.
Even at this stage of development, children who have
not been exposed to the racial prejudices of their family
and society retain the remarkable gift of obliviousness
to the social baggage attached to race. Dr. Laura Schlessinger,
author and nationally syndicated talk show host, once
told a marvelous story on her show about a childhood
incident that illustrates this point. When she was a
girl, she had a piano teacher named Charlie. Whenever
he came to her home to give her piano lessons, he greeted
her younger sister by hoisting her on his shoulders.
One day, about a year after Laura had been taking lessons,
Charlie did not hoist her sister on his shoulders. Instead,
he bent down and gave her a candy. Her sister said,
"Charlie, your hands are black!" This was
the first time her sister had noticed Charlie's skin
color despite all the time they has known each other.
Although she had been oblivious to his different skin
color when she was younger, as she grew older, she was
developmentally able to see the difference. Dr. Schlessinger
concluded: "Racism is not congenital; it has to
be learned."
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