Racial Awareness in Children - They Notice...

Here's a great article...

A follow-up on a comment I made in Random Confessions where I mentioned that as a little girl I thought the Tar Baby was adorable, and loved stories about Little Black Sambo, and loved little black kids my own age in general whenever I got the chance to play with them (which was very rare as I lived in rural Canada)... I was most definitely not a racist little girl - I was just absolutely fascinated by people from other cultures. When a little baby girl from Qatar in the Middle East came to visit our church for awhile, my sisters and I practically fought over her because she was so beautiful with her chubby brown legs and huge brown eyes and curly black hair...

http://www.teachingforchange.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/ec_childrenraceracism_english.pdf

Just thought this article was very interesting because we so often like to think of children as "color-blind", but I am coming to think that this is an avoidance tactic, and the article really puts it into perspective. As interracially motivated people, it would do us well to at least skim over it, and I would appreciate your thoughts and experiences. Either your own experiences, or observations of your children.

 

If I say something here that you don't like to hear, please don't say that I'm condescending.

I would like to say something, but I don't know how you'd react.

 

Say it, and don't WORRY about how I'll react. I'm not going to neg rep you or anything.

 

I feel like I've never really noticed race until I came to DC.

One of the cousins I grew up with is half black, to me he was always... him. I've never really thought, "hey, he isn't white" or anything like that. When I was about 8, my family and I visited family members in Ontario. For most of the vacation, I spent time outside running around the apartment building grounds with other kids, some black kids and asian kids... I didn't care. I don't think I noticed a difference, but I could be just "adjusting" how I remember things. Just, I've seen pictures from that time, and was surprised at how diverse all us kids were lol

 

As a teacher, I see this is kids year in and year out. They start off color blind....by 4th grade, I start noticing they start to separate themselves from different cultures, and start hanging out with people in their own culture. By middle school it's clearly a difference, and in HS, even worse.
I think this shift starts at home. If parents are color blind, kids will remain color blind, but the moment race is introduced in the home, kids really have no shot. Sad, but true.

 

Interesting what you, Trouble, and what you, Nic, say about playing with kids at an early age... Because I was very aware that the little Haitian girls were black, but it was not uncomfortable, it was exciting and fun to me! I wanted to be around them always! I wanted them to be my new friends - I was really so lonely in my every day life - and they were so sweet and full of life and so loving and giving. I don't know what happened to that big adopting family - I tried to google them and came up with nothing - I will have to ask my parents - they have more connections than I do.

I had a dear little Dutch friend at school, and she was the only one that I relied on for any sense of friendship (she and I are FB friends right now - I wish she and I could meet one day). One friend = sad and lonely. I think our school was actually full of many races although I didn't know it at the time - my dad was the principal. Dutch families adopted Native American kids and one kid I think was black - they were all older than me - I was eight. I thought they were interesting (although only in the back of my head - at the time I just thought it was normal). It was the Boss family LOL. There were a lot of relatively new immigrant Dutch families in Alberta at that time and they were quite progressive - very formative for the province. At times I miss Canada.

Also there was a Vietnamese family that my family helped come over, and I played with the kids... they were so traumatized that they were not able to enjoy things and I didn't understand what they had gone through... I wish I had... I could have been kinder to them... the ladies were so sweet to me and played with my hair and were so much gentler to me than my mother ever was... I loved them so much. When they got settled, they made the most lavish feast to thank us for helping them. They were wonderful people.

 

Yeah, where we currently live is also very diverse. Watching kids play is truly a wonderful thing. When playin' double-dutch, freeze-tag, or whatever (LOL), it's the attitude of "I know what color you are, but SO WHAT! We're still best friends!!"

It's really beautiful to see...

 

Diversity is something that I noticed to be an important attribute in my life from day 1.

 

Absolutely. Diversity builds experience. Its important that people understand cultures other than their own.

 

^^yessir! Absolutely..

 

yeah it stinks when they hit the teen years because thats when they get introduced to hatred.

 

I have a cousin who lived overseas (in Saudi Arabia) for ten years--from first grade to high school age. He went to a school for foreign kids that had about fifty percent of the kids from the U.S. and the rest from all over the world. He told me it wasn't unusual for him to have friends from several different countries at the same time and race was pretty much meaningless to him until he arrived back in the good old USA. He was shocked to go into his cafeteria and find that the students were sitting in self-segregated groups. (This was in North Carolina and about eight years ago--maybe things have changed?) It was really a very big deal to him and he went on to get a degree in public policy and is now finishing his law degree. His goal is (his words) "to make this country a little more like the way I grew up." Imagine that. To grow up in Saudi Arabia (admittedly in an isolated enclave--the expatriate community) and learn about racial prejudice only when you come home to the U.S.

 

I believe it my friends from Europe have always told me how shocked they are by the level of racism in this country. A few have flat out told me they dislike the white people in this country because of how ignorant, and rediculous they are. Some have just said "The white people are stupid here." Though regards of their opinion they all have agreed that this country is to focused on skin color.


The funny thing is a lot of people come here because America markets itself as a diverse nation. When people think diverse they don't think rediculously segregated.

 

People overseas tend to not like their American counterparts.