I’m white. My daughter is also white. She’s 3 years old, almost 4.
Up to this age, my approach to teaching her about race has been to focus exclusively on skin color. Meaning, we talk about how people can have all different colors and tones to their skin. Talking about skin color on a spectrum. But always emphasizing that people are all the same and that everyone should be treated the same.
In isolation, this all sounds lib. I of course want to get all into structural and institutional racism et al. But… she’s 3. Up until a few months ago she was still pooping and pissing in a diaper. My thinking is that emphasizing this more lib understanding of race is more age-appropriate now, and we can get into the real stuff a little later on when she has the mental and emotional maturity to handle it (that said, I have told her that the cops aren’t very nice to people who don’t look like us. Whatever, the daycare has pigs come over and talk to the kids even at her age, so fuck em I’m gonna counter that shit now).
Is this the right approach? Is there more I should be doing? If you all have any age-appropriate books on this topic you can recommend, definitely let me know.
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You might not even want to bring up the idea of racialized differences this early. Maybe “there’s people of all shapes and sizes and all of their minds have surprises”.
When I was 6 I heard the phrase “Black person” and had no idea what it meant. I had seen plenty of people with dark brown skin, but they weren’t really a category until my 1st grade teacher (who is Black) spelled it out for me. I did have a fairly sheltered, well-off early childhood though.
Maybe teaching your kid about how white skin can change colors from the sun is a useful thing to do, showing that it’s mutable.
Yeah, my original intention was to not bring it up at this age. But she’s really curious and asks a ton of questions about everything (even for a kid her age, at least it seems that way to me), I don’t bring it up proactively but what I described above is what I say when she asks questions about skin color. And I’m trying to do the Captain Fantastic thing where I give her as honest of an answer that I can to any questions she has.
