How to talk with kids about race?

I’ve been looking back on some choices I’ve made in talking with my kids about race. I think to some degree I’ve been swayed by the zeitgeist in ways that weren’t actually helpful.

(We’re a white family in a mostly-white environment in the US. Things will obviously be different for different children, and I expect that kids who are in a racial minority where they live will need different considerations. There are other pieces about what “the talk” is like for different groups.)

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In June 2020, a lot of parents I know were trying to figure out how to talk to their kids about the wave of attention to police violence and racial injustice. It felt important to do something.

I read guides on how to talk to kids about racism, and accounts of how other parents were raising the topic. One evening, I told the kids that people were sad and angry because a police officer had killed a man for no good reason, and this has happened to other black people before. The three-year-old basically didn’t process it, which was fine. The five-year-old asked a lot of questions and took it very seriously.

Over the next weeks, she would hand us paper and dictate letters for us to write down. She’d deliver them (to nobody? to everybody?) by throwing them out the window, and I’d find them in the garden.

At one point she put on a fancy costume, got Jeff to play piano, and improvised a song with the refrain “Black Lives Matter.” 

When a third grader at the school organized a Black Lives Matter rally, L made a sign saying “Please don’t hurt black people.”

I was proud to have a child who cared so much.

………….

Then I started noticing the downsides.

L started saying she didn’t want to play with one of the neighbors anymore. She asked “Is she black?” No, I explained, the girl’s mother is Asian and her father is white. L was somewhat mollified but still said she didn’t want to play with this girl anymore.

She saw a book cover with a group of children of different races playing together. She pointed to a black boy and said “It’s surprising that they’re playing with him and not being mean to him.” No, I hastened to explain, it’s normal and good for children of different races to play together.

The next fall she had a classmate who was new to the school. “I made sure to be extra nice to him . . . . ” she said. I waited for the other shoe to drop. “Even though he’s black.”

…………

This year my second child started kindergarten. She knew that Martin Luther King Day was a holiday and that she wanted to wear her new purple dress for the occasion. I asked what she knew about Martin Luther King, and she seemed utterly confused. Even after I explained, she asked why he was a king.

We watched a video of the book “Martin’s Big Words,” which is about as kindergarten-friendly as any book about this topic. The book’s description of segregation was brief, so I explained more about that. On the page about his assassination, she turned to me, her eyes big with shock. “Did that really happen?” Yes, it really happened.

After we were done, I wondered what was better now. Is it good for her to know about segregation at age 5? Does it help her see her black classmates as peers? Does it help her see them as equal to learn about exactly how her great-grandparents degraded theirs?

If I were doing it over, I would wait longer. There are a lot of horrors to learn about. I want my children to be part of the solution, but it didn’t seem like the steps I was taking were moving toward that.

………….

I tried to write a section about what we know about how children learn about race, but I came away more confused than I started. My starting point was the chapter about this in NurtureShock, though social science research is hard enough that I didn’t take everything there as true.

Here are some things I’m pretty sure of:

• Children are not color-blind. Babies can notice differences in race as young as three months, based on studies where they look longer at faces of some races than others. (Although different researchers make different interpretations about whether looking at a face longer indicates liking or disliking it!) 
• Young children are often interested in classification and systemization, and this is something adults actively teach (put all the round buttons in one pile and the square buttons in another pile, one of these things is not like the others, etc.) 
• Even in the absence of explicit messages about race, the combination of these factors plus actual experiences often leads to preference for one’s own race by age 3 or so. (More research).

But as far as what to do about it, I’m less sure.

• A lot of parents (especially white parents) don’t talk to their kids about race, either because they think it’s bad to introduce the topic or because it’s fraught and uncomfortable. Even studies that recruit families for research on children’s views on race often have a hard time getting parents to talk about it for the study.
• There are some studies indicating that getting parents to talk explicitly about race changes the children’s attitudes. But everything I’ve seen uses interventions like “get parents to say messages about racial equality from a checklist each night for five nights.” After that, I’m not surprised that the kids can guess what adults want to hear when a researcher asks them about it afterwards.
• Some things you would think help do not help. For example, children at the most racially diverse schools are less likely to have cross-racial friendships. (source)

A basic thing I think is worth doing:

• Explain physical differences. Kids notice them and come up with their own theories if they don’t have access to facts, often to do with darker skin being “dirty.” People with ancestors from different parts of the world look different even though all the important stuff is the same, people have different amounts of melanin in our skin, etc. 

I’m less sure about this, but probably still a good idea:

• Teaching norms relevant to children’s daily lives, like “People of different colors can be good friends” and “It’s bad when people are mean to each other because of their race or how they look.” 
• This guide has examples of the kinds of things I’ll probably continue to say and do with my kids.

And I now lean away from:

• Covering historical or current examples of severe racism with young children. For white children, especially if they aren’t already close with children of color, I suspect this causes them to think of other racial groups as victims to be pitied rather than peers. At least that seems to have been what happened with my oldest.
• This is similar to how I think about most of the news cycle: I think young kids should be told enough to make sense of what they hear other people discussing, but don’t need to know about every tragedy or outrage.

Obviously kids have to learn about the really bad stuff at some point. Slavery, segregation, and brutal treatment of Native Americans are basic facts of American history. And at some point kids should learn about factors that systematically affected different groups’ outcomes, like how a bunch of white veterans got free houses and college educations after WWII and black veterans didn’t.

But I expect early elementary school is too young.

…………..

I’m not sure how much difference this makes, if any, but I also try to find media that includes protagonists of color. Of the book series we’ve read recently, a lot of them are about girls of color: Zoey and Sassafras, Anna Hibiscus, Pacy, Lulu, Grace, Yasmin. A few of them include episodes about the kinds of prejudices that children encounter, but mostly they’re about kids being normal kids (or kids who run a clinic for magical animals, in Zoey’s case). I’ve found some of them via What We Do All Day‘s general book lists and lists of books about children of color.

Related: Marjorie Ingall on how weird it is that every year there’s a new batch of children’s books about the Holocaust but few about life as a Jewish child or teen today. She writes that some of the literature “amounts to torture porn,” while in the latest books there are “none that explored conflicts between keeping Shabbat and playing a varsity sport; none that talked seriously about real-life efforts to build bridges between Israeli Jewish and Palestinian kids; none that wrestled with parents flipping their lids over the protagonist dating a non-Jew; none that explored navigating kashrut when you and your friends want to grab a snack after school.”