Sam S.
Arlington, VA
I’m a young white teen growing up in a rich white area. For the past few years I’ve tried my hardest to confront and learn about racism: reading dozens of books, watching videos and movies and trying to understand the buried racism in me and my community. This has helped me realize some deeply racist things I’ve done and believed in my childhood, and more recently.
A lot of white people don’t understand how early kids absorb racism. Researchers at Yale have discovered that by age three, children can start to evaluate others based on their race, and by age five begin to have the same kinds of mindset about race as adults.
When I was young, the word ‘Black’ was practically taboo in my house. It’s not that my parents tried purposefully not to teach me about race, but the fact that they didn’t teach left me exposed to racist society. And I absorbed the values I was taught. I’m very ashamed to say that, when I was about seven years old, I told my younger sister that ‘Black’ was a bad word. And I fully believed it.
It’s absolutely horrifying that a child so young could be led to believe that such a big group of people deserved to be erased, down to their name being thought of as a curse word to never dare say. Or that the word ‘Black’ could be equated to an insult.
Back then I was seven. I was in second grade. I didn’t know anything about race, but under the surface, without even realizing it, I thought a lot about race.
To raise children so ignorant is unacceptable. White children are not taught about race like children of color are. White parents seem to assume that their kids are innocent and they believe that everyone is equal, but kids learn by observing other people. That’s a fact of life. And it’s also a fact that many people are racist.
Take the media kids consume, for example. They see how most of the characters on their favorite TV show are light-skinned or white, how the housekeeper is so often a woman of color, how the Asian kid in a movie is the smartest in the class, and the Black girl the sassiest (and God forbid the main character!) They notice how characters portrayed as beautiful women are almost always white, and now they have a subconscious bias associating white features with true beauty. This applies to all children.
In real life, they notice the way some white people purposely avoid the gaze of people of color. They notice how so many service workers are people of color, and how so many doctors and lawyers and professors are white, and this leads to the conclusion that people of color are better suited for menial labor and not intellectual work, and that white people are too good for service jobs and inherently more intelligent. They won’t recognize any of this, but they’ll internalize it anyways and the racism coded into them will take years to chip away at.
How do you think racism still exists? Racist adults set racist institutions in place and raise their very impressionable children, who go on to uphold those institutions. Racist communities raise children. A racist society is raising children. This is dangerous.
Children become adults. Racist children become racist adults.
Too often, teaching kids about racism in school is reduced to the same books about Rosa Parks and Dr. King every Black History Month, which focuses on racism as a thing of the past. Kids need to know that racism is a very real thing.
Parents can’t shield their children from all the racism and stereotypes in the world. Even if white people try our hardest to understand all the tiny microaggressions up to the biggest pieces of erased history of racism, there will always be a thousand more we’re not aware of. But white parents can do some things. You can read your children picture books representing different races and cultures than our own. You can try your hardest to give them diverse spaces. You can talk about racism and race comfortably in front of your children so they’re not led to believe that race is a taboo topic and ‘Black’ is a curse word. Also, I highly recommend the book How to Raise an Antiracist for white parents.
Every good parent loves their child. Some might worry that talking to kids about racism will lead them to be too aware of it, and that knowing about stereotypes will reinforce them in their kids’ minds. But if you don’t get to your kid first, society will.
