| For (some of) these white kids though, their lives are white. Their patenrs don’t have friends of other races – they don’t have to. Their kids witness their patenrs having mono-racial ideas of who is worth hanging out with and who is not. And while kids may not, at this age, put an inherent value on thing like skin color, hair type, and eye shape, they do recognize difference easily enough to see that the only place they interact with people not like them is in school. And they make an inference that if Mom and Dad don’t hang out with these people, then I shouldn’t either – for whatever reason. This is such a clear and useful example of how white socialization is maintained and passed on to children, often by patenrs who are completely unaware of what they are teaching and who may consider themselves committed to fairness and equality. Even more powerfully than from their families, kids are absorbing social roles from community norms and the dominant culture at large. So when patenrs' social lives are entirely white, there's nothing to contradict the conclusions our children are reaching based on how society sorts, segregates and selects people by racial groups. Platitudes like We're all the same and Race doesn't matter have little power when children observe on a daily basis that this is simply not true.Recently I read the book, The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism by Van Ausdale and Feagin, which shares findings from a year one of the authors spent in a preschool center unobtrusively observing children's interactions around race. She recorded multiple examples of children as young as three years acting out white dominance and exclusion, and even more startling, hiding this behavior from their teachers because they had already absorbed the understanding that adults didn't approve! When the researcher shared her observations with the staff, there was a common response of disbelief, based on adult ideas that the children were too young to notice race and to be playing it out in these ways.A good article with much of the same information (including references to the book) in a shorter form is Talking to Children About Race: The Importance of Inviting Difficult Conversations by Jeane Copenhaver-Johnson, printed in Childhood Education (available for purchase online as a download or through your library). As white patenrs, unless we are actively providing a different message through our behaviors and the conversations we have with our children, they will absorb white dominance and white centrality and they will act it out. The good news is, making our worlds more colorful and talking to our children about race are choices we can make.
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