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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This happened to my biracial (black/white) daughter OP. It started at the same age. She started saying  she hated being brown and having curly hair. Transpired Her classmates were telling  her she was covered in mud and looked like a warthog (they were studying them at school) because of her curry hair and brown skin. During black history month someone asked her if her grandparents had chains around their necks. She became so despondent that, in her own 5 year old way , she said “I don’t want to be alive because I don’t know how to be happy being brown”. She called all black people ugly.
It’s a very long and extremely painful story but we eventually, after a year of talking to the school, decided to move her to a private school where she was not the only brown person and it’s made the world or difference. 
In these situations it’s very hard to bring about change because most of the comments made are by children who are just not used to people different from them and are curious. [b]No one has explained these differences[/b]. If there is no one else like them they bear  the brunt of these comments and it can be very damaging. I was advised by the  school social worker, off the record, to remove her from the school because where these situations had arisen before they often got worse not better. 
I hope you have a better experience than we did and are able to resolve the situation within the current school. [/quote]

No one has explained the differences because if we try to talk to our white kids about black kids then we're racist. But of course they aren't blind so they see the differences and they aren't deaf so they hear the differences too. And I just hope like heck that they aren't in a room one day and blurt out something that goes through their head while they try to figure things out for themselves.

While the differences can't be discussed, the similarities can't be discussed either, and it stays some sort of Big-Thing-That-Can't-Be-Talked-About. And there will never be unity in this country with that.[/quote]

You don’t talk to your white kids about black kids.  You work- hard- to educate yourself that we live in a diverse country. Skin color, race, religion, national origin, language, etc.   That way, when your kid encounters someone who looks different, your kid will not be ignorant and will not say ignorant things.  [/quote]

I don’t talk to my kids about race either. We are Asian.

We recently were doing a puzzle where there was an African American skater. We were trying to match puzzle pieces and call people the jeans family, brown jacket guy, green hat girl and I described one girl as the black skater. 8yo DS told me I shouldn’t say that because it is racist. I told him that I wasn’t saying anything negative and that the skater was black. It isn’t negative to be black. We also called one girl the Asian girl in the puzzle and DS didn’t have a problem calling the Asian girl Asian.

DS goes to a predominantly white school. He must have learned at school that talking about race is taboo.[/quote]

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