Reply to African-American parents - where are your kids in school and how are they doing?

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[quote=Anonymous]OP I understand your concern.  I have 3 children. We used to live in an all white southern neighborhood and the kids went to a predominately white pre school. My son--around the age of 3.5--started making eye brow raising statements and exhibiting behavior that made me go..."hmmm".  He would only make friends with the white kids.  If he said a girl was pretty, she was always a white girl, which is fine but I started to notice a pattern.  One day he was looking at his sister's two dolls. One white, one black.  He pointed to the white one and said she was pretty.  I said, "What about the other one?"  He said, "She's ugly. " I asked why.  He said because, "brown is bad".  It broke my heart.

To this day I'm not sure what happened to start him down this track of thinking and it continued for some time.  When we moved back to DC in 2010, his pre-K class was AA and Latino plus 1 white kid.  Guess who he picked as his best friend?  Why?  "Because brown is the color of do-do."  It drove me crazy.  (We have 3 generations of Howard graduates in our family for pete's sake! :))

He's 6 now, and in K at at wonderfully diverse DC charter school.   I haven't witnessed this kind of behavior or heard him say anything like this in months. His friends come in all colors and he loves his new school.  I can finally exhale now.

I think, although being the "only" may be more difficult for the girls in middle school and up, it seems to me that black males in that situation have more issues in the lower school (although my husband went to a Big 3 for 6th grade and he said it was really difficult having to deal with being the "only."  He subsequently transferred out to another private that was more diverse).

Every kid is different.   I wouldn't hesitate to drop my oldest daughter in and "only" situation, but I would never put my younger daughter in a school where she was the "only" black kid.[/quote]

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