Reply to How to talk race and diversity with a preschooler?

Forum Index » Infants, Toddlers, & Preschoolers

Reply to "How to talk race and diversity with a preschooler?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]OP here. Wow, wow, wow--what a thread to come back to! :)

First, thanks to all who offered context and/or specific suggestions, and thanks to those who validated that I should indeed be concerned about this. Not to worry--we have absolutely addressed it head-on when it's come up, in no uncertain terms (but potentially not in terms that our child fully grasps--the conversation has largely been in the vein that a few PPs suggested, talking about how we are all the same inside [I appreciate the perspectives that this is a white privilege response, PPs, and think shifting the conversation to being about how everyone is unique vs. how everyone is the same makes a lot of sense--thank you] and reminding him of all of his (and our) friends of different colors. The note about his best friend being black was not intended to mean "so clearly he's not racist," but rather to note that we're not talking about a kid in a white community who has never personally encountered anyone of color. In fact, we live in one of the most diverse cities in the country in one of its more integrated middle (and mixed)-income neighborhoods, so his daily life involves interacting with people of all colors and creeds and means. I will think about ways to make sure he understands that this is a bigger deal, though. We do want to address the source of the ideas vs. just shaming him into not speaking these thoughts, though. That's my much bigger concern.

- What we did for MLK Day: nothing explicitly for the day itself, but I had forgotten a biggie: DS heard the end of an NPR piece on Claudette Colvin a few weeks ago and asked a lot of questions about that; we gave him our best approximation of the Rosa Parks story instead [the real one with the civil rights activism context] since I didn't know the Colvin story. At the time I thought it was a bit over his head--he kept referring to it as "that time when all the people on the bus were yelling and the police came." But possibly that factored in? (Maybe we totally screwed up our recounting of that story??) It's been on my to-do list to find a book on it for him so will bump that higher on the list. Our city has also been at the heart of a large number of protests and actions around the Brown and Garner murders so we have talked with him somewhat about that, although in very general terms (because of the violent nature of their deaths and his age).

- We do say black and white in our house and not light and dark skin, so that language must be coming from somewhere else. I had not planned to talk to school about it but have changed my mind after reading through this thread--particularly given that his best buddy is black and they are joined at the hip for most of the school day, I wonder if it is being directed at his friend (or at them both) from other kids during the day at some point? He's pretty supervised whenever he's with us, and I think we'd have picked up on a source there.

Thank you all--and feel free to continue passing along any particularly good resources that we or school could use to support this conversation.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics