I wish my daughter didn’t sit and stew on bad things for a week at a time before she brought them to me. Like tonight, she told me that when we were last at the public pool some boys taunted her saying her friend has skin like poo. I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am, and I certainly shouldn’t be as wounded as I am. I mean, it is a weak and stupid jab as far as racism goes, but still, I love her friend and so does Lauca. And the insult was course and blatant and perfectly pitched for its four year old target.
The thought of her friend being hurt. Oh god. I feel sad and appalled and kind of defeated too. I mean, two little girls playing in the pool, for fucksake, absolutely delighted with themselves and their swimming skills and some little monsters come and ruin that for them. Lauca thinks her friend didn’t hear them, but I wonder, has her friend had to learn already how to look away? I wish I had seen it myself, I wish Lauca had come to me right away, I wish Lauca had known how to handle a situation like this, how to defend herself and her friend.
Strategies for dealing with racism, as contextualised for a pre-schooler.
We’re terribly close, the mother of that little friend and I, but never mind our different ethnic backgrounds and skin colours here is where we really differ: I am wondering tonight how to broach that awful topic with my daughter, whereas she has probably had to some time ago with her own.
I wish I knew. But it’s something that we will no doubt encounter as family because while myself and my partner are very white and pasty looking his child is most definitely not. We already get a lot of looks because of it but nobody has ever said anything outright yet (though we always get asked if she is ‘ours’ by well-meaning strangers).
My manager’s 7 year old son walked into our conference room last year when we were watching First Australians- it was NAIDAOC week and my manager is a single mother with occasional childcare difficulties. He watched for a while and commented very innocently that they looked kinda like apes. I was shocked but think (hope) I gently said that they were as human as any of us or something like that.
Now this definitely doesn’t come from the mum who I know quite well. I’d like to know where this prejudice does come from, it made my skin crawl. I always thought it was from school…
I am so sorry. Sorry that Lauca witnessed it and so sorry for Lauca’s friend. As a brown child growing up in Australia, it was my defence mechanism to pretend that I didn’t hear the insults but I wish for the sake of your friend she didn’t have to pretend and that she genuinely did not hear the insults.
Here is a link to a great article on inoculating against racism
Hope you find it helpful.
http://www.handinhandparenting.org/csArticles/articles/000000/000038.htm
What a horrible experience. You know, I’d be inclined to ask someone at your daughter’s school how this kind of thing is handled. I bet it’s something that comes up a bit in the playground and if there isn’t already an emphasis on diversity of cultures then perhaps there ought to be.
I know it sounds like buck passing but actually I think it’s really important for these things to be addressed at an institutional level, out in the open, where kids can ask questions and perhaps challenge the racist ideas that they may have already been exposed to at home or from some random comment heard on a bus or wherever.
I feel very strongly the responsibility to stop all this kind of nonsense with our kids’ generation. Idealistic perhaps, but when will there be a better opportunity?
Gosh, hope that doesn’t sound too high-horse-ish. It’s just that it’s so frightening isn’t it? I feel like it needs jumping on right now with a sledge hammer or something.
There is a chapter on talking to kids about race in the book Nuture Shock. It says that these discussions are important and that there is a window (before 3rd grade) when they should be done to have the most effect.
On another program, (PBS This Emotional Life) there was some interesting information about bullying. That one of the most powerful preventers of bullying is a bystander (ie. your daughter) standing up to the bully and saying that what the bully is saying is not cool or acceptable. That might be a skill worth trying to teach her.
To a great extent, I keep my children sheltered inside a nest of protection. By my older daughter’s age (6), I had already been knocked down and called a “dirty religious epithet” by 8 year olds, and my brother had been chased down the block after religious studies, by the children at the RC religious studies across the street, being called” a Cxxxxx killer” (at 7). That was the US in the 70′s.
I wonder how hard it will hit my children here, when they are attacked. And I know it will happen,because as an adult I both see and hear it. I don’t know how to proactively explain it to them. In so many ways I envy their innocence.
[...] Milk writes Sunny, with a chance of racism, explaining an incident of racism her four-year-old had with one of her friends at the swimming [...]
Reading your post made me so sad. I went to the link Tasmiya posted and thought there were some really good suggestions. Hope you don’t mind I wrote some thoughts on my own blog and linked back to this post. http://schmoopybaby.blogspot.com/2010/02/thoughts-on-being-anti-racist-parent.html
Hi!
Have you perhaps considered the possibility that children, particularly young children, and certainly in my experience, boys, have an obsession with faeces? You don’t say how old the boys were. It would be safe to say that at a certain age, say 8 or over, a child’s knowledge of the world should be sufficient to comprehend concepts like racism.
A good example of how the children’s world can be different to adult perceptions was portrayed through the famous treatment of an adult Down’s Syndrome male by Scottish Police in 2008;
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article3761056.ece
Adults will define racism as meaning anything that is insulting or demeaning to another persons color or culture. But a child has yet to take on those human failings some times, and will say things, even insulting things, but with no knowledge of racism, let alone an emotional response to others through the vehicle of racism.
Some might determine, ‘hey, racism is racism’ full stop. Any age, any circumstance, anywhere. Strategies for dealing with such incidents might be complex. Racism is a human failing, but I’ve heard people inform me confidently that it is impossible for a non-white to be racist-therefore inadvertently falling into the racists logic trap ‘racism is a human failing, non-whites aren’t capable of racism, therefore non-whites aren’t human’.
It’s right to chastise children who insult others on the basis of a perceived difference – but at an early age, can we be sure that it is racism, and not just our adult social filter redefining the perceptions of the world that a child possesses?
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