Talking to My Black Son About Race. I’m White.
“I think people just need to change their minds, because they don’t even know me”
My son is eight.
He came to live with us just a few weeks after he turned five. Almost immediately, we noticed him regularly making comments about the color of his skin.
“My skin is ugly because it is the color of poop.”
“I am stupid because my skin is brown.”
“I wish my skin looked like yours.”
I remember feeling shocked and naive that at age five, before he was even old enough to be in school, he had already internalized such a deep sense of inferiority because of the color of his skin.
At that point, he had spent the last two and a half years in foster care. Surely the nice foster families wouldn’t have made him feel that way, right? And before that, he was in his biological home with people who looked like him, so they weren’t talking this way, I assumed.
The color of my skin made it hard for me to imagine how a child so young could already be experiencing racism; that he could already believe he was “less than” because of the color of his skin. Sure, I understood that adults and even adolescents, experience racism. I just could not wrap my head around the fact that a child so young had such a profound…
