When racism starts in preschool (Part 1)

[This is the first of a two-part series discussing racism in young children.]

During my final year in college, my co-worker and friend, Jon, regularly told a story that started like this:

“My four-year-old daughter is a racist.”

Jon and I are both white, and we worked for an extremely white radio program. I’ve heard him tell the story with the same shrugging self-deprecation to group after group of white people.

A few months after I first heard the story, I interviewed him about it.

We were sitting on the carpet of a sterile grey recording room when Jon told me about how his daughter, Sara, goes to a preschool in Menlo Park with two black kids in it. One day at her school, Jon saw Sara playing with Jason, one of the two black students. While driving home, he asked Sara if she wanted to have a play date with Jason and she said no.

When he asked why not, she said, “His skin — it isn’t pretty.”

“There are two kids in my class and they both have black skin and I can’t tell them apart,” she later told Jon.

“Where did she hear this language of someone’s skin being black?” Jon recalled thinking. “Because if you had no context of race, you would actually say the kid’s skin was brown.”

At first Jon told Sara that when you decide to play with someone, what matters is that they are nice not that they look a certain way. That evening Sara, who had her hair in a ponytail, asked Jon to play. He told her he didn’t like to play with girls who wore their hair in ponytails. Sara parroted what Jon had said earlier, about how it shouldn’t matter what someone looks like.

But when asked the next day about reconsidering the play date with Jason, she said no.

Every time Jon brought up Jason, the conversation would go:

Sara: “Well, we don’t really play together.”

Jon: “Let’s change that by scheduling a play date then!”

Sara: “I don’t know if he’s nice.”

Jon: “Is he mean to you?”

Sara: “Well, no…”

Perhaps Jon’s story about Sara could have been the starting point of an uncomfortable but important conversation about race in America, or about the experience of being a black kid in a majority white school. But the way Jon told the story helped it function as more of a vehicle for white people collectively to feel OK about the problem of systemic racism learned by children. In various all-white rooms, Jon’s delivery was always the same. It was followed by shrugs, nervous laughter and the parents-fail-even-in-the-Bay-Area shaking of heads.

The story makes me think about this woman my sister worked with who would take a few Tums after every bite of pizza she had at lunch meetings. As someone who takes Tums on occasion, I’m not sure whether to be disgusted or grateful to this woman for eating them in public. Taking Tums publicly makes it seem like the private experience of digestive distress is as shame free as using a napkin. Her pill-taking suggests both the problem and its domestication.

If for white people race guilt is stomach acid, Jon’s telling of the story was like watching someone eat Tums in public. Listening to him telling it involved recognizing it was someone else’s way of coming to terms with their life and seeing how the story’s impetus, the internal distress, resonated with your own life.

I couldn’t be disgusted or morally removed from the whole situation; I was complicit. I, too, felt compelled to tell the story to other white people, as though if enough of us laughed and acted vaguely uncomfortable about it, then it would stop being sickening.

Near the end of our interview about his daughter, Jon told me that we’d gotten really somber, and that our conversation didn’t reflect how he usually talked to people about this.

I asked him if he’d been in a position to tell the story to a person whose life is directly affected by racism. Part of what I meant was — do you have any friends who aren’t white that you talked to about this?

He shook his head before responding.

“The scariest part of the story is that for much of America this isn’t a story at all,” he said. “This is just everyday life.”

[Thanks for reading. This story originally appeared on ripple.co. Part 2 is here. If you like what you read, check out more of our stories.]