WHY AREN’T YOU BROWN LIKE ME?
Use books to start conversations about race with your children from infancy, say experts
LONG before we had children, before we were even married, my wife, Jenny, started buying a children’s book nearly every time she travelled to a new city. So when we had our first child, in 2015, we brought her home to a bookshelf already half-stocked with books. In that first year of EJ’s life, I remember often reading to her from one of my favourites, A Baobab Is Big, by Jacqui Taylor.
Jenny had bought it in Cape Town. As I read, I pointed out things to our daughter, but I never said a word about the colour of the main character’s skin. The fact that this little boy’s arms were darker than hers, darker than mine – why would I draw attention to that?
It wasn’t until three-and-a-half years later, when Jenny signed us up for a class at a library, Teaching Preschoolers About Race, that I began to realise that children’s books were a way into a conversation that our family had not been having.
And it wasn’t just that we weren’t talking to our 3-year-old about differences in race and ethnicity. My wife and I had not been talking about it either, despite being a multiracial family. I am white, and my wife is a Filipina American. Our daughters (we have two now), are what EJ, our eldest, calls “half-peach, half Filipino”.
Wanting to explore the idea further, I reached out to Kirby McCurtis, who had been one of the teachers of the course. “Just go for it,” said McCurtis. “You’re going to feel awkward, but if you don’t do it, it’s going to be worse.” McCurtis recommended starting to talk to babies as young as 2 or 3 months old about differences in skin colour as you read board books.
“People get really nervous about othering people,” said McCurtis, who is black. She recommended pointing out everyone you see in a book. That way, she said, “no one is othered”.
Since taking McCurtis’s course, we had sought out more diverse characters and authors for EJ and her 1-year-old sister, Juni, and yet how many opportunities to teach them more directly about race had we missed? How could we make sure we didn’t miss any more? I spoke to experts in the anti-racism field. McCurtis’s idea of starting the work early was echoed by Katie Ishizuka and Ramon Stephens, founders of the Conscious Kid, which works to reduce bias and promote positive identity development.
“At the age of 1, children are able to distinguish skin colour so it’s important to expose babies to books that feature a variety of skin tones, races and classes,” said Ishizuka, who is Japanese. In addition to narrating and asking your baby questions about skin colour, she said parents should also be “affirming that all skin tones are beautiful”.
By the age of 3, kids are using race to reason about people’s behaviours, Ishizuka said. This is the when you can begin to talk to kids about racism and discrimination in terms of fairness.
However such a conversation might go, remember not to shame your child for asking questions. Toddlers are naturally curious, and if yours asks a question like, “Why is that person’s skin so brown?” celebrate their curiosity, and perhaps look into a book like
All The Colours We Are by Katie Kissinger, which takes a scientific yet simple approach to explain that humans are different shades of brown, depending on how much melanin we have in our skin. For 4- and 5-year-olds, Ishizuka and Stephens recommended asking children more in-depth questions about how race operates in the books they’re reading, such as, “Who is doing what in the story and why?” According to Stephens, who is black, the biggest mistake adults make when talking to kids about race is sanitising the issue: “Kids are definitely absorbing these issues, and they’re more than intellectually capable of understanding them.” I also reached out to parents I know to get their perspectives.
Dione Heater said she and her husband, who are both black, try to choose books with protagonists that look like their 7-year-old daughter. She also thinks it’s important to read books that have black protagonists without addressing their race at all.
Ishizuka agreed, saying “not everything has to be about racism”. Sarah Gartman remembered a time when she took her adopted daughter, who is black, to the doctor, and another white woman started touching her daughter’s hair without asking. “I didn’t have the words then to tell her this was not okay.” She recommended Don’t Touch My Hair! by Sharee Miller.
Hassan Rutherford, who said he grew up not knowing he was biracial, advised: “Don’t ever try to shelter the child from the experience (of racism) itself, no matter how painful.”