I Thought Finding Anti-Racism Resources For My 5-Year-Old Would Be Simple. I Was Wrong.
Last Tuesday at the neighborhood playground, I was wiping popsicle stickiness off my jeans when my daughter Mia yells, loud enough that the whole playground can hear, “MOM! WHY IS THAT MAN’S SKIN CHOCOLATE?” I froze. The man looked up from pushing his little girl on the swing, gave that tight polite smile people use when you’ve just put them in an awkward spot, and looked away. I tugged Mia down to sit next to me, shushed her, mumbled something about “we don’t point at people” and spent the next 20 minutes pretending I wasn’t dying of embarrassment. That night, I decided I needed to actually find good resources to talk about this stuff with her. I figured a quick Google search, a few library holds, done. Turns out it’s way messier than that.
I started with the obvious search, and the first thing that popped up was all these lists of “best anti-racism books for kids” so I clicked through. Half of them were way too heavy for a kid who still thinks the tooth fairy leaves quarters under her pillow. One book opened with a two-page explanation of slavery, and I just… Mia can’t wrap her head around why she has to go to bed at 7:30, how is she supposed to understand hundreds of years of kidnapping and exploitation? I’m not saying we never talk about hard stuff, but starting there felt like throwing a toddler in the deep end and expecting them to swim.
The other half were all these “we are all the same inside!” rainbow books that are so nice on the surface, but when I flipped through one at the library the other night, Mia stopped me halfway through and went “But no we’re not. Olivia’s hair is curly and mine is straight and your skin is lighter than Grandma’s. Why does the book say we’re all the same?” And she’s right! 5-year-olds notice differences. They don’t not see color, no matter how much we wish they would. Telling them to ignore it just makes it feel like a weird forbidden thing, so they blurt it out loud at the playground like mine did. That’s exactly what I did wrong for the first five years of her life, right? I told her not to point, don’t say anything, it’s rude to notice. So it became this big secret thing she had to ask about loud when I wasn’t prepared.
I texted my friend Janay, who has a 6-year-old boy a class above Mia, and asked her what she uses. She sent me a title, said it’s her son’s favorite, but when I checked our library system it was checked out, and the only copy for sale on Amazon was $28 for a hardcover. I know that’s not a lot of money to some people, but between daycare co-pays and the new tires we needed for the minivan last month, I wasn’t about to drop that on a book I hadn’t even read. I get why people buy them, but that’s just where I’m at right now. I tried YouTube next, looking for short little cartoon videos that Mia would sit through, and the first one that came up was 10 minutes of a talking bear going “Racism is bad! Don’t be racist!” and that was it. Mia watched half of it and asked if we could watch Bluey instead. It didn’t answer any of her actual questions. What’s the point of that?
I accidentally found the most useful thing last weekend when we went to the children’s museum for their new dinosaur exhibit. I was hiding from a group of rowdy 7-year-olds that were throwing foam T-Rex bones around, leaning against the wall by the bathroom, and there was a little rack of free handouts for parents. One of them was called “Talking About Race With Kids Under 6” and it was only three pages, written by a local group of early childhood educators. It didn’t give me a fancy list of books to buy or anything. It just said the first thing you need to do is let kids talk about differences, instead of shutting them down. It said you don’t have to give them the whole history of the world right now. Just say “yeah, that’s right, some people have darker skin, some have lighter skin, that’s how we’re made, and it’s okay to notice that.”
I still think it’s rude to point and yell at people in public, obviously. But now when Mia says something after we’ve left, or at home, I don’t shush her. I just answer her. The other day we drove past a woman with bright pink hair and Mia said “why is her hair pink?” and I said “some people dye their hair that color because they like it, it looks fun” and that was it. Same thing with skin now. No more awkward shushing, no more making it feel like something bad to talk about.
I did finally get the book The Skin You Live In from the library a couple days ago, the one that’s just rhymes about kids with all different skin colors doing kid stuff: climbing swings, eating ice cream, hugging their parents. Mia loves it. She flips through it and points to which shade matches her, which matches my mom (her grandma, who lives with us and has much darker skin than me), which matches her best friend Javi who’s from Mexico. It’s nice, but it doesn’t talk about unfairness, right? And I know that eventually we need to talk about that, because Mia knows what unfair is. She yells about unfair when I don’t let her have another cookie. She gets it when someone doesn’t let her play just because. But I don’t know how much of that to bring in right now. Some days I think I’m overcomplicating it, some days I think I’m not doing enough. The other day a mom at pickup said to me “she’s five, she doesn’t even know what race is, why are you pushing this?” and I get where she’s coming from, but I also remember how I felt at the playground, fumbling and awkward, because no one talked about this with me when I was little, so I still don’t know what to say. I don’t want that for Mia.
I still haven’t found that one perfect resource, the thing that checks all the boxes and makes me feel like I’m doing this right. The best thing we’ve done so far is this little construction paper book we made last Sunday, when it was raining. We drew pictures of all the people we love, colored their skin with crayons I dug out of the back of the junk drawer, and wrote little sentences under each. “Uncle Raj loves to play catch, his skin is brown.” “Ms. Lee reads us story time, her skin is tan.” “Dad has lots of freckles on his white skin.” Mia carries it around in her backpack now. It’s messy, the crayon is smudged, she drew extra arms on half the people. But it’s ours. I still panic sometimes when I think I’m messing this up. I still don’t have all the answers. I guess that’s just how it goes, right? You don’t get a perfect pre-made resource for this stuff. You just fumble through, same as everything else with parenting.
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