Looking for Anti-Racism Resources for a 5-Year-Old: What Actually Helped
The first time my daughter asked about skin color, we were in the cereal aisle at the grocery store. A older Black woman reached past us to grab a box of oatmeal, and my five-year-old said, in that perfectly clear voice kids save for public spaces, “Mommy, why is her skin so dark?”
I did what many parents do. I mumbled something about melanin, steered the cart forward, and hoped the woman hadn’t heard. But my daughter had already moved on to asking for the sugary granola, so I thought we were safe. We weren’t. The question came back at dinner, then at bath time, then again the next morning in a slightly different form: “Is it okay that our skin is different?”
I realized I needed actual help. Not a one-time conversation, but something we could live with. So I started searching for anti-racism resources appropriate for a five-year-old, and quickly found myself overwhelmed by books about white privilege, podcasts for adults, and think-pieces about raising anti-racist kids that all somehow assumed my child could already understand structural redlining.
What I needed was something simpler. Something that would match where she actually was developmentally: still learning how to share, obsessed with fairness, and completely capable of absorbing a well-written picture book for the fortieth time in a row.
The first thing that worked was a board book, of all things. Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi is technically for babies, but the thick pages and simple rhyming lines gave us a way to talk about what fairness looks like. “Instead of just being not racist, you need to be anti-racist,” the book says, which is a big idea. But my daughter held onto one line: “Views are not color-blind.” She asked what that meant, and I tried a simple explanation: “Sometimes people judge others by skin color, and that’s wrong. We should notice and speak up.”
It wasn’t perfect. Some pages were too abstract for her. But it started something.
Next, I found Our Skin: A First Conversation About Race by Megan Madison and Jessica Ralli. This one was even better for her age. It uses real photographs and simple text to talk about the fact that people come in many shades. It also names racism directly: “A racist idea is one that says one race is better or worse than another.” We read it at bedtime, and I was surprised how matter-of-factly she responded. At five, she already understood an unfair rule; she just didn’t have the vocabulary for it.
Then came the day when everything we had been reading suddenly became real. We were at the neighborhood playground, and a group of kids was running a game of tag. My daughter got paired with a boy whose skin was darker than hers. She stopped, looked at his arm, and said, “Why is yours that color?”
I tensed. The boy didn’t. He said, “‘Cause I have more melanin. My mom told me.” He kept running. My daughter stood still for a second, then ran after him. Later, in the car, she said, “He’s brown like our favorite pancake syrup.”
That word—“brown”—stuck with me. She wasn’t being rude. She was sorting the world into categories, which is what five-year-olds do. Their brains are constantly categorizing: big/small, soft/hard, same/different. Skin color is just another category, unless we teach them through silence or anxiety that it’s a forbidden topic.
The best resource turned out to be not a single book, but a combination of things: having diverse books around all the time, not only on special occasions. All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold showed her a classroom of kids from different cultures doing normal things — eating together, playing, learning. The Colors of Us by Karen Katz became a favorite because a little girl walks through her neighborhood painting her friends and family in different shades: cinnamon, peanut butter, chocolate, honey. My daughter loved that because food references made sense to her.
We also bought a crayon pack that includes skin-tone shades. For a while, every family portrait she drew looked like a collection of peaches, walnuts, and Crayola’s “Deepest Almond.” That was the point. Skin color became something to name and match, not something to pretend didn’t exist.
I learned to say things differently, too. Earlier, I had been afraid to talk about race because I didn’t want to teach her to see color where she might not have noticed. But then I read something that changed my thinking: children start noticing differences in skin color as early as they notice differences in gender. They see it. The question is not whether to talk about it, but how.
So I stopped saying “everyone is the same.” Because they aren’t. My daughter and her friend do not have the same skin color, and pretending they do confused her. Instead, I started saying things like, “Yes, your skin is lighter than your friend’s. Both are beautiful. Different means interesting.” And when we see someone being treated unfairly because of the color of their skin, we can say, “That’s not fair. Let’s help.”
One afternoon, she asked me a question that made me briefly panic again: “Why are most of the people in our town white?”
We live in a mostly white (or white-leaning) community. She goes to a school where most kids look like her. At five, she was noticing that, too. I didn’t have an easy answer. I told her honestly: “I think that’s because of history, and some choices people made long ago. Not everyone gets the same chances. Some of that is unfair.”
She didn’t ask more. She just nodded and went back to her puzzle. But I felt like we had opened a door rather than slamming it shut.
There are still moments when I can’t tell if I’m doing this right. I overheard her telling my mother that one of her favorite books is “about a brown girl and a purple girl,” and I had no idea what she meant. I’ve also read Something Happened in Our Town with her, which is about a police shooting and follows two families processing it. It felt too heavy at first, but she just absorbed the part about sadness and worked through her own questions: “Why did the police hurt him? Was he being bad?” It didn’t traumatize her. It did make me realize she understands more than I give her credit for, but also less than I sometimes assume.
We are still figuring this out. Every week, another small question comes up, and I try to answer it without turning it into a formal lesson. I keep a stack of books in the living room and another one in her shelf. I don’t have a perfect list. What I have is a willingness to say, “That’s a good question. Let’s think about it together.”
Yesterday, she was drawing a picture of our family and paused. She held up a brown crayon, then a peach one. “Mommy,” she said, “what color is your skin when you were little?” I laughed and told her I was actually a lot paler back then. She nodded and kept drawing. I don’t know where the picture ended up, or what exactly she was making sense of inside her head. But I’ve stopped expecting clean endings on this. We just keep reading, keep talking, and keep staying open to wherever her next question takes us.
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