My four-year-old pointed at a man in the grocery store and asked, “Why is that man’s skin dirty?”
I felt my face go hot. The man—Black, middle-aged, wearing a neat work uniform—was scanning avocados. He didn’t seem to notice. My daughter’s voice had that clear, ringing quality that carries across produce aisles. I wanted to disappear, but more than that, I wanted to know what to say.
I mustered a quiet, “We don’t say that,” and steered the cart away. She lost interest quickly. I didn’t.
That night I searched for “anti-racist resources for young children.” I expected a neat list of picture books and maybe a PBS episode. What I found instead were a lot of think-pieces and curated PDFs, most aimed at teachers or parents of school-age kids. The few items labeled for five-year-olds felt either too abstract (“celebrate diversity!”) or too heavy for bedtime reading.
I went to the library with a list of titles. I grabbed Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi, The Colors of Us by Karen Katz, and All Are Welcome by Alexandra Penfold. I brought them home and stacked them on the coffee table.
Reading them with my daughter was a different story.
She liked All Are Welcome well enough—the rhyming and the bright pictures held her attention. But Antiracist Baby felt like I was reading a conference pamphlet out loud. There’s a line about “equity” and another about “street-level justice.” My daughter asked me what “equity” meant, and I gave some rambling answer about everyone getting what they need. She nodded and said, “Like snacks?” I said yes, but I wasn’t sure that was right.
The Colors of Us worked better. It’s about a little girl’s mother explaining that brown skin comes in many shades—like cinnamon, chocolate, and honey. My daughter pointed at an illustration and said, “That looks like Aunt Cara’s skin.” She wanted to talk about each character’s skin as if they were paint swatches. That felt manageable. We read it three times in a row.
I thought maybe we could check the “anti-racist parent checklist” and move on. But then the playground happened.
Another mom, a friend of a friend, was sitting on the bench while our kids played. Her daughter—also four or five—picked up a piece of bark and said to my daughter, “You can’t be the princess. Your skin is brown.” My daughter shrugged. She’s been called brown before; she knows she’s not a white Disney princess. But this friend’s child had a certain tone, not mean, just matter-of-fact.
I didn’t know if I should intervene. My daughter didn’t even look upset. But the other mom stood up quickly and said, “Honey, everybody can be a princess.” Her daughter said, “No, like in the movie.” The mom tried to explain, and I saw her face get that same hot flush I’d felt in the grocery store. We both smiled at each other, a little too brightly, and moved on.
That night I called my sister, who is a preschool teacher. I described the playground moment and my failed grocery-store answer. She laughed. “You can’t be neutral about race with a four-year-old,” she said. “They already have ideas. If you don’t give them words, they’ll make up their own.”
She told me about a trick she uses in the classroom. When a child comments on someone’s skin color, she responds directly and matter-of-factly: “Yes, her skin is beautiful and brown. People have different skin colors, and that’s one of the ways we look different.” She says it calmly, like naming the color of a bus. She said the biggest mistake is to shush kids or act embarrassed, because that teaches them that skin color is something naughty to mention.
That sounded simple, but also scary. I tried to imagine saying that out loud in front of a stranger. It felt like breaking a rule.
The next week, I had a chance to practice. We were at the park, and my daughter saw a Black woman pushing a baby on a swing. My daughter called out, “She has dark brown skin like me!”
The woman turned and smiled. I felt my chest tighten. Then I remembered my sister’s words. I said, “Yes, she does. And that’s lovely.” My daughter nodded and went back to playing. The woman gave me a polite nod. Nothing awful happened. I realized I’d been holding my breath for something that didn’t need holding.
That moment shifted something. I started collecting what I call “everyday anti-racism” tools that don’t require a special book or a scheduled conversation. The first is simply naming skin colors correctly. Not “dark” or “different,” but actual words: brown, tan, deep brown, golden. It helps that my daughter is familiar with her own shades from The Colors of Us. We talk about skin color like we talk about hair texture or eye color. It’s just a part of someone’s description.
We also started listening more. My daughter noticed a wardrobe in her favorite picture book that only showed white characters. She asked, “Where are the brown kids?” That wasn’t a deep philosophical challenge; she just wanted to see someone like her in the book. So I made a point to rotate in books featuring Black, Latino, Asian, and Indigenous characters in everyday stories, not just books about civil rights or slavery. Those matter, but a five-year-old also needs to see that brown kids can be astronauts, librarians, or just regular kids.
I tried introducing the word “fairness” instead of “racism.” When she complains that her brother got more crackers, my husband and I use that as a tiny moment: “That doesn’t seem fair, does it? Sometimes people aren’t treated fairly because of how they look, and we don’t do that.” It feels awkward, sometimes, shoehorning a lesson into a snack dispute. But it’s practice. It makes the word familiar.
I’m still learning which resources are actually useful. The best ones seem to be the ones that don’t feel like resources at all. Picture books with characters of color doing ordinary things. Dolls and toys with varied skin tones. Conversations about noticing differences without judgment. The worst ones are the guides that give parents a script for “the big talk” about racism—because it was never supposed to be one talk.
My daughter asked another hard question last week. She said, “Mom, are Black people the ones who get hurt by police?” She’d heard something on the radio, a pebble of grown-up news that slipped through the car speakers. I panicked again. This was beyond “skin color.”
I said something like, “Some people with brown skin get hurt by some police, and that’s wrong. There are people working to make it better.” She looked at me for a long second. “Can I have fruit snacks?” she asked.
I don’t know if I answered well that time, either. And I’ve accepted that I won’t always. The search for the right resource, the perfect phrasing, the one book that covers everything—it’s never going to end. This isn’t a skill I get to master and file away.
So we keep reading, keep naming, keep stumbling through small moments in the grocery store and the park. Some days I feel like I’m doing it right. Other days I just hope I didn’t pass on my own discomfort. But at least now I know that waiting for a perfect, age-appropriate anti-racist curriculum is a trap. The resources are out there; they’re just not all labeled. Most of them are simply ordinary life, looked at with a clearer eye. And the best one so far has been my own willingness to say “yes, her skin is brown,” and let my daughter see that I’m not afraid to say it.
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