Raising Color Blind Children

In a past life, I was middle school teacher in a private school. Throughout the year, there were various convocations, all school events, where the entire school joined together in the gym to commemorate an important date or event. Martin Luther King’s birthday was one such event.

I, for one, was not a huge fan of this convocation. Let me explain. It’s not that I am against equal rights. Quite the opposite, actually. I enjoy the fact that my local area provides me access to many interesting and intelligent people with many different skin colors, ethnicities, religions and nationalities. I recently found my children in a tunnel, in a children’s play area, packed in with a few new friends. Not one of these new friends had the same color skin as my kids or as each other. I was overjoyed.

My objection to these convocations was that we have all heard these words before. While they remain powerful and true, I wouldn’t mind a new angle in our ever changing world.

Which is what I found when I started to phase out and look around at the students.

Below me, on the ground, a 2^nd grade class was sitting in row. Approximately 20 students, in the same school uniform and equally bored by the speech that was clearly not directed at them.  Among those students, two little girls stood out, because they were misbehaving badly enough to receive constant reprimand from their teacher. Did they care? Absolutely not. They were way too busy playing with each other’s hair, tickling each other’s legs and making funny faces at each other until the other one giggled out loud. They were cruisin’ for a bruisin’ and the teacher was not pleased. Normally, frisky kids don’t provoke intellectual thought but this time it did. Why? One little girl was white and the other was black, and I would bet my life that were the very best of friends, in deep platonic love. They were unwittingly demonstrating the very content of the speech, but in a significantly more creative and interesting way. I understood, again. Thank you, girls, for that accidental life lesson.

Today at the playground, my daughter (cute little white girl) became enchanted with a little boy younger than her and finally found the coordination and confidence to go up and hold his hand. I had been chatting with his father, a very nice man who had a camera on hand and got photo evidence of the adorable scene. Did she care that he was black? No. Not only did she not care, I don’t think she noticed. If she had the vocabulary to articulate such observations, I would have asked her to describe him, just to verify my theory. Would she have mentioned that he was black, or would she have simply described his age, height, t-shirt color, favorite activity on the playground, etc? Would his race have been a relevant detail to her? I wonder…

Are we, in fact, raising kids that are culturally color blind? When my children’s generation sees a person of racial difference is that difference noteworthy or is it as irrelevant as eye color?

I can’t wait to ask them.