Racism Starts at Home... ?

madurobob

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madurobob
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This could just as easily go in Politics or maybe Social Issues, but the issue I had was not really political and my concern is education related.

Yesterday my 8 year old came home from school and said "Daddy, I don't think Barack Obama should be president". I asked him why and he said "I'm just not ready for a black man to be president".

Ouch.

When pressed on this he said that black people are mean and pick on other people. Then he said there were black kids at after-school who were mean and picked on him. I pointed out that his two favorite people in the world are his two cousins from Atlanta who have a black father and who self-identify as "black". He was unphased. He even pointed out that one cousin was all girl, but only half black, so she surely likes Hillary and is also "not ready for a black man to be president".

I tried to make this an opportunity to talk about generalizations and the problems you bump into when you use the actions of a few to judge the character of a large group of people. He was not very receptive (but then again he is only in second grade). Do I need to be concerned about his need to stereotype, or is this typical of kids this age when facing racial issues for the first time?
 
It, in his case, is logic based on his most current experience - which is perfectly normal for kids (cousins are occasional, picked on/mean is NOW). What I would be concerned with is the phrasing. Unless he already has a big political background, that is a phrase I would expect from an adult - which, I suspect, means he heard a conversation between older persons (teachers or other) where that phrase was used and applied it to the kids he knew.
 
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Yes, thats a good point. My assumption was he heard it form another kid who was parroting a parent or older sibling. But, it could just as well have been an adult at school or after-school or somewhere else. I agree that its a phrase he would not likely come up with on his own.
 
I think you did exactly the right thing. As was pointed out by fuelair, he's basing this on experience; it doesn't sound as though he has a huge number of black people in his life - and if the ones he runs up against the most often aren't people he likes, you can understand why he might extrapolate from that.

My neice came out with something similar when she baldly stated one day that she didn't like black people. In her case, she's just never been exposed to them - she lives in a very white area of the UK, there's no black children at her school etc - so them seem somewhat odd to her I guess. It's not malice, just a distrust of "difference", I suppose.

Seems you handled it perfectly to me - point out that i) it's inconsistent with other people he knows, and ii) that it doesn't really make sense. Hopefully he'll get from the fact that you're keen to talk about it that what he's saying isn't acceptable, and also it'll make him think.

Totally agree that the statement is a very obvious parroting of someone though - quite likely he's just said it to sound a bit grown up etc. "I'm just not ready for X" is a very adult turn of phrase; there's some relatively complex ideas implicit within it - with all due respect to your son, I'm not sure an 8 year old would really understand all those nuances? So it's highly unlikely that he came up with himself, and also unlikely that he really understood what he was saying, IMHO.

I wouldn't worry unduly, basically :)
 
Oddly enough for North Carolina, there are lots of Asian kids (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) in his school, but very few blacks. His after-school, practically across the street, is more diverse. I didn't think to ask him how he'd feel about an Asian person for president.

I'm sure he doesn't understand all the nuances of what he said, but what got me is the rationalization he had built up in a rather short time (I think). Blacks are bullies, blacks are mean, blacks think differently that whites - therefore we should not vote for a black president. I don't intend to make a big deal about this with him; I mostly just found his opinion surprising. I'm not one to micro-manage his life and tell him what he's supposed to think. But, if he continues to build on this line of reasoning I may need to rethink my approach.
 
madurobob said:
I'm sure he doesn't understand all the nuances of what he said, but what got me is the rationalization he had built up in a rather short time (I think). Blacks are bullies, blacks are mean, blacks think differently that whites - therefore we should not vote for a black president.
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Are you sure you don't have it backwards? Maybe he just mimicked a grown up, and then made the rest up as a justification?

Otherwise, he has to be coming up with racist ideas on his own, while simultaneously finding an adult to phrase them for him.
 
Jekyll said:
Are you sure you don't have it backwards? Maybe he just mimicked a grown up, and then made the rest up as a justification?

Otherwise, he has to be coming up with racist ideas on his own, while simultaneously finding an adult to phrase them for him.
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Thats just what I meant - that he heard the phrase, then quickly built up the rationalization in his head. Its that quick rationalization that bugs me... he applied his 8 yr old critical thinking skills and came to a very different conclusion than I would have preferred!
 
The group of kids I work with, the exceptions countable on one hand, are Latino. Things I have had said to me or heard:

"Mexicans are better people. No offense." (interesting because the child does not behave as if I'm not as good because I'm not Mexican)

"White people suck."

"I hate white people." (On that one, I've pointed out that I'm white. And black. And Asian. Which leads into...)

"You're not Korean." (I explained my grandmother is from Korea, my father was born there, no, I was not born in Korea)

ETA:

Three other things I've heard from kids while growing up in a mainly white community:

"At least my dad isn't black." (The parents were pissed when they found out their daughter said that.)

"N****r." (Upon which, a boy who was walking with the kid who said this, my sister who was the target of this comment, and several other kids, but the speaker up against a wall in a flash and demanded he apologize to my sister. Everyone not my sister in this group was fully white. A few day's later, the speaker's mom wanted me to baby-sit after she failed to reprimand her son for what he had said. I told her, "No." and hung up. Mom answered the phone when she called back very confused and asked, "You're ****ing kidding, right? You have no idea why she's not going to sit for you and I'm not going to make her? Seriously?")

"Your hair never gets wet." (BECAUSE I AM TEH BLACK.)
 
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madurobob said:
I'm sure he doesn't understand all the nuances of what he said, but what got me is the rationalization he had built up in a rather short time (I think). Blacks are bullies, blacks are mean, blacks think differently that whites - therefore we should not vote for a black president. I don't intend to make a big deal about this with him; I mostly just found his opinion surprising. I'm not one to micro-manage his life and tell him what he's supposed to think. But, if he continues to build on this line of reasoning I may need to rethink my approach.
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I don't have a kid but at that age exposure and time were the best things for expanding my views. Is he into sports yet? His main exposure, and source of friends is his school, so if it's fairly low on diversity you could try to expand the pool by introducing him to other activities that are more diverse.

It could be that the few black kids at his school actually are bullies, so from his vantage point and thinking ability that would be a rational extrapolation. He has very little information to draw from, so it would seem odd for him if you insist that black people are nice or normal while every day he experiences something else.

Obviously they are normal, with some mean some nice like anyone else, but it's best he experiences it rather than is forced to believe it.
 
If you look in his closet and he has white sheets that are not meant for sleeping, I would start to worry :)

In all seriousness, at that age he is very receptive to any type of information coming his way. I think you are doing a good job in trying to make him understand not to generalize to the larger group based on a small sample of the population. Though, at that age it might be difficult for him to comprehend that logic :::shrugs::: Just keep on top of it.

Worst comes to worst, move to the south, buy a pickup truck, put a confederate flag on it, burn some crosses, eat roadkill and name him Billy Bob! Ooops, I guess my biases have seeped through :)
 
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In fairness to your kid, that kind of experience is hard to rationalize away. I grew up in a similar circumstance where I didn't know any black kids until third grade and then the one and only black kid in school was a gigantic bully who stole my snacks/snack money during that year.

Now even at that point I was getting the whole diversity-good education (or whatever the phrasing was back then). Still, it built in a trigger for black=dangerous that wasn't too easy to dislodge. Of course, I had a different parental experience too -- always the talk about how everyone was equal, but you still didn't want to go to certain malls because there's roughs just waiting to rob lone white kids.
 
Yes, it's mostly about the stereotype that one creates. It's not racism (although it tends to develop into racism in some people). So it's good to start talking with him from now before he starts escalating that paradigm and perhaps turning it into something... not so good.
 
That's not so much an adult's phrase as a pundit's phrase: "Is America ready for a black president?" I've heard that verbatim more than once, and I only rarely watch what gets passed off as news these days.

Like some of the others here, I think your son's 'conclusion' is likely from the immediacy of the bullying and perhaps from few opportunities for good experiences with black folks.

I was lucky at that age, one of my family's closest friends, a psychiatrist, was this really fun black woman. We gradually lost touch after she'd moved a few times, but at the time, I'd had nothing but good experiences with her while growing up. It turned out to have been a great insulator once I'd gotten old enough to pay attention to the news. (The network stations were all Detroit affiliates, so I'd seen plenty of unflattering coverage of their black community.)
 
Well, its been several days and he's not made any similar comments. His two black cousins visited for the weekend and there was plenty of adult talk at the dinner table about Hilary/Obama, so he had many chances to try out his "I'm just not ready for a black president" phrase. Nothing even close crossed his lips, and he's not one to self-edit or pass a chance to interject in the grown-up's conversation.

So, I guess its true that he's just trying on new ideas to see what fits.

Back to my second sentence "his two black cousins...". This is where the idea of race breaks down for me. From the backgrounds of their parents they have a mix of Northern European, African, Portuguese, Italian and American Indian ancestry. But, because they have light brown skin and tightly curled black hair.. they are "black". Thats how they self-identify. But, it really is nothing more than a chance of genetics and a third child from the same parents could be light-skinned and blond haired. All this gives me another layer of complexity to consider when I see Dave Chapelle's "Black White Supremacist" who was blind so he didn't know he was black.
 
When I was in the 3rd grade, it was 1980 and, of course, the presidential race between Carter and Reagan was going on. I didn't hear a lot of political talk at home, but I remember vividly a group of kids (ages 7 to 9) gathered after school, one of whom said this: "Ronald Reagan will start World War III." I asked my mom about it and she said it was "silly" and not to worry about it, so I didn't - though I was later "victimized" by a Nostrodamus special.

I'm sure it's the same thing that's going on here. Kids hear things at home and they carry them to school and pass them on to their friends, even if they don't really know what they're saying. It might ease your concerns a little bit if I tell you that despite hearing a lot of racist talk at school (I grew up in neighborhoods that were about 80% white, 15% Asian-American and 5% "other") while I was growing up, it didn't make me a racist. I probably lost a few IQ points absorbing such nonsense but it didn't counteract the tolerance I was taught at home. :)
 
Children absorb a lot from their peers, maybe even more than from their parents, especially at that young age. Teaching tolerance at home is obviously a great idea but you might also want to look in to the company your kid keeps.

Just as an aside, this can work the other way around. My maternal grandparents (white) threw the N word around all the time and were terribly ignorant and hateful towards nearly everyone. My mother is a lot better but doesn't like "mexicans" and flipped her wig when she found out I was atheist. Me, I never encountered a lot of racism at school - having grown up in the late 70's/early 80's I also had a lot of exposude to prosocial, inclusive television - and I like to think I only dislike people for their actions, not for circumstances of genetics or birth country.
 
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