When A Child Asks About Race
When a child says they’re hungry, you’ll help them make lunch. When they tell you they can’t sleep, you’ll check under their bed to ensure it’s monster-free. They scrape their knee, and you’ll help them find a Band-Aid and pick themselves up. When a child asks about race, you’ll experience brief moments of shock and panic that begin to resemble characteristics of existential crisis.
Kids are always asking questions. I knew this well; I was a twenty year-old nanny skilled at answering all sorts of questions, from “but how can you be only twenty if you look so much older?” to “what exactly is needed to make a baby?”. I hadn’t only become a master of answering the constant onslaught of tough kid questions; the kids I took care of and I spent hours together after school, doing homework and eating meals together, taking day trips to farms and the beach. The younger one often called me “mama” by accident and the older child told everyone I was the cool young aunt that raised her. I took my role in their lives very seriously and made their lives my priority.
One afternoon we found ourselves sitting at their kitchen island, eating an afternoon snack of mango on bright colored Ikea bowls. It was a rare free day; no rush to empty the dishwasher, no scrambling to pack the swimming bag or their backpacks with math homework and shuffle them to their extracurriculars. The lull was broken by the younger child’s voice asking, “Why are your parents married?”
The question stunned me, knocked all thoughts out of my head. The few thoughts that remained simply froze, preventing any synapses from firing and delivering any messages that would drive some sort of cohesive response. Not entirely understanding the question, I asked them to repeat. “Well maybe not why, but how are they married?”. I could hear nervousness in their voice, hesitation creeping in. Maybe they were rethinking the query or beginning to think it wasn’t a question they should be asking in the first place. “Well…one is a man. And one is a woman” she said. I reminded them that their own parents were married, and one was a man, and one was a woman. They said I was right, that that wasn’t really what they were trying to get at.
“Your parents are different. They’re not the same”.
When a child asks you about race, you may not even realize at the beginning of the conversation that’s the direction you’re headed. Realization hit me deep in my stomach. She was making the observation that my parents were different. Think back to “one of these things is not like the other”, kindergarten sorting games where you put objects of the same shapes and colors into like-groups. If my parents were in one of these games, they would be divided into different groups because they’re not the same. My mom would be placed in one group, and my dad in another.
I asked if she was trying to understand how my parents could be married when my mom is Chinese and my dad is White. She said yes.
There was a rush of words and replies and feelings. Some sadness, some anger, a lot of anxiety. A lot of phrases and sentences and rhetoric that are built for the more adult brain and the more adult world. Raw conversations I’d had that were comfortable, in my home or with my closest friends. Snippets of more uncomfortable and strained conversations I’d had or overheard with strangers and acquaintances, fighting words about color and race and privilege and equality.
To sort through this rush is impossible. Despite drowning in a pool of untapped material I knew I could glue some sort of crafted answer with, I had nothing. I sifted through everything but it left me nearly empty. As the dust cleared, I was left with three distinct feelings: I was the only one in this moment who could answer this question; I had a responsibility to uphold on behalf of my Asian-American and biracial community; I had to control my own emotions and feelings and not overreact, not project onto the small White child leaning towards me as they waited for an answer.
When a child asks about race, you doubt yourself. Had I failed them? Hopelessness began to creep into the cocktail of sadness and shock. They went to diverse schools; in their classrooms their Caucasian faces were surrounded by small faces of all colors and backgrounds. They had known me for almost their whole lives, and I’d made it a point to take them on Chinatown trips. They knew one of my favorite desserts was dan tat, my mom gave them hong bao for Chinese New Year. They reminded me at the store that I couldn’t pick produce in groups of four because it was bad luck. It wasn’t in my job description, but I had tried to immerse them in the Chinese-American community as much as I could. If I hadn’t been in their lives, they wouldn’t have been as exposed to the Asian-American community until much later on. I believed that being Chinese, or at least half Chinese, had been normalized.
Normalizing identity, exposing identity, my family, my community for a pair of White children, for a White family. Knowing that this exposure was necessary, thinking that “early exposure” was the only way to make them feel comfortable around an Asian family. I understood that this early exposure hadn’t done what I thought it would do, that I still wasn’t normal. To this young child’s mind, I was different, my mom was different. Chinese was different. Different means they’re not supposed to go together, they’re in different groups. Yet her question emerged with no malicious intent. It was an innocent question that came from trying to understand what she saw in her world, putting it in the context of what she learned in school and what her parents had or hadn’t taught her.
When a child asks about race, I want to protect them. I wanted to protect them from all negative emotion, to not overreact and allow my feelings to affect my answer. I wanted to have some sense of control and feel like I was competent enough to give them something good to hold onto. If this interaction was negative, it had the potential of stubbing a mental development and awareness about race. This was an opportunity, or a small platform even, to help educate a kid on race, to help them see the beauty of things that weren’t just white. It was an opportunity to show them how they could handle tough questions in the future, to model an appropriate reaction. Suddenly I heard the older child scolding their sibling, and I was driven to make it a good conversation. I replaced the lecturing with a response that said my parents were in fact different, that they came from different families and different parts of the world; that their skin was a little different and their faces looked different but they were both humans, and all humans are beautiful and can love who they love and that means all different people of all different kinds can fall in love and get married. I began slowly, but eventually rushed through my words creating run-on sentences to try and cram all the sentiments of love and togetherness into it as I could, all because I didn’t want to let a kid down. Thankfully it was an acceptable answer for the kindergarten mind.
When a child asks about race, you may be left with long-term processing that keeps you up until 3AM thinking about the question and the answer over and over, wondering if there will ever be the opportunity to do it again. To do better. I felt I had answered in too cliché a manner; but love and humanity seemed like a good place to start with a six-year-old, something they could relate to and couldn’t deny. It’s different to engage in discourse with a listening adult; you can discuss back and forth to build on top of ideas, and there’s a foundation of knowledge that both parties can speak from and add to. But to respond to a child feels different; the complexities and intricacies of race as we know it seemed too great a topic to delve into on a random afternoon. And despite my being a motherly figure in their life, was it my place and responsibility to dive so deeply with a child who is not mine?
Here’s the thing- kids aren’t blind to differences. From a young age they’re taught to organize and group based solely on visual characteristics like colors and shapes. If they can recognize differences in colors and shapes on plastic pieces and on TV screens, of course they will recognize differences in the people they see around them. Race is something we should be discussing with our kids at a young age, not something we should be saving until their teenage or adult years. In a PBS article for parents, they state that it’s never too early to talk to your kids about race; by the age of two and a half, they can begin to recognize racial differences, and by the ages of four or five, bias can begin to show itself. They list seven tips specifically for parents on how to address conversations about race, which includes things like practicing what you want to say, addressing your own biases, and helping them understand how important it is to be an ally to people who look different from themselves. Kids watch adult behavior; you can speak as many words as you’d like at them for as long as you’d like, but they’re really modelling themselves after you.
This gives me a sense of hope. She wasn’t scared to ask me questions. I shouldn’t have been scared to answer. I modelled the best I could. But I wish I had spoken more truthfully, more honestly. When a child asks about race, we should speak truthfully, speak openly, and speak honestly. Underestimating a child is one of the worst things we can do; they can handle, understand, and process more than we think. We can prepare ourselves as much as we’d like to, arming ourselves with academia and studies and research. We can throw statistics at people, hoping they’ll listen and understand. But maybe we need to appeal more to the child in us; speak from the heart, say what we really want to say and don’t let our fear hold us back. We should appeal to more than just the kindergarten digestion I was aiming to communicate with before. When a child asks about race, they deserve an answer that we have added ourselves into to.
I’ve held onto that little conversation in that kitchen, and I am reminded of it when I think about how we discuss race. Sometimes I hope that they’ll come back and ask me a question similar to the one they asked when they were six. Perhaps it will be one of more advanced verbiage, and probably more discomfort. Then again, they may never have the chance to ask again. Chances are, they don’t even remember that day or the question that was asked. We have fast-forwarded four years, and they’re now a ten or eleven-year-old entering fifth grade in the fall. I don’t know what they’re being taught, what they have to model their own behavior after. Regardless of what they have now I hope they feel it in their heart to see differences as beauty. One day, when a child inevitably asks them about race, I hope they remember those few minutes in the kitchen, or the girl who showed them Chinatown.