Children and Race

Newsweek recently ran an article about babies, children and racism. Here's the link, http://www.newsweek.com/id/214989/page/1

There are two pieces to this article, but in the end I don't really understand the shock. My family is biracial. My husband is of Indian descent, and I'm a mix, mostly German and Irish with some other white mixed in. Race is an important part of our lives, and we're very open and honest about it. We talk/joke about it between us, with our extended families, with our friends and with our kids. I will never understand people (and, yes, it's mostly white people) who think the best way to "address" the issue of people being different colors is by completely ignoring it. This is what they found in the article, that parents stick to an "everyone is the same inside" argument, and proceed to ignore race completely.

Meanwhile, they found that babies spend more time staring at photos of faces that are a different race than their parents are. This didn't indicate a preference, per se, just that even babies as young as 6 months notice that it's "out of the ordinary" from what they normally encounter. Well, pardon my language here, but no shit, sherlock.

Anyone who has children knows that even the tiniest babies notice when something is new to them. That's kind of the point of their little developing brains. Ultimately the issue here isn't that babies notice different skin colors (which I should point out, is NOT a bad thing. Noticing and talking to your kids about race and skin color is okay. In fact, it's mandatory, in my opinion), it's that they aren't getting the chance to be around people of all races.

With kids who are mixed race, I think about bigotry, faux liberalism and hidden racists all the time. I live, geographically, in an area that is pretty liberal and we rarely have any issues with other people not approving of our family. Still, my husband and brown kids are probably the only encounters most of our friends and their children have with non-white people. My guess is that this is pretty standard for most white people.