Ask ARP: What should I do about my daughter thinking that “white babies are better?”
Dear Anti-Racist Parent,
First, thank you for the resources you provide and facilitate the provision of - I have very much appreciated reading the columnists and discussions on your site.
Second, I’m very much hoping you and those who frequent your site will have some insights to share that might help our family with some challenging toddler self-concept and race stuff we’ve just begun to deal with of late.
Last night, before she went to sleep, my daughter put the baby doll she was playing with to bed on the window sill by her bed. {This particular baby doll is phenotypically Caucasian. She has one other presumptively white baby doll, three with her own light brown coloration, and two darker ones closer to her father’s.}
This morning, when she woke up, she asked me to get a baby doll and play dolls with her. She said, “You get a brown one, mama. You like them. But I want a white baby because white babies are better.”
Needless to say, this began a toddler-oriented discussion about coloration {which included the revelation that she had picked up this white-is-better perspective at preschool - in which non-white folks predominate both as teachers and students} and the reading of every kid’s book we have about skin color. {Thank you, bell hooks et al.}
My partner is calling the racial justice organization he used to work for to see if they can refer us to a kid-capable community educator to present at our daughter’s preschool.
Coincidentally, my partner and I were just discussing how to discuss race with our daughter last night. We have made a point of having her toys and books and DVDs be positive in their portrayal of non-whiteness, and we have touched on these issues a few times before - also often at the catalyzing of a teacher comment she reported to us.
Still, we haven’t tackled race specifically ‘cuz we’re at something of a loss as to how to do it without reifying social constructions that are likely to leave her feeling adrift as a mixed blood {or am I just projecting my own experience here?}.
Plus, there’s the additional complication of her non-white, but passable mama, and the general consensus that toddlers aren’t ready for abstract thought - like the social construction of race.
If we can find a community educator for the preschool, I’m hoping s/he’ll have some useful approaches, but I also want to cast a wide net for possibilities on how to deal positively with these fraught issues.
Please help - I’m about to sob sitting here thinking of the look in my beautiful brown girl’s eyes when she said, “white babies are better.”
Thank you,
From Janine Demanda in Oakland, CA
If you’re interested in submitting a question, please email us at team@antiracistparent.com and put “Ask Anti-Racist Parent” in the subject line. You can read past Ask Anti-Racist columns here.
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of 
Jessalyn wrote:
We’ve had this issue crop up before, too. The first time it came up, I looked for pictures of celebrities of different colors and talked about how beautiful each one was.
We’ve read “Black, White, Just Right” by Marguerite Davol, “The Colors of Us” by Karen Katz, and “All the Colors of the Earth” by Sheila Hamanaka and books with similar themes.
The last time it came up, I named relatives and asked my daughter if one on her dad’s side of the family was more beautiful (what can I say, my daughter has a beauty hang-up
) or better than members of my side of the family. As we discussed it, she understood that each member on both sides is beautiful and wonderful in his or her own right.
I know I will have to constantly reinforce this for many years to come. I look forward to reading the suggestions that others share.
Posted 07 Sep 2007 at 10:03 am ¶
kim wrote:
While I normally disapprove of making analogies for explanation, especially where one introduces the outside and impossible purple-polka-dotted type, or animal life to avoid the complex human connection, in this instance…
I think that a book my children and I really enjoyed, “Edward the Emu,” might help your child to understand how the desire to be other than that which one innately and instrinsically is, finds one seeking in vain to “be” that which is perceived as better.
The follow-up discussion, as it would relate to placing value on being one thing as opposed to the next, would be in speaking of how each Mommy and Daddy certainly love their child and think that child the most beautiful in the world, simply for being. And how could a Mommy or Daddy be wrong?
Something along those lines, expanding the discussion to talk about how different groups of people look different from the next, yet many within and across specific racial and cultural lines, find, love, and appreciate the other. Love can’t be wrong, can it?
Let us know.
Posted 07 Sep 2007 at 4:04 pm ¶
Heza Hekele wrote:
Perhaps this is a good opportunity to help her celebrate all of the beautiful diversity that is the human race. Perhaps pointing out that there are many shades of skin, colours of eyes, textures of hair, etc.; that it is a beautiful thing that each person does not look exactly like the next…and that your daughter is a unique and beautiful human being. You could perhaps make a game of naming one beautiful thing about each baby doll…
These are just suggestions that come to mind. I would be asking a lot of the same questions if I was in your place. Good luck to you!
Posted 07 Sep 2007 at 10:06 pm ¶
Yvette wrote:
You may think you have not “tackled race specifically,” but it is clear that your little one has learned a lot about race–by inclusion, omission, or both.
I have to take somewhat of an exception with commenters who are suggesting that you explore with your child all the wonderful diversity of everybody: this does not seem to be her issue. What she has picked up on is not that “diversity” is bad/less desireable–but that “brown babies” are bad/less desireable.
This is a key distinction.
I think we parents are more comfortable talking about “we’re *all* wonderful in our own way” rather than addressing and trying to counteract the idea that a specific group of people (e.g., “black” or “brown”) are less than.
Kids, even toddlers, can understand more abstraction than we give them credit for. (Afterall, she has already piked up on one abstraction of skin color preference.) Children are attuned to such concepts as “being mean/nice,” “fair/unfair,” someone’s actions making one feel “sad/mad/glad.” Along with books and discussions hailing diversity, we need to share with our children even when they are young books and discussions about these basic concepts of social justice and injustice.
All the best to you and your family!
Posted 08 Sep 2007 at 10:02 am ¶
Fat Lady wrote:
I find it difficult to offer my perspective on your situation because I don’t know some key things, like the age of your child or approximately what was said to her in preschool.
So, I’ll try to stay as general as I can. I think the one thing I’ve learned in my 8.5 years as a parent is that children perceive things VERY differently from adults. Sometimes we hear our children say things and we think about what it would mean if we said it - but we have experiences and knowledge of history and other implications that children just don’t have.
Children repeat what they hear, but frequently they have no idea what it means. Your daughter may have heard someone saying a white dolls is better and it’s possible that she believed them, but makes absolutely no connection between dolls and people. So while she may think a white doll is better, that doesn’t necessarily mean she thinks white people are better.
Similarly, she may think the white doll is better because it’s wearing a blue dress, or because it has a freckle, or because it’s feet have the toes pointed to the left, or some other such thing that catches her fancy. Tomorrow she might think the black doll is better because the she woke up and the sun was shining on it and the little dust particles in the air made it look like fairies were dancing on it. Kids perceive the world differently and their likes and dislikes are frequently based on things we would never consider in our wildest dreams.
Lastly, I would say that over the years your child will encounter people outside of your family that will test her self-confidence, and all the positive things you will expend your energy instilling instilling in her. From teachers to friends to the media - there will always be someone out there to tell her, in one way or another, that something about her or those she loves isn’t right. This, of course, isn’t just a black or multi-racial, or other ethnic thing - you just have to look at the stats on white girls with eating disorders to know that.
Instilling confidence and the fortitude to maintain that confidence in the face of all the negative attitudes and ideas that exist in the world is a full time, never ending job. It means that while the books about positive self-image may fly off the shelves at a rapid pace to be read with vigor when an incident happens, those books have to make their way into a parents hands, on a regular basis over time. It means that even in books that aren’t specifically about the beauty of all people, we’re looking for those messages about individual beauty and kindness and intelligence and a million other positive attributes in every book we read.
It means looking at the things we see in everyday life that before held little or no meaning for us and being able to see how they hold lessons for our children and ourselves - and sharing those lessons in age appropriate ways.
It means, that we don’t pull our hair out and think our child is permanently damaged at every little incident, but instead realize that impressions are made over time and while others may make a big splash in our children’s lives, we are the steady drip that makes the most lasting and permanent impression.
Posted 08 Sep 2007 at 11:24 pm ¶
L&N's Mom wrote:
Hello! I just wanted you to know that I think you are already handling this well. I, fortuneately had the opportunity to send my older daughter to a multi-racial preschool where she learned about all kinds of ethnicities and races by playing with other children. She is white, her step father is black, and 1/2 sister is “like chocolate milk” as she puts it. We discussed skin color as shades of chocolate milk, because I think discussing in depth race issues is too much for young kids. Just my opinion, but I also live in a diverse community which makes most of these “issues” less of a factor.
When my husband and I started thinking about getting pregnant with my new daughter (4 months now), I found a book which I thought was a great teaching tool for me to understand how race interracts with the minds of children:
I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World by Marguerite Wright
I’m sure I don’t have all of the answers, but I believe having parents that care enough to do research and spend time with their kids teaching them is a huge step to well adjusted children.
Thanks for being one of those kinds of parents! Good luck!
Posted 10 Sep 2007 at 9:07 am ¶
Janine deManda wrote:
first, much appreciation to all who took the time to respond and offer insight and support. thank you!
jessalyn,
thank you for your response. from jump, we have tried to give our daughter a context for human beauty as complex and hetergeneous. in addition to her books, toys, and dvds, her family, her preschool, her city also provide contexts for and examples of this on a daily basis. in this instance, she didn’t mention beauty, but “better”, and that seems to present an array of distinct, though connected issues to address.
thank you for the book recommendations! we already have two of the three {hamanaka’s is one of my favorites, but katz’ food analogies are a bit uncomfortable for me}, but i’m glad to hear of another in the same vein and will be adding it to our daughter’s library asap.
kim,
thank you for your response. i checked out _edward the emu_, and i’m not sure it looks promising to me. to use a different set of analogue referents, when i was a kid, i decided i didn’t want to be an emu, so i moved away from the zoo and made a whole new life for myself that i find joyful and satisfying. i’m not sure about using a book that could be construed to support adherence to the status quo instead of self-determination, ya know? i’m just going by the reviews/descriptions, though, so i’ll check it out at the library before deciding for sure.
as to the follow-up discussion, i also don’t feel comfortable presenting parents as the final arbiter of reality. many members of my family were way off base with regard to race and love when i was growing up. i was in my thirties before i got all that sorted out to anything resembling my satisfaction.
so, while i’ve accepted the responsbility to share what i’ve learned, offer protection, guidance, nurturance, etc. with our daughter, i definitely want to leave her room to understand that we might be wrong about some things, and she can make her own determinations. okay, so maybe i’m getting ahead of myself here, but maybe not - she’s precocious verbally and cognitively.
heza,
thank you for your response. as i pointed out above, though, we have provided and engaged a heterogenous world for/with our daughter from the outset, and she hasn’t made an issue of beauty, so that’s not my primary concern. plus, even beginning to engage the concept of beauty is in itself fraught. everything she has yet announced is beautiful, we have affirmed, but beauty standards are themselves problematic, exclusionary, and often rooted in racist, sexist notions of physical perfection, so i’m hesitant to try to address one set of heirarchies with a related set of heirarchies, kwim?
yvette,
thank you for your response. when i say “we have not tackled race specifically”, i mean exactly that - that we haven’t talked about the specific word “race” and the attendant social and cultural classifications. we have specifically addressed human heterogeneity, but as you noted above, that does not appear to be the issue at hand. i know she has absorbed a lot about race - the specific word and attendant social and cultural classifications, and now i’m kicking myself in the ass for not taking the lead in that myself sooner.
when you say, “we parents are more comfortable talking about ‘we’re *all* wonderful in our own way’ rather than addressing and trying to counteract the idea that a specific group of people (e.g., “black” or “brown”) are less than”, i think you have hit it on the nose. my own experiences of coming to understand racism were unexpected and traumatic, and my partner’s experience with being tutored in them from diapers on is not something he looks back fondly on. i think we wanted to protect our daughter from the revelation that humans can seriously suck for as long as possible. i am feeling irresponsible in that choice now, for sure.
yes, as i noted above, our daughter has been verbally and cognitively precocious, and we should have taken her cues on these issues when they were subtler - regardless of what child development guidelines had to say about what she could or couldn’t grasp yet {and now as i read further, i’m finding some discrepancies of opinion even among those guidelines}.
again, i think you are right on point about the need to directly address issues of social justice and injustice with our kids along with “diversity”. i had been of the mind, though, that i could wait a bit longer before undertaking that, and i’m feeling foolish for that misconception.
fat lady,
thank you for your response. my apologies for my lack of clarity. our daughter turns three next week, but i don’t know exactly what was said in her preschool. though she said “preschool” when i asked her where she heard that “white babies are better”, she did not, as she usually does when i ask where she’s heard something, tell me who exactly said it or what the context of the statement was. i’m thinking she may have heard it among the neighborhood kids or even drawn her own conclusions from the culture as a whole even despite our efforts to provide her alternative contexts.
others have pointed out to me based on the idea that children her age don’t understand abstraction, that the statement she made was no where near as loaded as the statement i heard. i think there may be some truth in that, at the very least insofar as she doesn’t have any knowledge of the history and politics of her environment. still, even if it were the whole truth, i’m troubled by that particular preferencing in the context of the prevailing cutlure in the u.s., especially given that she’s been communicating complexly for more than half her life now, and she has never asserted a heirarchy before about anything else.
additionally, even if she were simply parrotting someone, i still want to give her tools to work with when what she’s parrotting becomes {more} comprehensible to her.
given that she has continued to engage the coloration of her dolls and the people around her since the initiating conversation, though, i think she is beginning to grapple with the larger abstractions at play already. we have since located all of her baby dolls throughout the house {turns out there are 9 - 2 “white”, 3 papa’s complexion, and 4 her complexion}, and she has been taking care of them/giving them to us to care for in various combinations which she has specified by color. we’re feeling our way along, again trying to provide useful tools for understanding.
yes, i wholeheartedly agree that kids perceive the world differently than adults and base their likes/dislikes on things we’re not inclined to consider, but i don’t want to leave too much to that because i don’t want to leave her foundational understanding of these issues to what she picks up at preschool or from the neighborhood.
i wholeheartedly agree that “instilling confidence and the fortitude to maintain that confidence in the face of all the negative attitudes and ideas that exist in the world is a full time, never ending job.” i am sorry if i gave the impression that i thought otherwise or was looking for a quick fix. i was distressed by what i perceived as white supremacy’s first incursion into my child’s consciousness, so i may not have expressed myself as clearly as i might otherwise have. your closing words could be a parenting mantra, and here’s hoping i am able to live up to them: “we are the steady drip that makes the most lasting and permanent impression.”
l&n’s mom,
thank you for your response. our daughter attends a pre-dominantly non-white preschool - both with regard to staff and students, but i’m not sure that is always or is presently quite the panacea we had hoped it might be. though i think it’s a better environment for her than being the only non-white child in an all white school with all white teachers, it has it’s own complications. we also live in the most hetergeneous city in the country, but still, these issues manifest in a variety of ways.
as i mentioned above, we have discussed differences in appearance among humans, but not the specific language of race because i, like you, was accepting the idea that abstractions were not yet comprehensible for a toddler. as i also noted above, i’ve changed my mind about that.
thank you for the book reference. the title of this book makes me very uncomfortable because the equation of race with food and non-whiteness with edibility has struck wrong chords in my personal history as well as in a larger social context, but the reviews seem to indicate that it has some useful insights to offer, so it’s on my to-read list.
in closing, more thanks to all who responded. this whole parenting thing is intense, and all resources are appreciated.
Posted 10 Sep 2007 at 6:12 pm ¶
kim wrote:
Wow, Janine…you really really digested those comments.
Do find the book, and determine for yourself. The ramifications do not lend themselves to an intransigent position on self-definition, or homogeneity at all, but rather to a simple appreciation for all the aspects that one finds oneself being, without benefit- or distraction, of comparing onesself to another.
As to the infallibility of parents’ decisions and actions…yes, I considered that after I wrote it, but still feel that as the parent is the first teacher, god, omniscient figure in a child’s life, if it comes from her own mother, and is positive (and I guess there’s the rub), she can’t be guided too far off the track.
I absolutely respect that we each want our children to be critical thinkers, and know that each of us sees the way to that end completely differently also.
-K
Posted 11 Sep 2007 at 6:09 pm ¶
Janine deManda wrote:
kim,
thanks. i’m trying to do the best i can.
if edward the emu does what you describe, it does sound promising indeed. there is so much pressure to allow oneself to be defined externally and as against the measure of others, and i’d be glad of a book that affirmed internal definition and satisfaction with self.
i see what you’re saying about parental perspectives and their potential positive power {whee! alliteration!} in a child’s world. i hope that both you and fat lady are right, and we can make those positive, lasting, and permanent impressions.
thanks again.
Posted 13 Sep 2007 at 3:24 pm ¶
NJ girl wrote:
I know what I’m going to suggest might sound really far out or really obvious (someone may have already suggested it). But considering her young age, I wonder if by exposing her to the wide variations of something totally different would also be helpful
Like I said, this might seem strange for some people (not to me though), but what I’m suggesting is using certain animals as a device to “reveal” variation (especially color) with neutrality.
The two species that work really well for this are domestic cats and horses. A good thing about these two is that within species the size variation is relatively small; it’s mainly coat variations. Domestic dogs don’t work as well for this since the variation of size and body shape is so huge within the species. It is just not as apparent to a 3YO that all dogs are all really the same animal.
Anyway, some ideas: fun books with great pictures of cats, kittens, horses or posters of different types of cats or horses.
Burmese cats and kittens
——————————
http://www.kittysites.com/deluxe/okeydokey.jpg
Of course all the other suggestions above address the more serious needed measures. But what I’m trying to really get at is a care-free thing with which to help her (at 3YO) to see and to enjoy the breadth of life that exists within a group. And to simply be able to delight (and just have fun) in all its manifestations.
Posted 28 Sep 2007 at 6:37 pm ¶