I remember quite clearly the moment that my daughter learned about racism.
She was six years old and was quietly reading a book on the couch in the family room while I prepared dinner. The book she was reading was from the Babysitter Club chapter book series. The series focuses on a group of young adolescent girls who run their own babysitting business. Even though my precocious reader was a little younger than the age that the books were targeted for, the books seemed gentle enough in content that I didn't feel the need to censor them before she read each individual book.
On this fateful day, she was completely engrossed in one of the books, her eyes quickly darting back and forth as she devoured every word on the page. I tended to my pasta sauce. At some point I heard sniffles and I went to check on her. The book was on the floor, she was curled up under a blanket, and she was crying. I was perplexed.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"There is a family in that book that doesn't want Claudia to babysit for them, they don't want her to babysit for them because she is (long pause with some sobs for effect) Japanese."
"Oh." is all I can say.
Then she looked at me with big, tear-filled eyes and asked the awful, awful question, "Will people hate ME because of the way I look?"
Oh, how I wished at that moment I could just say "No."
I knew she already knew the answer, she just wanted confirmation from me. Lying was not an option. This was not Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. This question begged an honest answer. I knew I had to respect that.
I sat down on the couch and explained to my six year old child that there were some really stupid people in the world. These people hated everybody, not just one person, but they were out there, and she might encounter them. I must have said the word "stupid" about 100 times. I hated having this conversation with my daughter.
I hated telling her that the world was less than perfect.
When our awful conversation was over, I picked up the book, and told her to finish it. It was a book for children, so I knew it must have a happy ending, or at least a good moral lesson.
She resisted, but being the avid reader that she was, she couldn't not finish it.
I went back to making dinner. I heard a few more sniffles, but eventually they subsided. By the time she finished the book her eyes were completely dry.
At dinner, I asked her to tell me how it all turned out. She told me in her own six year old way that Claudia's friends all decided not to babysit for that family either. So the "stupid" parents couldn't go out to their "stupid" dinner and had to spend their anniversary at home with their "stupid" kids. She thought it was a great ending. She also made it clear that it was the "stupidest" book she ever read and I couldn't argue with her.
Over the years, I have thought of that moment many times. I have wished she had never picked up that book, I have wished I had read it first so I could have prepared her, and I have wished that I could have honestly told her that no one would ever hate her for the way that she looks.
But, in a strange way, I am also grateful for that day. I am grateful that she was at home, with me, when she learned this harsh lesson. Sadly, there was no way I could prevent her from coming face to face with racism at some point in her life, but at least I was there when the unsavory introduction was made. I am also glad that I could tell her that it was the offenders who were "stupid" and not the other way around.
Now she is fifteen and reads books like "The Diary of Anne Frank" and "To Kill a Mockingbird" that deal with racism at a much deeper level, with endings that are not always happy. Thankfully, neither the untimely death of Miss Anne Frank nor the unjust death of Tom Robinson will ever have the impact on her that one simply written, elementary school chapter book did.
Unfortunately, the lesson that the world can be a cruel and unkind place only needs to be learned once.
In my opinion, it's a pretty stupid lesson.
I remember when you told me about this after it happened. I wish our kids never had to learn lessons like this.
ReplyDeleteThat is so hard. And everything is harder when you watch your kids go through it... It's not necessarily the same, nor perhaps the same magnitude, but it was still devastating. I remember the day I fully realized sexism was alive and well, and that boys suffer from it as much as girls... In preschool my oldest at the ripe old age of 4 was happily playing with a doll (he had dolls at home, a total non issue) when a girl he had become very friendly with staunchly informed him that boys don't play with dolls, girls do. He was so upset. The funny thing was, this girl was a "tomboy" and clearly happily played with "boy" toys... so I found it even more upsetting that she who was being told she could play with anything she wanted (rightfully so!) was somehow also getting the lesson at home that boys could NOT. In fact, this issue came up between the two of us just yesterday as we discussed an Episode of What Would You Do where no one defended a little boys right to where a princess costume for Halloween, but the right of a little girl to be Spiderman, while not as defended as I would have thought, was still defended at a higher rate. We talked about how that wasn't fair that girls can literally wear anything they want, while boys are still very narrowly prescribed as to what they can and can not wear without being "called" on it. Unfortunately there wasn't much more to say than that it was unfair...
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