Fighting Racism, One Flub at a Time

When my eldest two children were very young, my sister-in-law was expecting her first child. I would frequently accompany her to her doctor's visits, occasionally bringing my children along for the ride.
During one such visit, I thought about waiting out in the car with the kids, but my sister-in-law said, "Bring them in, it'll be okay. They have toys in the waiting room."

We went in and the waiting room was packed with expectant mother's and their companions. My children found some toys and sat in the middle of the floor playing, when suddenly my three year old son looks up at me, points to an attractive black woman on the opposite side of the room and asked very loudly, "Mommy, what's that?"

The poor woman turned just as red as I felt, and I called my son over. The only thing I could imagine that confused him was the size of her seventh to eighth month along belly, or depth of the color in her ebony skin. But we lived next door to a black family, and he played with their children all of the time.

To clarify, I started with, "She's pregnant, like Aunt Aggie, she has a baby in her belly."

"NO," he insisted, still quite loud, "Her skin."

Not ever wanting skin tone to be an issue with my children, I thought this might be a good opportunity to explain what a minor difference skin made, so I explained to him, "Well, you know my skin is darker than yours, right?"

"Yeah...."

"And Granny's skin is darker than mine, right?"

"Yeah...."

"Well, her skin is just darker than Granny's, that's all."

I seemed to get nods of approval from the surrounding audience, even from the still blushing mother-to-be across the room. Then, with the innocence only a three year old can have, he asked me at full volume, "Her darker?? But why???"

Thoroughly flustered, I shushed him and asked, "She's black, just like Shay and her family. Why are you so confused?"

While looking at me as if I had just flunked a major test, he informed me, "No Mommy, Shay is brown, not black."

I guess I should have added Shay to my "degrees of darkness" example. Luckily, he did learn the lesson that skin color wasn't relevant to who a person was.