When an innocent five-year old school girl was asked to identify the “mean” child from pictures of children whose skin ranged from light to dark, can you guess which one she chose? She chose the dark-skinned doll in the picture.
She must come from a racist home, right? Wrong. When the mother of the child who participated in the study watched as her daughter demonstrated an overwhelming bias toward white pictures, she wept. The mother, stated that her daughter had never asked about skin color so it wasn’t really discussed at home.
Results such as this were typical in the CNN study released on Tuesday. The results of the study showed that white parents did not discuss race on a whole with their children.
Po Bronson, an award-winning writer on parenting issues says white parents “want to give their kids this sort of post-racial future when they’re very young and they’re under the wrong conclusion that their kids are colorblind. … It’s in the absence of messages of tolerance that they will naturally … develop these skin preferences.”
What lesson can parents learn from this study? Start talking to your kids about differences in culture, race and ethnicity from an early age. Celebrate beauty, art, and culture that doesn’t quite look like you with your child. Perhaps by showing our children that diversity is to be celebrated and appreciated rather than pretending differences don’t exist, we can move toward a more global and tolerant society.
Comments
No comments.
Add your comment