re my son and his attitude (non attitude?) to race?

[DrSeuss]

My son is 6.5 and has yet to notice that the people of the world come in a variety of shades. The area where we live has a large British Asian population and a growing African population. He has a British Pakistani friend, friends who are half Indian, and has been lucky enough to travel a fair bit, meeting many people of a variety of races. Never a comment on the fact that they look a little different to him. (White, Irish extraction).

This has always been a source of pride to me, as I believed that he was being brought up to be a non racist. I vaguely wondered if he would ever comment but was happy that he never did. When visiting a number of Muslim countries, we have talked about Islam, relating it to the Christianity he experiences at school and to our British Pakistani friends. So far, so good, I thought.

Then I read this
articles.cnn.com/2010-05-18/us/doll.study.parents_1_white-children-black-parents-black-children?_s=PM:US
and now I just don't know what to do for the best.
Any thoughts?

I think you are over analysing things to be honest. Your post suggests you think a great deal about race. Is there a reason for this?

The book Nurture Shock deals with this - see www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2009/09/04/see-baby-discriminate.html

It definitely made me wonder - my ds is white and at age 3 had a best friend at nursery who was black. I am pretty sure that at that age he only chose who to play with based on personality etc. We certainly assumed that he didn't notice skin colour.

However when he started school (far less racially mixed than his nursery), in the first term he started to say things about not liking brown people - it seemed to come out of nowhere. I was horrified and have had many discussions with him since then about the differences in people and what racism is, etc. Although he is white, he has a pretty ethnically mixed background (each grandparent born on a different continent!) and has a "foreign" name so we have highlighted his differences as part of it. I think the message has sunk in.

I think it is good to be aware of the fact that you can't be complacent; at the same time it doesn't sound like you have anything to worry about!

That research is not new. It's been going on since the 1960s. It reflects what children see on TV, hear in the playground, generally get from society.

Unfortunately this never seems to be done in predominanty black countries. I'd love to see how it would work in Ghana or Nigeria.

It has been done with pictures or white and maori children in New Zealand and in Northern Ireland with pictures of children who looked typically Irish or typically British.

At some point he will notice a difference, and when he asks is when it is right to tallk about it.