how do you handle questions about skin colour? no offence meant by this post BTW

[helsi]

My dd (2.11) was with me in B&Q at the weekend and a black man was behind me in the queue. She looked at me and said "look mummy a chocolate man". I didn't know where to put myself and I apologised to him(he seemed ok) and I quickly changed the subject. However, the same thing happened last night when she saw another black man on TV and again said the same thing. I just told her that he wasn't and that some people have different skins just like we have different eye and hair colours.

She is very young and so doesn't understand but was wondering how other people would handle it and how you would feel or deal with it if you had been the person in the queue.

Aloha - for us it did indeed lead into a discussion of Britishness!

It was a good discussion though, and kept simple quite accessible for them.

I told them it was just like Mummy being Scottish and living in England with Daddy. When she had you, you were English like Daddy because that was where we were living when you were born!

Whether DH would have been as magnanimous had they been born in Scotland is questionable

I think Cbeebies is wonderful for inclusiveness.

MY older daughter is very interested in skin colour and working it out - we are a complicated family genetically, and only DP's skin colour reflects the half-Asian heritage we've all got!

Colour was the Big Unspoken Thing in my family when I grew up so I tell her straight that people have different colour skins and it's interesting, isn't it, that she and her sister and I all look white when we've got brown family too. And I also tell her that that some people think it's more important to have white skin and that those people are wrong.

You raise something interesting there, misdee -while I'm v unencouraging about dd making plain racial difference remarks (ds luckily seems not to be a commenter), I take completely the opposite line about cultural things - so that it's really special and exciting that X does Indian dancing, etc. And I would heartily join in on how fabulous Y's mummy's dress-called-a-sari was. And if they noticed the man behind us at B&Q had long dreadlocks I would probably make a point of telling them why. Interesting where one draws the line.

I think when it is your family then yes, it is more important to go into the background etc and I'm certainly not saying it is ever wrong at all. It's interesting.
I simply felt for ds that to emphasise the foreigness of colour might be counterproductive and I wanted, if anything, to emphasise human similarity rather than to associate varying skin colours with being foreign or different.
Maybe that's naive. Certainly ds takes it all his stride so far.

No aloha she didn't look anything like Josie Jump.

Luckily ds doesn't seem to notice skin colour anymore.

Another time at the drs, when ds was about a year old there was a lady waiting to be seen who looked a bit like my mum and ds kept looking at her expectantly wondering why she wasn't talking to him.

Well it's not just white children that comment. My children never noticed anyone's colour for ages. I think that children just know people and then one day they see someone they don't know and it occurs to them that there are differences. Here are a few of the examples of that within our family and the friends we have:

DS1 on seeing an African's children's choir at school came home and said

"Mummy all of the African children have gone home now"
(Me) "That's nice dear"

On seeing black people on the street
(DS1) "He's from Africa. He hasn't gone home. She's from Africa"
(Me) "And what about Mummy darling?"
(DS1) "You're Mummy" - so clearly my black skin hadn't occurred to him.

E (a friend's DD) on coming home from her grandparents (where they pass racist comments)... "Look mummy there's a c**n"
My friend was mortified and said "That's not a nice thing to say. What about Mars? She's black"
E replied "Don't be silly mummy, she's Mars!!!" - again my black skin didn't occur to her.

DD2 turned around one day and said
"Poor Daddy, I'm brown, DS1's brown, Mummy's brown. Poor Daddy is just white!"

I picked up a friend's daughter from nursery the other day. She looked and looked at me (she's known me since birth 3.5yrs ago).
"Why do you look like that?"
(Me) "Like what?"
(F) "Like that! All over!"
(Me) "God loves colour and made us all different colours. It would be boring if we were all grey or the same colour. Your mummy and daddy are white, so you are white. My mummy and daddy are black, so I am black. I am black, DH is white and so my children are a mixture and look a lovely caramel brown"
(F)"Oh I see!"

She had recently come back from a trip to Africa and I think that that made her notice.

What I'm getting at is that kids start to notice differences and being kids just come out and say it. I doubt the guy in the queue gave it another thought! I certainly wouldn't. In fact I kinda chuckle inside as I watch people squirm and try to make me feel better about something that didn't upset me in the first place (but then my humour is wicked and bad!)

He is very interested in his globe and atlas!

Yes, I do see what you are getting at Aloha!

I think the reality is that they are at an age where they are still very accepting of the answers we give them.

I dread the day, really dread it, when they have to face up to real racism and just hope that they are independent of mind enough to deal with that!

Some people do have skin the colour of chocolate. She made a perfectly innocent and accurate comment.

It's our grown-up hang ups which make this an issue.

I find it very inconvenient that the correct term is 'black' because my kids say, 'She's not black mummy, she's brown'. Which is true.

Kids soon sense us tip-toeing around certain areas and my worry is that we pass on our anxiety needlessly.

When we lived in Brixton I was in the swing park and I remember my son, who was no more than 2, calling up to a woman who was at the top of the slide, 'I'm watching you brown lady. You are too big for the slide'. She and I both laughed.

Great post Marslady.

BTW it's just as inconvenient to me that my skin colour is called 'white' as it clearly isn't. It's kind of pink.

I wonder why we literally use black and white terms to describe ourselves.

ds says he is yellowy-pink.

thank you spider

Sometimes we all make far too much of things and actually make things worse rather than better. A bit of fact doesn't hurt, but I would draw the line at making an issue of it when it isn't. As has been said before, what is acceptable from a 3 year old, is clearly not with a 10 year old.

Interesting thread. Having grown up in totally white environment (Germany in 1970s) I was admitted to hospital in England aged 4, and vividly remember being absolutely terrified of the West Indian nurses, having never encountered a non-white person before, even at a distance.

So have been watching the way my children, in a very mixed inner-city school dealt with the differences they encountered. I found that at v. young age (Reception and under) they simply didn't notice skin colour. So if then mentioned (say) Michael, and I asked 'Who's Michael', you'd get: "Well he wears a blue jumper and he's a little bit older than me and he doesn't like apples." Okaaaay, that really helps me picture him.

A litle bit later they did notice skin colour, but only as part of a matrix of physical features. So you'd get, "Well, Olivia has black hair, but she has pink skin", or "Daniel has light brown skin but he has straight hair", or "She's got black hair and she talks like Huy" (ie. Vietnamese).

Dd1 is now 10 and is still doesn't really categorise people as 'black' or 'white', though she's aware that other people do. Because their peer group is so mixed, I think those categories are too simple to really reflect her experiences: I don't think it would make sense to her to group the Ethiopian boy who is her table partner (and partner in crime!) together with a couple of Nigerian girls that she's constantly at loggerheads with.

Friends/not friends seems to be the principal operating category in my children's classes.

Does depend what they're used to, though. We've had cousins staying from deepest rural Devon, and on coming to church with us the four and five-yo were immediately asking, "Why have all those people got brown skin?" My children were completely banjaxed by the questions -- for them it was so normal it had never occured to them to ask.

We moved to Singapore when DS1 was 4 and after a couple of days he asked "Why do the people here have different faces, Mummy?". So I launched into the "Well, everyone has different hair and eyes" bit and before I could finish he said "Yes, but I'm not talking about their hair, I'm talking about their faces". I did a simple explanation about different types of face (didn't get into the Equator bit, which for Chinese in Singapore is a bit confusing in fact, though I think it's helpful and will use it with DS2 if needed).
DS2 (4) asked me today why Lego people had yellow faces since he didn't know anyone with a yellow face.
I agree though that I feel a terrible (and unnecessary) embarrassment when they comment on something, like the time we saw a woman with only one leg on crutches at Legoland. We did end up with a discussion on all the different reasons for only having one leg there could be - think frostbite even got a look in....

yes - dd is also in the habit of shouting out that that lady/man has poorly legs when she sees someone in a wheelchair but then wants to know the ins and outs of why the legs are porrly and don't work properly.

I explained to ds by talking about eye colour. You have brown eyes but some of your friends have blue eyes. It's the same with skin. He seemed to take that and never asked again.

Only DD has ever made a comment about skin colour which I was surprised about when she did. She was 5 and we had just met our new neighbour. In ear shot of the new neighbour, DD said 'Look mum, he has the same brown colour skin as X's gran, he can be her boyfriend!' I don't think our neighbour heard but I didn't know what to say! I was more amused that DD was matchmaking an 80(ish) year old with a 50(ish) year old!

Helsi - bizarre! My DD made exactly this comment about a woman last week and I started a thread today about it

here

Blimey and she's exactly the same age as your DD!

My ds appeared to be completely colour blind at nursery. He was the only (very) white kid in his class, but the other children had the classic London range of very pale brown to really deep brown. When he was talking about other children I would try and get him to describe them, and he was completely useless! We did the Child of Our Times thing, and he picked everyone for everything. I just think he's not usually that observant about people. dd on the other hand has always given great descriptions, and has to have large sets of colouring pens for her many pictures of people. Neither of them (now 6 and 5) have ever asked why about skin colour, although we have had conversations with dd about hair (she is the only blondie in our dark-haired family). Our embarrassing public questions have been about other things...

My best friend is mixed race and I honestly didn't think ds1 (he was about 3 at the time) had noticed until one day he said "X is very old isn't she?" I said (laughingly) "well, she's older than me, but she's not that old." It transpired that he thought she was old because her skin is brown (don't know what wonderful workings of his brain brought him to that conclusion So we had the conversation - similar to several on here - about how people from hot countries have darker skin to stop their skin getting burned by the sun, and, no X, wasn't from a hot country, but her Daddy was etc. And isn't it marvellous we are all so different yet underneath all just people and exactly the same.

With regard to noticing differences - we were once walking behind a man with an artificial leg - not one made to look like a limb, just metal, with a trainer on the 'foot' (he had shorts on so I guessed he wasn't too self-conscious about it). Ds1 said (as I knew he would) in the clearest, ringing tones..."Mummy! That man's got a robot leg!.....Cool!" The man just turned round and grinned at him. Sparked an interesting discussion about what had happened, did it hurt, was there a lot of blood, and what had they done with the leg that had come off.