Thursday, September 11, 2008
Perspective on skin color
Madison is doing video school this year for Kindergarten. It's a real class and everything, just video taped. So she has "friends" in her class and they are very real to her. Her best "friend" is Nicole who is African American. Now, we have been doing this for four weeks and she had never mentioned Nicole's color. Actually she has never mentioned anyone's color ever. So today she said, "I don't like Miles." And I said why not? She said "because he's a boy and he has brown skin and I don't like the color brown." I was caught off guard so the first thing I said was, "Have you noticed that Nicole has brown skin too?" She looked at me for a minute and said, "Huh, well she's my best friend." I don't think she had even made the connection but b/c Miles is a boy, she noticed he was a color that she doesn't like. So of course, we went on to talk about color of skin, eyes, hair, piercings (my sister had her lip pierced which made for interesting commentary with the kids ) I said, "what if I said I only liked girls with blonde hair?" Do you think I could love Leah but not you?" She said, "No way, not good!" Then she said, "Mama, God loves Miles and I love him too!"
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3 comments:
Ask her if she knows that Aria is yellow-LOL!
What a sweet post!
That was I was thinking. She has never noticed that one of her best friends is a different shade. So funny!
kids are so funny at that age. since we seldom refer to someone in terms of color at our house, shannon (and even molly at that age) didn't ever say anything about several of her friends being different from her - now she sits with a little girl at lunch who i suspected had different skin color than she did because her name was Iman - turns out she is Indian - but Shannon couldn't see a difference in them enough to tell me her skin was darker when i asked her what she looked like. She just told me she had brown hair, which she does. if only all adults could see the world and others the way 5 year olds do.
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