So February is Black History Month. I saw an ad on TV about celebrating, but mostly I've been reading about celebrating with your children on other Mommy Blogs and websites. Celebrating Black History with your toddlers may be a bigger theme online this month than Valentines Day.
But I'm not going to with Jacen, and this is why. Small children, and Jacen specifically, are color blind. To him, a kid is a kid, not a black kid or a white kid or a Hispanic kid. He has no expectation for one person to be any different from another based on how they look. And I desperately want it to stay that way. If prejudice is taught, then I have no intention of teaching it to him.
There may be a time when he asks me why a classmate looks the way they do. And then I will answer, "God made him that way, just like he made you with blond hair and bright blue eyes. Aren't you glad we don't all look the same?"
Someday he will learn the history of African Americans, and that's good, too. But I want him to be old enough to understand that the way blacks were treated in this country was horribly, horribly wrong. To understand that treating anyone badly, or even differently, simply for how they look on the outside is wrong. Then we can celebrate.
1 comment:
That's how we are with our girls too. We just don't bring it up. Marley brings it up sometimes with her dolls ("Look, they don't match but they can still be family, right Mommy?") but otherwise, it's just not an issue. I agree with you - why point out differences when they aren't important enough for the kids to notice on their own.
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