?My daughter, Ijanaya, was four when she came home in tears one day because the teacher would not allow her to colour a rose black.
"Miss told me to colour the rose pink or red or yellow–a good colour," Ijanaya said. I nearly fainted. I was upset enough to go to school and talk to her teacher. The teacher, who was a lovely person (and of Afro-Trinidadian heritage I might add for the sake of the story), just couldn't understand why it was important to allow Ijanaya to colour the rose black.
"Do you realise the implications of telling a child that certain colours are good and certain colours are not good?" I asked. She didn't hesitate in answering, "Yes, but a rose should still be white or pink or yellow."
The conversation finally ended with me saying, "Just let her colour the rose black. It's important to her–and me." A few years later I interviewed an American psychologist who spoke about racism and its roots.
She claimed that children associate colour with people by the age of four. The story I wrote brought the most irate responses from readers that I have ever got in my 25 years as a journalist. Readers accused me of being racist. I was reminded of all of this last week when I read an article entitled "See Baby Discriminate" in the September 14 issue of Newsweek magazine. In this article Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman examine research from the University of Texas that concludes babies, as young as six months old, can associate skin colour with people. The article says that in 2006, researcher Birgitte Vittrup used Caucasian children from five to seven in a study about perceptions of skin colour. Children were divided into three groups. One group watched multi-culturally themed videos, including episodes of Sesame Street for a week. They visited an African-American family's home and watched an episode of Little Bill where an entire neighbourhood got together to clean up a neighbourhood. The second group received the same videos and were asked to use them to set up discussions on race.
The third group received no videos and were asked to discuss racial equality in whatever way they wanted to present it. Much to Vittrup's surprise, five families in the third group abruptly pulled out of the study. Their reasons: "We don't want to have these conversations with our children. We don't want to point out skin colour." Vittrup found that hardly any liberal "white" families talked to their children about race. They made vague, abstract statements like "everybody's equal," "God made all of us" or "under the skin, we're all the same." The researcher's conclusion: most parents wanted their children to "grow up colour blind." When those same children were asked, "Do your parents like black people?" 14 per cent of the children said no and 38 per cent answered, "I don't know." "In this supposed race-free vacuum being created by their parents, kids were left to improvise their own conclusions–many of which would be abhorrent to their parents," write Bronson and Merryman.
Parents with good intentions were actually adding to the confusion because they felt the best way to prevent prejudice was not to address anything that has to do with differences in people. The Newsweek reporters point out that not even the election of US President Barack Obama has helped the issue. Some parents say that anyone can rise to great heights regardless of skin colour. Other parents felt they shouldn't mention Obama's skin colour or background. Even more shocking was a 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family that found "that out of 17,000 families with kindergarteners, non-white parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than white parents; 75 per cent of the latter never, or almost never, talked about race (with their children)." Bronson and Merryman say that "...for decades it was assumed that children see race only when society points it out to them."
Child development specialists have never known this to be true. They say children are conditioned to respond to colours from the time parents dress girls in pink and boys in blue. In one study from the University of Texas conducted by Rebecca Bigler, students were given different colour T-shirts to wear. The children all played together. When they were asked to join a team, they all chose children with the same colour of jersey. Their colour, they said, was the best. The Newsweek writers conclude, "We might imagine we're creating colour-blind environments for children, but differences in skin colour or hair or weight are like differences in gender–they're plainly visible." And that's the cold, hard truth.
