When we picked a nursery school for our 4 year old daughter, racial percentages of the kids in the school wasn\u2019t an issue. It was a highly recommended school and close to home, so it made sense for her to go there.<\/p>\n
The fact that she is one of 3 black kids in the class also didn\u2019t bother me until one Saturday morning when she woke me up with the statement \u201cMommy I don\u2019t like brown people except for my family, I only like white people\u201d.\u00a0 Obviously this shook me right out of my reverie of sleeping in and uninterrupted showers. I hesitantly asked \u201cWhy don\u2019t you like brown people?\u201d to which she responded \u201cThey are boring and they make me upset\u201d. \u00a0I try to make light of the situation and say \u201cBut sweetheart, brown is beautiful and it\u2019s the colour of chocolate. We like chocolate don\u2019t we?\u201d Her response? \u201cNo, I like white marshmallows.\u201d<\/p>\n
So here I am sitting in my bedroom faced by my little racist toddler at a complete loss as to what to do or say thinking this child needs Jesus, but little things start to make sense e.g. how she wants me to make her hair \u201clike Sally*\u201d, she prefers Barbie to her darker counterparts and how she is always more comfortable around white people than around \u201cbrown\u201d people.<\/p>\n
I then had the talk with her about the fact\u00a0 that no skin colour is better than any other colour and that brown is beautiful. She eventually said \u201cI like brown people Mommy\u201d but I am not convinced she is convinced. Could it be that being part of the minority has made her hate who she is? Was it something one of the kids said? How does a parent deal with this? Any ideas welcome.<\/p>\n
P.S. In the meantime I am making sure she doesn\u2019t end up with my friend\u2019s son the homophobe.<\/p>\n
*names changed to protect the innocent<\/p>\n
Note: If you enjoyed this article, and would like to stay updated with more, you can:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When we picked a nursery school for our 4 year old daughter, racial percentages of the kids in the school wasn\u2019t an issue. It was a highly recommended school and close to home, so it made sense for her to go there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":353586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[6,7,9],"class_list":["post-1069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-childrens-rights","tag-are-toddlers-racist","tag-do-children-see-race","tag-racist-toddler"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jozikids.co.za\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n