TULSA, Okla. — 2 Works for You is starting a conversation about how to talk to kids about race.
Travis Guillory sat down with a diverse group of parents with children of varying ages, genders, and ethnicity to talk about how they handled race talks with their children.
Sondra Slade, an African American mother to two African American children, said she first had a conversation with her son when he was six years old. “He was the only African American kid in his class. He was 6, and two of the kids didn’t want to play with him. So, we had to have the conversation of why you’re different, why they may see you as different, why you should love everybody and still respect everybody.”
Autumn Worten is white and Native American and has a daughter who is white, Native American and black. Worten said, “My daughter was in pre-k, so she was 4. A boy had come up to her and said he didn’t want to play with her because her skin was brown. So, that really didn’t afford me the opportunity to share it with her in a way that I wanted to; it really helped us force the conversation at that point because she had a lot of questions and she didn’t understand.”
Leonard Shepherd, a professional counselor, said, “(Children) notice a difference in color. They’re noticing differences between male and female.” He added, “It is normal for them to want to be with groups that they find are like them at those ages.”
Jo Lein, a white mother to two white children, said, “(We) started having conversations about differences in skin color when she was as early as two or three because I knew she would go to school with kids that didn’t look like her.”
When asked whether parents should initiate conversations about race or let the child experience it on their own, Slade explained, “I think as an African American parent, I don’t have the luxury to wait for an opportunity to talk.”
Lamar Guillory, an African American father to three African American sons, added, “You have to be intentional because the probability, as an African American dad and kids, that you’re going to face something like that if you’re not in an all black environment is very high.”
Worten said, “There are moments where she’s like, ‘I wish my hair was straight like my friends’ or ‘it’s easier to have straight hair’ or whatever the case may be. Those moments kind of hurt for me as a parent because I want her to embrace her beauty. But I think it’s important to have a mix of intentionality and letting them come to you.”
Shepherd explained, “It is very important for parents to prepare the child before they are faced with a traumatic situation, where they have to come questioning – if they come questioning at all.”
Kelli McLoud-Schingen, an African American mother, said, “Having biracial children, the conversations almost happen earlier anyway because they’re living in a household with two parents that don’t look like each other.” She added, “We would allow them to get to a place where they would find their own identity and make sense of it because identity is very personal . . . The things that we were intentional about were making sure my daughter had brown dolls. I made sure that the movies that we saw were diverse movies. I made sure that the fairytales that we brought in also had Cinderella who was a brown girl.”
When asked if parents should teach their children not to see color, Lamar Guillory said, “Our society, in the way it’s set up, is going to force you to check a box.” McLoud-Schingen added, “We know that kids see color . . . When they draw us all, I’m always brown. They never draw me white. They never draw me pink. They never draw me orange. They draw me as a brown person.”
Shepherd said if parents teach their children not to see color, the children will then interact with other individuals on the premise of ‘I don’t see you.' He says that diminishes what makes someone unique and different, and children won’t learn to appreciate one another. The counselor said, “You want to stay away from things like that because it kind of just dismisses it a little bit. They see it. And that’s why we need to talk about it.”
McLoud-Schingen added, “What matters is what information they hold around that color. What experiences do they hold around that color? What has somebody told them about that color? Because they see the color, right? That’s just a fact. But how they experience it is going to be the most important thing. So, we as parents, have to be intentional to make sure that the experiences they have around certain people or groups of people are positive ones.”
Lein said, “(We need to) recognize that just because you had one experience with one black person doesn’t mean that that is all black people. And that needs to be actively fought against, especially from white people.”
Leonard Shepherd suggested, “What’s going to be most helpful is a dialogue. You need to find out from them what they know about people of other races. What has been your experience? You have people like this in your classroom. Do you talk to them? How do you treat them? How do other people treat them?”
Jo Lein had a conversation like that with her six-year-old white daughter. She said, “We started talking about brothers and sisters. Of course, she only wants a sister. I said, ‘Mommy and Daddy are done having babies but maybe we can have a baby from another family come join our family. She kind of paused and then she started crying a lot." When Lein asked her daughter what was wrong, the little girl asked, "What color skin will she have?" Lein explained, "She realized, I think through the many, many tears that it was shameful to ask that question. She felt shame from that. I said, ‘Tell me more about what you’re thinking,’ and she said, ‘Well I think white skin is prettier.’”
After a long, difficult conversation, the six-year-old said she would welcome any color baby into the family - as long as the baby is a girl. Lein said, "I complimented her on saying the thing that she was thinking. I think often we want to prescribe what a person should think – like that’s not the right way to think. And she was able to say it out loud and to be vulnerable, which I think more white people need to do."
McLoud-Schingen told a story of her own, saying, “My son was about the same age, about 7 years old at school. He came home one day and he said, ‘Mom, I wish I was white . . . The white kids play with the white kids, and the brown kids play with the brown kids, and I just want to play with both of them. But it just seems like the white kids get more stuff.’ And then he said this and it just finished me. He goes, ‘It just seems easier to be white.’”
Lamar Guillory had a much bolder approach to teaching his son about the effects of being African American. He posted a video on Facebook recently, showing himself kneeling on his son's neck in a similar way a Minneapolis police officer knelt on George Floyd's neck. In the video, you hear Guillory say, “If they got you like this, just relax your body, breathe, deep . . . Let your body go limp. I need you to stay alive." Guillory then looks into the camera and says, "This is what I taught my son this morning, America. What did you teach yours?”
He later explained, "What parent really wants to have that conversation with their kid? . . . We are, as African Americans, having that type of conversation every day. But I think what that represented was the extreme of what we have to go through possibly. It’s not a stretch, given what you just saw on the TV.”
Slade added, “We have to learn to get comfortable having those uncomfortable discussions. If you don’t you’re not going to find your truth, your honesty, and you’re not going to communicate.”
"The hard part as a parent is do you prepare them for the world as it is? Or do you prepare them for the world you hope it is when they inherit it," Autumn Worten hypothetically asked. She went on to say, "Creating opportunities to be around people who are different is how adults will break the cycle because the adults are passing the ideals and views down to their children, and the cycle will never break until adults are willing to say, ‘I love someone who is different from me.’”
The parents said it's not just up to them to educate their children about race. They say schools have a big responsibility.
Lein explained, “Educators need to go so much work to teach and to ensure that the history is accurate, to ensure that we are not committing atrocities against kids of color in schools and acting appropriately when situations arise.”
McLoud Schingen added, "If we’re going to spend six months on the Holocaust, we need to spend at least six months on the Native American Holocaust. If we’re going to spend three months on women’s history, we need to spend three months on LGBT history. I think we need to have these equitable experiences.”
"Going forward, the solution would be to have truth in history," Guillory said. "I agree that there needs to be equitable (education), but let’s talk about the truth in history. Because if you don’t, you don’t learn lessons . . . That’s across the board because people that don’t study history tend to repeat it.”
Worten said, “I also feel like it’s my job to make the world so much better by the time she has to face it on her own.”
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