The worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism that began last week after the death of George Floyd are forcing many parents to address issues of race, privilege and injustice based on skin colour with their kids. Here’s how to do it effectively.
The worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism that began last week after the death of George Floyd are forcing many parents to address issues of race, privilege and injustice based on skin colour with their kids.
And if you think your children are too young to get it — or that you’re raising kids colour-blind to race — you’re wrong, say experts.
“Children are thinking about race already by the end of their first year of life,” said University of British Columbia psychology professor Andrew Baron, who specializes in the origins of race bias.
“Certainly, by the time that they’re three or four, they’re identifying race when they look at people. When they see individuals, they’re not just looking at them as a person.”
Baron said his own research shows children already have “implicit bias” — unconscious thoughts and feelings about social and racial groups — by the time they’re out of kindergarten.
“These are the kinds of things that predict who you’re going to hire for jobs, who you’re going to vote for in elections, how kind or friendly you’re going to behave toward people that are different from you,” said Baron, who has a nine-year-old son.
“And the fact that a five- and six-year-old already has it at adult-like levels suggests that this stuff isn’t learned very slowly. It’s learned very early.”
Approaching the subject
While people of colour often factor race into daily conversations out of necessity, many white parents might be talking to their kids about race as a result of recent protests for the first time.
And that luxury to wait, said black identity and multiculturalism expert Handel Wright, should be acknowledged as privilege.
“Inaction is not neutrality,” said Wright. “Inaction is, in fact, support of the status quo.”
One way to start talking about anti-black racism is to “model empathy,” said San Francisco-based pediatrician Rhea Boyd, who studies the effects of policing on children’s health.
“If a child expresses concern about what they’ve seen affecting another child or family, share how they can act in defence of that person. How they can stick up for them.”
The kinds of biases that we have as adults … are notoriously difficult to change.– Andrew Baron, UBC psychology professor
But it’s rarely kids who are uncomfortable talking about it, experts say. More often, it’s parents.
Baron, Boyd and others suggest diversifying home libraries for starters, and people might already be catching onto that.
The top five bestsellers on Amazon in the U.S. this week are about race, including White Fragility: Why it’s so Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin Diangelo and So You Want To Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Canada is experiencing a similar phenomenon.
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