Ryan was telling me about a girl on his bus who gave him a coloring picture because she had several and did not need all of them. He told me her name, and felt it was important to add a description: "The small brown girl who is also in first grade." From this I gathered the obvious... she is smaller than Ryan, and brown... but I already knew who he was talking about without the explanation.
So... with a little pinch of uneasiness in my gut and the mental reminder that this was one lesson I needed to get absolutely right we talked more about skin. We started with ourselves. What color were we? (I am sand, and Ryan is caramel by the way) and the little girl on the bus...she is brown. We talked about people that we know who are a darker shade of brown than the girl from the bus and people in the middle. Briefly... we came up with some interesting descriptives... that girl is now somewhere between chocolate ice cream and root beer. I wonder which one she likes better?
To bring Ryan's brain back down to earth though... we needed to talk about all the ways he is exactly like that girl. All the traits they share. They both have faces, and mouths that are normally in a smile. They both have eyes, noses, teeth, loose teeth, ears, hair, arms, legs, and thanks to Ryan... I now know that he and bus girl both have small and large intestines and a heart that pumps blood all around especially to their big, juicy, gray brains. They both have feelings, and ideas and toys that they love. Games they like to play and songs they like to sing. They are both in first grade, and they live in the same kind of house in the same neighborhood and ride the same bus. They are both humans, and they are both smart. Apparently though...Ryan says she is a girl and that he is a boy...who knew! We then talked about people we know who are different in other ways... A friend's dad who lost an eye, another friend who lost an arm and a man we have seen who has no legs. Different, but still very much the same as we are.
I told Ryan that February was Black History Month. That during next month, he would likely learn about a lot of different people and notice that they too were all shades and colors...but that one thing would always be true about each and every one of them.... They were just like him in hundreds of ways.
Even though I wish that we truly could live in a color blind world...it is clear to me that children inherently notice the differences between them and others. To teach a child equality, it is impossible to overlook the obvious differences and I find that hard... I hope I have done well...giving him a good foundation and if someone (a peer, a friend, anyone) ruins his innocence in this... I will be sad.
