she is in such a hurry to grow bigger and bigger until, she says, "i'm taller than that tree and touch the sky!" i'm not in such a hurry for her to grow bigger, but she's doing it anyway, and i'm just trying to keep up.

my partner and i had dissimilar experiences as kids with how our families approached heritage, race, and self-concept. we both had aspects that we liked and didn't like, and we've tried to use what we liked and what we've learned since as well. what i've read about raced identity development in young kids is conflicting, so i'm just feeling my way along mostly.

from the beginning, dd has had a panoply of books at home and from the library that show the various cultures/races she's descended from and those she's not and that show mixed families and queer families and gimp families {i'm a gimp}, et cetera. our "village" is populated by folks who are mixed, who are from a variety of races, who are queer, who are str8, et cetera. we've also controlled her media exposure to the extent we could {don't get me started on tv time at the preschool and *@#@$%** disney princesses} to give more time to kids' dvds that are about or include kids of color - dora, happily ever after, little einsteins {i know, i know, but she loves them}, the magic school bus, et cetera. given this context, we still talked about folks descriptively with her and avoided using race-construction based abstractions like "black" or "white" or even "mixed" until she started bringing them up herself.

even when she did, she was still a bit nonplussed and confused by them - of course, 'cuz they're totally arbitrary, but as adults, we don't tend to think about that so much. so, that and our efforts to give her a grounding in her various cultures has lead to some as-age-appropriate-as-we-can-make-'em conversations about anti-semitism, genocide, slavery, bigotry, et cetera. we are definitely feeling our way along with this. we decided faith ringgold's invisible princess was too intense for her age { http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Princess-Faith-Ringgold/dp/044041735X } 'cuz it made us both tear up. on the other hand, we decided we could give a vague outline of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism to help make tim tingle's crossing bok chitto { http://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Bok-Chitto-Choctaw-Friendship/dp/09383177... } or spalding and skow's the secret of the dance { http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Dance-Andrea-Spalding/dp/1551433966/ref=sr_... } make sense.

we're trying to walk the line of giving her a positive grounding in the complexity of cultures and heritages that she's part of and should honor in others and of giving her some sense of the related histories and presents without crossing it and overwhelming her capacity to understand or cope. if i could heal the world, so she never had to know the wounds, i'd never bring it up at all. i can't, though, so i'd rather she was well grounded and helped to learn gradually about them. i had them thrust upon me rather starkly as a kid, and i'll spare her that if i can.

so, that's a rough ramble about how we're approaching these issues. i hope it was of some use. thanks for the thread and the thinking that went into it.

"if i pass for other than what i am, do you feel safer?" ~ lani ka'ahumanu

dragon knows dragon

okay, all totally theoretical cos my kid's not even born yet. But I think there are stages through this. When kids are really young, I'm not sure they can truly appreciate the historical significance of race. Four may be too young to understand things on a very profound level. But they can appreciate difference - I think this happens at a very young age, as far as I can tell from what the experts say, and so being exposed to other people and children of different races and ethnicities than their own at a young age - either in real life and/or through books, etc. is important, in my opinion. And talking about those differences, especially when brought up by the child. I read the anti-racist parent blog a lot to stimulate myself to think about these things, find out what other anti-racist parents think. I also plan to read more about race identity development. I'm pretty committed to raising anti-racist kids, as opposed to just unracist kids, you know? And frankly, I'm committed to being more and more anti-racist myself!

But then again, I plan to educate my kids to be critical thinkers on a whole range of things, like the media, the government, etc. So really I'm just a freaky lefty mama!