I'm curious if anyone has any opinions/input on this, of any kind...no type of answer is off limits.

Take this question however you want to…if your answer is to make social commentary, to give parenting advice, or to just express general thoughts, or whatever, that’s cool. Here’s the deal.

My son is 7, almost 8. He goes to a public school in a big city. It is a GREAT school. It is also one which is very culturally diverse…I’m not sure if whites are in the majority there or not, but if they are, it’s a very narrow majority. Basically, our major ethnicities are Caucasian, Hispanic, African American and Hmong. And though my wife and I were both raised in households and cultures where this type of diversity was viewed as more a “bad thing” than a “good thing” (let’s just say none of our adult role models had any problem throwing out the “N” word or telling racial jokes), neither my wife nor I grew up believing those stereotypes to which we were subjected every day. We are both of the people are people variety who believe that others should be judged, as Dr. King said, by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

Indeed, for the first few years of my son’s life, we never discussed that there were different “colors” of people…it’s just a self evident fact like everyone has eyes, just a characteristic, which is what we believe it should be. We don’t want our kid growing up with the attitudes that still occur to us in the back of our heads from time to time when a non white person pulls a dick move. In other words, we don’t believe that, but it’s easy to hear in the backs of our minds what our elders would have said in a similar situation, and we don’t agree.

So basically, I don’t think anyone can ever be truly colorblind, and the proof seems to be that some times my son has come to us to tell us a story, and he identifies the kid as a “black kid”. Our answer is “does the color of his skin matter?” He says no, and we tell him then he doesn’t need to mention it in his story. That’s one thing that we both grew up around everywhere…if someone in our peer group were to tell a story about someone they interacted with, if the person was a white guy, they’d start the story with, “one time I was talking to this guy,” and if it was a black guy they’d start their story with, ‘one time I was talking to this black guy,” and 999 times out of 1000 it has NOTHING to do with the story.

Anyway, bottom line is we’ve told our son that skin color is just another characteristic like hair color and eye color and the kind of clothes you wear, etc., and he believes that, he says he agrees with that, and why shouldn’t he? But still, every now and then he would identify a person’s skin color when it was a) different than his own and b) not germane to the story. I think reminding him that it doesn’t matter unless it relates to the story has been quite effective. I’d love nothing more for him to grow up and see all people as people first, characteristics second…not just for race, but for any manner of outward appearance. But he’s reached an age where he is noticing differences.

Anyway, to my main question, we weren’t thinking much of all that, but if you read the last discussion I posted about kids who were bullying my son at a beach, one thing I did not mention in that question was that these kids were black. Basically, for the purposes of that discussion, it doesn’t matter, but for the purposes of this one, it does. Two days after this incident, my son asked my wife, “why don’t black kids treat me as nice as white kids?” Now, lest it just be about recent events, she asked him what he meant, and while he DID list that as an example…he also listed several other examples of black kids who treated him seemingly worse than the white kids he’s encountered. So, I don’t really have a question here, any more than, “what are your thoughts on this?” I don’t care if you interpret that as “why do you think this is,” “what do you think we should tell him,” “what does this mean in terms of race relations in society,” or some other question. I’m just throwing it out there as something that happened. Discuss.