A Reflection on Diversity

I’ve written before that my children taught me many lessons about diversity as they grew up (see here and here). This post is the story of another time I learned something from my son about diversity.

This occasion happened within a few months of my son’s third birthday. Exactly when it happened I don’t remember, but I do remember I was driving him from his preschool south of the Missouri River to our new house north of the river. We made that commute from late October 1984 through April 1985.

I stopped at a red light at about 31st and Main Street in Kansas City, Missouri. While we were stopped, from his car seat behind me, my son asked, “What’s that black man doing?”

I looked out the car window. A black man in dark clothing wheeled a fully loaded hand truck along the sidewalk. “It looks like he’s moving some boxes,” I said, and I explained how the hand truck worked.

But I wondered why my son had described the man as black. Race is usually one of the first identifying descriptors adults use, but why did a three-year-old describe someone that way? He went to an ethnically diverse preschool, but was he really aware of race so young?

“Why did you say he’s a black man?” I asked.

And I got a typical three-year-old’s answer. “Because he is.”

I tried another tack. I pointed at a white man nearby. “What color is that man?”

“Green.”

Huh? That was not the answer I expected.

Then I realized—the white man had a green jacket on. And the black man wore black clothing. My son was identifying the men by the color of their clothes, which he apparently thought was more important than their race (if he even saw their race).

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. In those days, my son called one of our cars the white car and the other the yellow car. He didn’t care that one was a sedan and the other a station wagon. Or that one was Mommy’s car and the other was Dad’s. And every morning I told him to put on his blue pants or his gray pants, what color shirt to get, etc.

My son focused on the sorting mechanism he knew best—colors. The most obvious colors to him were the clothes the men wore. Their different skin tones weren’t relevant to him.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we all sorted each other by the color of our clothes and not by the color of our skin? Or, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., dreamed, by the content of our character, though that takes longer to discern.

What have your children taught you?