by Rebecca Mikulin

Created on: June 05, 2010

In a preschool class, Jimmy is the only black kid and the rest are white. A mother asks her son, “Do you think there’s something different about Jimmy?” Her son replies, “Oh yes, he’s different from everyone in the class.” “Why do you say that?” “He’s the only one who wears glasses!”

Small children don’t bother with trivial things like skin color, all they see is another kid to play with. They don’t see a kid that’s black, Japanese, Jewish, or Vietnamese; they see a boy that runs faster than everyone else, or a girl that’s really good at making people laugh. To them, the idea that skin color should make someone different in any way is completely ridiculous because we all have different skin colors anyway; it doesn’t make any more sense than placing a negative label on someone because their eyes are green or their hair is straight.

Sadly, racism is alive and well throughout the world, even if it is more veiled in some areas than others. How did these children go from playing together on the playground without a thought to skin color, religion, or country of origin to spouting hate-filled maxims that have survived centuries? In order for something to be learned, it must first be taught to children by those they look up to. Maybe it doesn’t start when they’re toddlers, it could be later in life when peer pressure changes their minds about people they would otherwise have nothing against, but somewhere along the way someone taught them.

Take any given racist person and look at the people around them. For most children, the teaching begins at home with their parents. What some parents may see as a harmless racist joke as long as no one is offended can have lasting effects on the children…whenever someone laughs, it teaches the child that this is simply the accepted way things are, and that obviously their parents agree or they wouldn’t have said it in the first place. Maybe comments have been made about a neighborhood going downhill with muttered opinions on whose fault that is, or parents who flat-out tell their children that kids of other races are no good and should be stayed away from. In extreme cases, parents make sure their children know that all other races are inferior to them and should be treated as such.

Now the child is old enough to go to school. Though the one-sided history taught in most schools is slowly becoming more rounded,

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