How can parents identify and address early signs of racial bias in young children?
07.06.2025 17:35
My older sister, being a damn Yankee, didn’t care about segregation. When we first arrived in Columbia, she wanted to drink from the “Colored” water fountain. Mom had to stop her and try to explain that white girls couldn’t drink from those fountains. My sister thought this was stupid, but not nearly as stupid as the fact that the sign didn’t tell you what color the water would be. What if someone really wanted blue water but that fountain had red?
Dad didn’t actually mean anything by using it - many people did. But when put on the spot like that, he had to tell us that it was a bad word and we shouldn’t use it. Mom just sat there and grinned at the inevitable “But if it’s a bad word, why do YOU say it?”
My mother did this back in the 1960s. We were in South Carolina, but being military and very young, my little brother and I didn’t even know about segregation. We had black friends - my first “boyfriend” (when I was 4) was the black kid who lived across the street from us on Fort Jackson.
As an adult, I can feel sorry for my father at that moment, as he had to explain to his children that he was wrong in using it. To his credit, I never heard him use it again in his life because, as Mom pointed out, his children learned from HIM.
Mom heard one of us use the term one day. Not calling anyone the name, but just in conversation between me (about 7) and my little brother (about 4). So that evening, at the dinner table, Dad used the term and my mother looked at him and said “And what, exactly, does that term mean? The kids used it today and you need to make sure they understand how to properly use it”.
My father liked to use a term for black people. Not the term one hears most often, that even that group uses among itself. This was a different term that was not uncommon in South Carolina in the 60s.