“Mom, Why is That Lady Staring?”
“Mom, why is that lady staring?” I whispered, trying not to make eye contact with the woman across from us in the produce section.
“Just ignore her,” was her answer.
At that time, when I was about eight years old, my mom and I never really had “the talk” about racism—instead, she provided brief explanations, like the one she gave as we left Safeway.
“We didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “Some people don’t like whoever’s different from them.”
I no longer need her explanations to understand, but it took years to make the connection on my own. Other eight-year-olds, including my first friends, would point my hair out to each other or laugh at the way I mispronounced a word. I was 13 the first time I was followed in a store while shopping with a couple of white classmates, who the clerk never gave a second glance. Years later, at my first job, the occasional customer would refuse to speak to me, voicing their complaints only to my coworkers once I waved them over.
Besides those memories is the ongoing experience of being stared at and, because it doesn't happen often, I'm never prepared for it. What may come as a surprise is, presently, the stares don't come from close-minded adults.
Instead, I find myself somewhere in public, with a school-age child who stops whatever they are doing to gawk at me. Knowing it’s only curiosity, I offer a polite "Hello!" and expect the interaction to end there. But this particular time, the mother notices and smiles awkwardly.
"I'm sorry about my son. He's just not familiar with...you know...Black people," she said.
"Oh," I reply.
As if that explanation was perfectly normal, she turns away without telling her son to stop and I become more and more uncomfortable as he continues to stare. I’m left to wonder, have some white kids never seen a Black character in their favourite TV shows? Have they never had a Black classmate or neighbour? Have their parents not had “the talk” with them about how people being different from one another—in colour, shape, and culture—is normal?
Research shows that all babies notice physical differences, like skin colour, from as early as six months old. And not only do they notice it, it influences their behaviour towards other children their age.
By age five, children can show signs of racial bias, othering children of a certain ethnicity during playtime. In a 2017 study with over 350 five- to 12-year-old white children, both younger and older children showed a positive bias toward white children as opposed to Black children during the Implicit Association Test. While it may feel like limiting a child’s exposure to the topic of racism protects them, it actually does more harm than good to avoid the conversation.
Kids who have discussed the topic with their parents are less likely to form racist behaviour later in life, according to researchers from Yale University. Anti-racism educator and author Shanice Nicole provides many tips for discussing race with your family, like finding children’s books or TV shows that address the topic and understanding that it’s okay not to have all the answers. The important thing is we continue to challenge ourselves and help make our community a more diverse and empathetic place to live.
I never asked the parents if they had conversations like this with their children and I absolutely don’t know what parenting is like. But what hurts more than an offended glare from a stranger in Safeway is being the only Black person in a space with white people my age, on the receiving end of ignorantly racist questions and jokes.
If I wasn’t too young to experience racism as a Black child, why is your white child too young to learn about racism?
