I wish this were an April Fool's joke...

I am so.....sad, disgusted, embarrassed, shocked, (pick one!) about something one of my children said today.

They were playing outside and I called them in for lunch. The garage door was opened (with all the bikes and such). The front door was also open (so I can see them playing). They all came in and sat down. I pulled the front door to because the sun was bugging me. One of my big kids says, "Mom! You can't close the front door! Someone might steal our stuff!" I told the kiddo that there was no reason to worry about that. We live in a safe neighborhood. Everybody knows everybody. It's just stuff. This child...this sensitive, intelligent, culturally diversified, formerly bullied for their ethnicity child....looks at me like I am absolutely stupid and says, "MOM! THERE ARE BLACK PEOPLE IN OUR NEIGHBORHOOD!"

Ach. I'm crying right now because it's so hard to even put that "out there." My child said THAT. My MINORITY child said that! The child has never lived in a home that teaches anything like that! Not only do we not teach that, but we DO actively teach the alternative to THAT! The child does not have family or friends (that I know of!) that would EVER have that attitude! The child's best friend has three internationally adopted siblings, two of which are from Africa. So none of the child's other culturally-diversified friends would say that right? Except that my child DID say it. And my child doesn't look like a racist either!

I have been wracking my brain tonight trying to figure out how my child received that message. Could a child absorb that sort of thought simply by seeing what the "bad guys" on TV usually look like and who the media chooses to highlight when crimes occur? I am not teaching my child that attitude. No BODY in the child's life is teaching that attitude. What else could it be?

Of course we ALL stopped everything at the moment of that comment and had a talk. I said, "How would you like it if, when Bright is a teenager walking down the street, people think he is going to steal their bikes just because he's black?" The child looks at me like I'm stupid and says, "But we know Bright! He's Bright!" And there it is. Outside this house people have color that defines them (in the child's mind). Inside this house, nobody is defined by color--they are defined by action. We talked about lots of stereotypes, and how you can't ever tell who a person really is just by looking at them. Blah, blah, blah....the same sorts of conversations we've had over and over in our house since they were all babies anyway! They know this stuff!

But that comment still came out. That child is still learning negative imaging of black people from *whatever* is observed on the exterior of her life experience (media, trips to wal-mart, whatever...). Some people try to say that racism is no longer a part of everyday American culture. Bull crap. BULL CRAP! If my internationally adopted, ethnic minority child can come up with a racist comment, anybody could! And it makes me mad! But I don't know what I can do about it...