How I Responded When My Son Made This Comment About Race

Our children are always listening

I have worked in elementary schools for over a decade. I’ve heard kids say all sorts of crazy and brilliant things.

But I was still shocked by a comment my 6-year-old son made on the way home from karate class last week.

“I’m glad I’m not Black, mom.”

Parenting moments like these can jerk you into slow motion. They feel immensely important.

In moments like these, I feel a weight of responsibility for the way I respond, as if it will make or break the opportunity for a teachable moment.

“What makes you say that?” I asked.

“You know how Black people aren’t always treated fairly? I’m glad I’m not Black so people don’t do that to me,” he responded.

My 6 year has already had plenty of time to internalize his observations about race in America. Children as young as 6 months are able to recognize skin color differences, and as early as 3 they have been shown to make judgments about others based on race.

My son has also lived in an urban environment his entire life, and he’s attended a racially diverse school since he was 3.

He’s seen the Black Lives Matter yard signs scattered around porches and lawns in his neighborhood, and the murals on city walls honoring the lives of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

His teachers, who almost exclusively come from Latin American countries, have read students books about skin color and hair texture.

But he’s also seen that despite living in this very racially diverse city, the majority of his friends and his parents’ friends are White. Every member of his family is White.

He’s had some time to internalize the grim reality of how race works in the United States, but his 6-year-old brain can’t process this in a tidy way.

As a parent of two White children, my ideal is that our open discussions of race will lead to greater empathy. It would be great if my 6-year-old son heard stories about racial injustice and declared his decision right then and there to be an anti-racist ally for life.

But instead, my son expressed an egocentric, somewhat logical idea that if someone was being poorly treated, he was glad it wasn’t him.

I tried to channel all that I’d read about talking to children about race. I knew I needed to address his comment without shame or judgment.

“Maybe what you’re trying to say is that you don’t like it that Black people are sometimes mistreated, and you wouldn’t like to be mistreated either?” I offered.

“Yeah, but also if I had a choice I wouldn’t choose to be Black.”

The challenges of parenting moments like these, ones that target head-on the values we want to instill in our children, is that they force us to examine the complexities of our values.

It was a challenge to explain to my son why it’s okay to be glad you’re who you are but not to say you’re glad you’re not Black.

We teach our children to be proud of who they are, so I don’t expect him to want a different identity or race.

But it also means something that he was explicitly telling me that he was glad he wasn’t Black.

It meant something that if he had a choice he wouldn’t be Black, as if by being born White he had escaped a misfortune.

And perhaps the hardest thing about his comment was that it forced me to be honest with myself. As his mom, was I glad he wasn’t Black?

Of course not. But I do know that I don’t have to worry about the same things with my son that Black mothers have to worry about in this country.

My son has been diagnosed with several disabilities, but I never had to question whether these diagnoses were the result of bias against him because of his race. I worry about his academic progress, but I don’t have to worry about him having to prove himself more because of his skin color.

And the conversations I’ve had with my son about police violence pale in comparison to the conversations I know go on around this country between mothers and their Black sons.

So, what did I say to my son on the way home from karate?

“I’m glad you’re you, and if you were Black I would be glad you were you too.”

I explained that it’s good he is happy with who he is.

I also explained that saying you’re “glad” you’re not a certain way, especially when it’s about another race or the way someone looks, is not okay because it’s implying that you don’t think it’s good to be that way.

I explained that he was right to be thinking about people being mistreated, and that I hoped he would help to make sure people weren’t in the future.

We talked a little more, he nodded at my words, and then he changed the subject to Harry Potter.

Race has come up before, and it will come up again.

I may not have the perfect words for these moments, but I know I need to keep engaging with my White child about race. Conversations like these are crucial if I want him to grow up thinking critically about his observations of the world.

He may only nod and then change the subject to a story about fictional wizards. But I know he’s listening.

Author’s note: I originally posted this story as “How I Responded When My Son Made This Racist Comment in the Car.” Several readers commented that the labeling of my 6-year-old’s comment as “racist” was overly harsh or incorrect. I decided to change the title in order to focus it more on the point of this story, which was to show my child’s astute observations about race and how I struggled to respond.

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