Conversations about race with kids as a light skinned person of colour

Talking about race with kids is important, but it’s also complicated especially if you are a lighter skinned person of colour. The Hilaria Baldwin debacle has us musing on the issue regularly in our house. There is no one right way to talk about race with kids, but these are some of the starters we use if you are feeling overwhelmed with where to start.

1. How racism affects people we know and love. If you are a lighter skinned person of colour you may not directly experience some of the worst aspects of racism like issues with interacting with authority. At the same time, most families have a range of skin tones and appearances so this does affect your family and you can talk about that and where people are willing to, get those people to share some of their personal experiences with racism. This is the racism that occurs towards our

2. Stereotypes and culture. We also discuss some of the stereotypes of our culture — we are fiery and passionate, we love music and dance, we are romantic and poetic and so on. We talk about the good side of those things, which people are often happy to ascribe to the lighter skinned people from our culture but how this gets magnified and turned into nasty racist stereotyping for people who look darker or more indigenous — the passion turns into a negative stereotype of violence, the romance turns into a ugly tendency to oversexualise children from a young age and so on.

3. The history of our journey. The journey also includes the immigrant experience in our culture and it’s important for us to talk about what that means. When you leave your country you want to leave behind certain things but also hold on tight to community and for us this also means a link to immigrant communities where we help newer immigrants who face systemic disadvantage.

4. The colourism in our community. As a lighter skinned person of colour it’s important that people also look at the colourism within the community and see how certain more european features are lauded. This is part of the internalised racism and needs to be recognised and challenged, preferably from a young age.

Now this isn’t a comprehensive list by any means, but a list of topics that we use to start conversation and stimulate thought. I offer it as a counter example to the simplified conversation around skin tones that tends to get given to kids.