Dinner Conversation

Update: I talked to little j again tonight about her comment last night and we cleared it up. The only reason she said it is because she couldn't think of anything else to say and that was the biggest difference she could think of. So after a short but good conversation little j admitted that there might be other reasons to not like someone, but skin color was not one of them. Whew!

I struggled with whether or not to do a post about this, but I am in the library trying to work on my dissertation and I just have to get some thoughts out in order to concentrate on the work at hand.

Tonight at dinner little j told us she didn't like someone because they were "brown." Holy crap! Where did that come from? I have two feelings: 1) I'm glad that she felt secure enough to tell us, and of course we weren't mad; 2) What the hell? Who did she get that from? She basically said that she didn't like this person because she didn't know where she or her family was from.

Big J and I sat in stunned silence, not quite knowing what to say. Finally we started talking about how all people are different, and, as a matter of fact we did know where she was from. We talked about it briefly, but a five-year old's attention span is only so long. It is definitely a subject that we will have to bring up again.

I can't help but wonder if she is getting the message from someone else? I can't imagine that any of her friends feel that way. And she most certainly didn't get that from Big J and I. And then the next concern is how to we start to address this as a family? It's true that we don't really have any friends that are Black, at least not that we socialize with regularly. And maybe that is part of the issue. I just don't know, but it's weighing heavily on my mind this evening.