Prejudice

My youngest son is not prejudiced. He does not care about the color of anybody's skin. He isn't really even fully aware that some people do care and some people are wrong to care. He doesn't know that white people came here from Europe, black people from Africa, brown people from Mexico or South America, he doesn't know that yellow people came from the Asian countries and he wouldn't understand that anyway, because they are not yellow, really.

So he inadvertantly said something this weekend that was probably taken as racist. And he knew something he had said was not quite right, because of the reaction it got. But he can't quite put his finger on it.

Driving home from a goodbye party in Gibbon, Neb., for my goddaughter who is going to study in Australia for about 10 months, my son said quietly: "I think I made one of Tristan's friends mad."

"Which one?" I asked.
"The boy whose sister was in the Snow White costume," he said.
"What did you say?" I asked.
"They were talking about how some scientists say a meteor is going to hit the earth," he said, only he said "earf" because he's having some pronunciation issues. But I love that -- EARF -- pronounced errrf.
"And I said, well maybe it will hit Africa. Who cares about Africa," he continued.
Well, the boy whose sister was in the Snow White costume cared about Africa, being of African heritage. He told my son, "My ancestors came from Africa."

Christopher hadn't said "Africa" for any other reason than trying to say the name of a place as far away from us as he could think of. He wasn't thinking about people who lived there and especially not about what race of people lived there.

But he said it. and it was inappropriate. So I tried to explain why. I'm not sure he gets it yet. But the two boys he had this conversation with (older than him) got it.

"Mom," Chris then asked, "Am I Poland?"
"Are you what," I asked, thinking about the pronunciation issues and suspecting I had heard wrong.
"Am I Poland," he said, "Because after I said that Tristan asked me, What if the meteor hit Poland?"

I explained to my son that he is about one quarter Polish and some of his ancestors came from Poland, but neither his father or grandfather had ever been there, so he was pretty far removed from being "Poland."

Political correctness is a pretty difficult concept to explain to an 8 year old. But caring about other people's feelings is a lesson I think he's learning. He's a loving and fun-loving boy who has many friends from many different ethnic backgrounds. He's still not quite sure exactly why what he said was wrong, but he knows it hurt somebody's feelings, and he's sorry for that.

That's as good a start as any.