Black Children in White Spaces

Caribbean parents, consciously or maybe subconsciously, measure success by their proximity to whiteness.

My parents immigrated to the United States from Haiti in the 70s. They were part of the second wave of middle and lower-middle-class migrants fleeing deteriorating socioeconomic and political conditions. My parents’ story is like that of many other Haitian parents who decided that leaving their homeland was a necessary sacrifice to give their children a better life. I was 10 when my family settled in Miami, Florida, but I rarely interacted with other Haitians outside of my family and the local restaurant where we picked up our Soup Joumou on Sundays.

For context, Haitians account for less than 2% of the US foreign-born population but make up 4.2% of Miami Dade’s population, making them the second-largest immigrant group behind Cubans in the county.

My parents worked very hard to give my brother and me a “good life.” To them, a good life was the product of a good education and a good education could not come from a public school. With the exception of Montessori, 17 years of my schooling was spent in very white spaces. Every day I participated in unconscious assimilation. I spoke with a certain cadence. I never used brown crayons to color. I attended dances but kept the rhythm to a minimum. I laughed every time something or someone was described as “ghetto.” I sat in pick-up trucks with small confederate flag stickers on the bumper, waiting for the first-period bell to ring. I attended sleep-overs but I left my hair scarf at home. I didn’t look up from my desk in the rare times our history books mentioned something about slavery. I never confided in any of my friends with personal issues and I always felt just shy of pretty. I was working so hard to blend in, I didn’t notice the harm that I was experiencing while trying to exist.

Now, as I try to give my own child a “good life,” I can’t help but notice how intertwined “good life” and “white spaces” are. A few weeks back, I began the search for a pre-school for my daughter. At the top of my “must-haves” list were a strong play-based curriculum, a streamlined and transparent pandemic safety plan, and diversity. I put my teacher hat on to interview multiple school directors making sure to ask, “What does your school’s diversity look like?” oftentimes receiving “pretty good” or “we’re very diverse” as an answer. I live in Flatbush, Brooklyn, so I thought nothing of these responses. I assumed we had the same understanding of diversity. It wasn’t until I dropped my daughter off for a trial day that I realized I was asking the wrong question.

Flatbush is the Caribbean heart of Brooklyn. With such a large concentration of Black and POC in the area, I was confused when I didn’t see any on day one of my daughter’s school trial. “Maybe the other kids' schedules are just different.” I thought. On day two, I knew that the question I should have been asking during the interviews was, “How many Black kids attend your school?” I will never forget the gut-wrenching feeling I had meeting my crying daughter at the school doors. I felt like I left her in an unsafe space. Not once, but twice.

When the school director asked for feedback about our experience, I decided to be honest. I told her that I was not satisfied with the lack of other Black children present.

According to the American Psychological Association, children notice race several years before adults typically address the topic with them. Research shows that children not only recognize race from a young age but also develop racial bias between ages 3 to 5. Furthermore, numerous studies unveil that children’s racial beliefs are not significantly related to their parents (Hirschfeld,2008; Katz, 2003; Patterson & Bigler, 2006). Essentially, they gather information from the broader world around them in order to form their own beliefs.

To be clear, neither I nor this research suggests that young children understand racism or are racist. Through no fault of their own, as children wait for their cognitive structures to mature, they’re limited to categorization by race and not from a multi-dimension perspective (Aboud, 2008). Plainly put, when they see someone who looks like them, they assume they are completely alike. This phenomenon coupled with society teaching children that race is a social category of significance opens the door for children to begin participating in what could be interpreted as micro-aggressions. Consciously or unconsciously, children pick up on the ways whiteness is normalized and privileged.

It is the responsibility of caregivers to meet the issue of race and racial inequality head-on and early in an age-appropriate way, especially if there is no racial or ethnic diversity in the classroom. Because we know that children can display bias, caregivers should be trained to recognize and respond to it. Racial prejudice doesn’t only manifest in an overt manner. It is also the role of caregivers to encourage more complex engagement with the topic. Inundating students with facts or other information pulls young children away from critical thinking. In addition to offering information, caregivers should explicitly teach children to pay attention to multiple attributes of a person — like their height or hair color. Besides the obvious call for daycares and schools in the Flatbush area to be more inclusive, I also challenge them to actively do the anti-racist work before the children of different ethnicities and race enroll.

“We try our best to provide representation through the books we read and the pictures posted on our walls,” the school director asserted in response to my feedback. “Besides, children at this age are just looking for a playmate.”

Though I dropped my daughter off at school, I was the one who remembered a lesson — a white space does not inherently equal a better space and proximity to whiteness is not a measure of success.

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References:

Aboud, F. E. (2008). A social-cognitive developmental theory of prejudice. In S. M. Quintana & C. McKown (Eds.), Handbook of race, racism, and the developing child (pp. 55–71). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Hirschfeld, L. A. (2008). Children’s developing conceptions of race. In S. M. Quintana & C. McKown (Eds.), Handbook of race, racism, and the developing child (pp. 37–54). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Katz, P. A. (2003). Racists or tolerant multiculturalists? How do they begin? American Psychologist, 58(11), 897–909.

Patterson, M. M., & Bigler, R. S. (2006). Preschool children’s attention to environmental messages about groups: Social categorization and the origins of intergroup bias. Child Development, 77, 847–860.