Color Coding

One of the things I love about little kids is the lack of inhibition when it comes to what they say. But I only love that trait in other peoples’ kids. Mine regularly embarrassed the hell out of me when they were young.

Morgan, for instance, was enthralled with black people. When she was only three, my brother, Beau, and his new wife, Kim, wheeled her in her stroller up to the Chick-Fil-A at Southlake Mall to order lunch. When they reached the front of the line, Morgan stood up in her stroller, pointed at the server, and shouted, “Look, Beau! She’s chocolate!” My new sister-in-law was mortified.

Two weeks later, Morgan and I were in the elevator right in the middle of Southlake Mall. The doors opened, and a young black woman entered, pushing her baby in a stroller. Morgan turned to me, and pointing back to the baby, said, “Mom! That baby’s chocolate!” Fortunately, the mother had a sense of humor. She burst out laughing and said, “You’re right, sweetie. He IS chocolate.”

How do you explain racial etiquette to a young child? I wondered how to tell Morgan that she couldn’t call people “chocolate.” I knew what she would say – “But they are chocolate.”

I finally just started telling her and her little sister, Lauren, that it is not good manners to talk about what color people are. Some people have darker skin than others do, but we’re all people, and God loves us just the way we are. I said it enough that Morgan finally stopped calling people “chocolate.”

Lauren handled the situation a little differently. One afternoon, a friend of her father’s came to our house. After she warmed up to him, she grabbed him by the hand and led him to the glass door that opened out to our backyard. Knowing she would get in trouble for talking about his skin color, she pointed to our little dachshund and said in her most matter-of-fact voice, “That’s my dog, Betsy. She’s black, too.”