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In a first grade classroom, the teacher is showing a picture of an old storefront from the early 1900s. She asks what the children notice. They say things like, "It's small," "There are so many shelves!," and "Why isn't there color in the picture?" As the responses continue, a few students in the back are having a conversation of their own.
Anna, a biracial child, leans over to Kevin, who is African American, and whispers, "If you were alive then, you wouldn't be able to go in that store because of the color of your skin." Stunned, Kevin repeats in a whisper, "If I was alive then, I wouldn't be able to go in that store because of my skin color." Then Kevin turns to Phineas, who is White, and repeats in an urgent whisper, "If I was alive then, I wouldn't be able to go in that store because of my skin color." Phineas looks at him but doesn't say anything. Kevin repeats the statement a third time, and Phineas turns and looks at Kevin and says, "Yeah."
Adults often assume that young children are not aware of racial inequities, but as this conversation shows, children know about and talk about race. For young children, race involves skin color, facial features, and how people group themselves or are grouped together by others (Goodman 1964; Patterson & Bigler 2006; Hirschfeld 2008). Scholars know that race is a socially created explanation for skin color differences rather than a biologically founded one (Tatum [1997] 2003). At the same time, race is also a socially meaningful category. Young children's understandings of race have a lot to do with their own experiences-how they are treated, how they see people treated who look like them, and how people are treated and talked about in their families, their schools, their neighborhoods, and the media (Tatum [1997] 2003).
Conversations about race and inequity are important in early childhood classrooms. Sometimes teachers feel that avoiding such conversations is developmentally appropriate because children are not ready to discuss why and how racial discrimination exists (Husband 2010). However, research demonstrates that a teacher can accurately and meaningfully teach about race and other somewhat complicated identity markers if she presents the material in an engaging way...