Like many “good” white liberal parents, my wife and I have grappled with how to talk to our white children about race. We’ve read a lot, listened to several podcasts, and tried to find age-appropriate resources for our kids.

This concern only grew in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. (My older son’s second birthday coincided with the day the mass protests began in Minneapolis, which also happens to be my hometown. I remember putting him to bed and scrolling through my phone for the rest of the evening, absorbing all the news, watching the videos, and clicking through the pictures.) The reckoning that came after that eight minute and 46 second video ricocheted around the internet was profound not only in its scale across our culture, but for how deep it bored into our personal lives. 

For many white people, we dealt with this reckoning by going inward, seeking out how we had been the problem, and how we could transform into the solution. Many wanted to “do the work.” Books like How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi, and White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, shot to the top of bestseller lists, clearly driven by white people seeking out answers to counteract the feeling of hopelessness that came with facing our nation’s racist core laid bare.

My wife (who is white, like me) and I had these same feelings, but since we had each gone through various anti-racist trainings, we both felt further along in our “work,” so to speak. But we were still relatively new parents and terrified about how we could possibly raise anti-racist white children in a country that has never reckoned with its racist roots. 

Thankfully, there were a lot of resources for us to choose from. In addition to his How to Be an Antiracist book, Kendi had written a children’s book, Antiracist Baby, which was conveniently timed to come out in mid-June, 2020. We snapped up our copy. 

When the book arrived, we read it to our two year old. The book is presented as a step-by-step guide to how children can be anti-racist, and much of what’s recommended should not be surprising to anyone familiar with anti-racist practices: celebrate differences, use your words, believe we can overcome racism. The book is a traditional board book - about 20 thick, cardboard pages, with lots of bright and fun drawings of babies and kids, with appropriately diverse backgrounds and skin colors. 

In addition to buying this book for ourselves and our kids (we had another one on the way that summer), we would send the book to any friend who had a baby or celebrated their kids’ birthdays. It became our “go to” present, which our (mostly white) friends seemingly appreciated. 

However, my wife and I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the book as our two year old grew into a three year old and became more aware of what we were saying to him. Many of the things in the book were generally nice things to teach a toddler, but some seemed a little outside his boundaries of comprehension. On one page, for example, Kendi suggests that children “confess when being racist.” 

This advice is well and good for any adult. I am not opposed to the idea. I believe strongly, as a white person, in repairing any relational harm that may come from my actions.

But, my three year old had no awareness about what “being racist” meant, nor do I think I could ever explain it to him in a way that I felt was constructive. Maybe this was a failing on my part, but I worried that by pushing this kind of message on him, that he would start to think about the world in binaries - racist vs. not racist - without a full context of what that means.

I’ll give an example: My son got a pretty good-sized firetruck for his first christmas from my Grandma. He loved this firetruck (and now, five years later, still plays with it sometimes). It had a ladder, you could open up the inside to see all the tools, it had stabilizers on the side - everything you would want in a firetruck. It also came with two pretty nondescript fire fighter figures, one with black skin and one with white skin. (Though my son referred to these figures as “brown” and “peach”, because, well, neither of the figures had skin coloring anywhere close to the black and white colors in his crayon box.)

He would frequently give these figures jobs to do on the firetruck. The “white” figure tended to be the driver; the “black” figure was on the top of the ladder, putting out the fires. I became concerned that he was categorizing these figures based on what I perceived as their race. One time, I switched them around - making the “black” one the driver, and the “white” one on the ladder - and he got mad at me. He said that was not where they belong. I said: “No, no, each firefighter can do whatever they want! They can be anything!”

As soon as I said it, I inwardly cringed. That phrase coming out of my mouth was embarrassing, not just because it was a cliche, but because I realized I was putting my own - and society’s - assumptions on to my son who had no reason to believe someone couldn’t do something they wanted because of their skin color. He was just a kid, playing. In his mind, the firefighter with a brown face was the one on the ladder; the one with the peach face was the driver. Most likely, that’s all there was to it - no value or judgment about which one was better. 

In the same way, Antiracist Baby places our society’s assumptions onto children who do not know better. My son had no idea about the unjust systems created to uphold white supremacy at that age. Yes, I know that children can be aware of racial differences at a very young age, and show racial preferences, but trying to explain the concept of a power analysis to a three year old would be met with an inscrutable face. Similarly, offering solutions based on that same analysis - even with bright colors - landed flat. He enjoyed the book because the central baby character was quite humorous and did silly things involving its diaper, but I don’t think he was able to absorb the message of the book at all.

Instead of telling our son, “nothing disrupts racism more than when we confess the racist ideas we sometimes express,” we have found more age-appropriate guidance, like from pediatric psychologist Dr. Sheila Modir, to be helpful. Dr. Modir encourages parents of very young children to model kind behavior and talk about what it means to harm someone else, and how to repair that relationship. We’re teaching our kids that if you hurt someone’s feelings, or say something that isn’t nice, you have to check in on your friend and see what you can do to make them feel better. 

Reading Antiracist Baby again, now that my children are older and have moved beyond board books, I see that it’s a book designed for parents to feel good about talking to their kids about race, not to present age-appropriate lessons to those kids. Buying the book was a way for parents to virtue-signal about their beliefs, rather than actually deal with the hard task of teaching their kids about the on-going legacy of slavery and racism in this county, and our responsibility as white people to do something about it. Now that my kids are older, and can understand more, I am continuing my struggle to figure out the most effective age-appropriate ways to talk about all this. 

In addition to buying Antiracist Baby, we got a copy of Homemade Love, by bell hooks. We loved, and still love, reading this book to our kids, when they’ll let us pull back out a board book. It was at one point my son's favorite book, although probably for just a few weeks; toddlers can be fickle. This book tells the story of a Black family with a young girl and how they love each other and support each other. It contains a phrase that I think about all the time: “There is no all the time right.” This phrase is said by the little girl’s parents to assure her she is still loved after she makes a mistake - breaking a flower vase - something we all need to hear and I tell myself frequently as I struggle through life. The book is written through hooks’ lyrical prose with fun almost-rhymes that always soothe us as we read it. 

Homemade Love felt much more age-appropriate for our kids while also introducing the idea of differences across families and the love that all parents have for their kids. It was perfectly aligned with Dr. Modir’s recommendations for modeling behavior and building empathy in young kids: the book literally illustrates unconditional love and acceptance, even when someone makes a mistake and creates harm. It showed a family different from ours, bringing diversity into our home. It also underscored our collective humanity and the fundamental dignity we all share, regardless of the color of our skin. I can’t say that this book made my kids anti-racist, but it did open up their world a little bit to what other families look like and experience, and how we all want and strive for the same thing: Love. 

As we continue to struggle to raise anti-racist children - a struggle I expect will continue for all of our parenthood - we will seek out age-appropriate resources and conversations. Our kids can understand things better than they did a few years ago. They are now in school, surrounded by a diversity of experiences and backgrounds through their peers. We will continue to talk with our kids about our nation’s history and what it means for their day-to-day lives, all to help them understand that their job, as kids and future adults, is to be kind to all and create a joyful world for everyone.