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How We Become Racists
Nearly all of us begin life untouched by fictions perpetuated by racists (and other -ists). Allowing ourselves to believe them is our own failure.
Go to any playground in an ethnically diverse park, to the places children of single digit age explore the social worlds of their communities. Or, the local swimming pool. Or day care. Or classroom. You’ll more likely than not see the same thing play out, again and again: children making friends with one another over nothing more than whether an invitation to play is met with a “yes”.
Children are—as I recall being, for a very long time, once my brain had matured enough for me to revisit those days through the lens of adult awareness—uncorrupted by grown-ups’ concepts of labeled difference, let alone the hierarchies we believe to exist as an outcome of these things. Or, perhaps more accurately, the very young are unbothered by whatever aspect of difference they happen to notice, if any at all.
If what I’ve perpetually observed as a parent, and in a half-century spent in the world’s two most ethnically diverse cities—New York and Toronto—is true…
