My nephew recently posted on Facebook a picture and note about his biracial son, Cruz. The children in Cruz’s classroom represented different ethnicities. Yet this preschooler came home and said to his mother, “I wish I was white.”
When I read the post, my mind flew back to an incident that happened in the 1980s. My husband and I had a team of young adults on a mission trip in Jamaica. We were having dinner at the home of one of the members of the church where we were ministering. Our host was a banker and the family would have been considered an upper middle class family. Their two children spoke English very well, so it was fun to talk with them. Their little boy who was 4 or 5 sat on Art’s lap playing with his hands. I watched as he examined first Art’s hands and then his own. Finally he looked up and said, “I wish I was white!” My heart wrenched at how ingrained the concept that “white is superior” was in this child’s mind. Yet this was not the only time I encountered such prejudice.
Two African-American sisters worked at the facility where I was an administrator in the 1990s. The younger of the two was light skinned, the other was very dark skinned. More than once I heard the younger woman belittling her sister or making unkind remarks about her color. This was always troubling to me. Why should the color of one’s skin determine how one was treated?
Moving on into the years around the turn of the century, I was working with people from many different countries and ethnicities. As I prepared things to take along on a trip to an Asian country, my hostess asked if I could please bring something “to lighten my skin.” I didn’t even know such a thing existed. To me, there were a lot of people who went to tanning salons so their skin would have the rich tan that I knew she possessed naturally.
I also quickly learned while traveling in different areas of the world that lighter-skinned children had a better chance of getting an education than a darker-skinned child in the same family. Boys were also given preference over girls. So this concept that “white is better” is not indigenous to the US but can be found in many areas of the world.
I used to think that if children weren’t taught to regard the color of one’s skin as important, they would not make this distinction. My father who grew up in the 1920s often told of visiting a butcher shop with his mother in Detroit. A black mother came in with her son who was about the same age as my dad who was a preschooler. My dad had never seen a black child before and the two boys began chasing each other around the butcher block. Suddenly they turned and laughing hugged each other. It made no difference to either one at that moment what color skin each wore. They were far more interested in having fun. And that is the way it should be!
I certainly don’t have any answers, but meanwhile my heart bleeds for each child who feels inferior because of the color of his/her skin. Bill and Gloria Gaither wrote a song that says, “I’m a great big bundle of potentiality.” And I believe that. But until children are comfortable in their own skin, they will have difficulty developing their God given potential. I may not have any answers to the issues faced by a child like Cruz, but this I know—each child is precious in the sight of God and deserves to be treated as such.