EDUCATING CHILDREN ABOUT RACE

It is well known that children are inquisitive by nature. Since their developmental skills are formulated through observation and questioning, what they see and hear from their earliest experiences will develop into lifelong attitudes. Children ask questions about everything. Why this, why that, and such things as why is a cat a cat and not a dog. For the most part the answers are simple for adults to answer but sometimes they are not easy.



When my son was about 3 years of age we encountered a young man in a wheel chair. We were going into a store just as he was struggling to exit in the wheelchair and I helped to hold the door open. My son looked at me and asked, "Mom, why is that guy in that chair?" I tried to hush him up, but the young man said, "M'am, if you don't mind, I'd like to answer that question myself." The young man went on the explain to my son that he had been in an accident and his injuries prevented him from walking so he needed a wheel chair to get around. My son was fascinated, he understood and accepted the explanation, and from that point on he did not see people in wheelchairs as particularly different but accepted that they had had a different experience.



Years later, when my son was about 9 yrs. old, in 1978, we were in the car on Main St. at the corner of Ridge St. in Charlottesville, Va. and we heard screaming. I was driving and I looked out the window to my left and I saw a young black girl holding her shoulder and screaming. Blood was gushing from under her hand where she had placed it to stop the bleeding. There was a very young child with her maybe, 2 or 3 yrs old. I stopped the car in the middle of the road and turned off the engine, got out and ran to her to find out what had happened. Others in the car were afraid and told me to come back and just leave. They were afraid a crime had taken place and that we were in mortal danger since the area we were driving through was predominately black. My husband, disabled by MS, was mortified that I would just stop the car and run over to someone bleeding on the sidewalk, and leave everyone else in the car.



Since this was a time before aids awareness, I did not know what to do except to try to calm her , watch her crying child so it would not get in the street, and put pressure with my bare hands on the triangle shaped cut in her shoulder. ( I was a Girl Scout) The cut was close to her neck and it was deep. She was lying down on the sidewalk and when she calmed down she told me she had been with some friends, on what is now the Downtown Mall, and they had pushed her into one of the store windows and when she fell through it, it broke. She had some other minor cuts as well but nothing like the big one in her shoulder. A young black man came from the direction of Ridge St. and asked if he could help. I told him to get to a phone and call the rescue squad, and the police, and he did. By this time people had gathered to see what was happening. When the ambulance came the men told me they had it, she was going into shock, and I should leave. I remember looking at the blood on my hands and marveling how it was just blood, not black blood or white blood, just red blood that runs through all human veins. My son's only comment was a question, "Mom is she going to be alright?"



One of the adults commented that I could have been killed just running willy-nilly to help a person in 'that section of town' and that I should have had more consideration for my family than that. It is true that the car was stopped dead in the middle of the road, but the traffic was very light and seemed to move around our car just fine. I was concerned about what might have been said in my son's range of hearing while I was not there. We had members of our family who were then, and still are, racist. I can only hope , that by example, I was able to negate any racist mutterings to which he may have been exposed .