December 7, 2012

Colorblind

Something interesting happened last night. My son drew a picture of he and I holding hands. Before you assume that I've gone totally off the cliff with the whole "my kid is awesome and everyone should know all about everything he does" mentality so many Moms understandably have, this pictures was different. 

He had colored in our skin...a lovely shade of yellow. It was a first-usually we're stick people or just not colored in. I asked him if he had used the yellow crayon because of what our skin looks like and he replied with a "yeah" that sounded more like a "duh." It lead to an interesting conversation today about the different people we know and why they look the way they do. 

Being a white family living in an area that is very white can make it interesting to have discussions like this one but I'm glad we did. Maybe it's because I'm white and haven't faced the sting of racial prejudice but I don't understand when people say we need to be colorblind-don't misunderstand, I would hope to never judge someone good or bad based on the color of their skin but I also don't want to ignore the obvious beauty in our diversity. 

We ended up talking about different skin colors, eyes and hair but I think my son summed it up best when he said "It's cool that God made people different colors because I have different color crayons and I like to use lots of colors in my pictures." I think God had the same idea little man.

5 comments:

Michelle Clark (AKA Miss Banana Pants) said...

This is awesome. I was raised with a VERY racist father and it's always been my dream to raise my children who are not "colorblind" but that see the beauty in our differences. Its precious to see that God doesn't create racist beings. . .they are modeled that way. It's our privelege as parents to help them see how our diversity makes us special. I'm posting this on my blog page. :) Hope you don't care.

Julie F. said...

Kids are always teaching us new ways to look at the world... So cute and very true!

Jen said...

This is awesome! :)

Milwife Mama of One said...

Well-said!

Amy said...

best response ever!