If I had a dollar for every time a parent boasted to me that his or her child was colorblind…well, let’s just say I’d be a lot better dressed than I am now.  With counting to ten and the alphabet, colors are among the first things that we teach our children.  We give them “What Doesn’t Belong” and “Spot the Difference” exercises, and they learn early on to categorize, grouping similar objects and discarding those that do not fit easily into a given criteria. 

So of course they notice who’s brown and who’s white, who’s blond or brunette, and other factors like hair, the shapes of lips, eyes and noses, disabilities and even smells.  Even people who are really colorblind can do that.  What matters here is what children do with these observations: Are they like the Chinese, who, as I toured Beijing’s Forbidden City, reached out to touch my skin and my hair?  Or are they like the five year-old classmate who told my daughter that no one wanted to play with her because she has brown skin?  I’ll take the curiosity of the Chinese, thank you very much.

How children react to the unfamiliar begins at home: those who are encouraged to be curious and open to the new can be shown that in the end, it shouldn’t matter what a person looks like.  Or, they can follow their parents’ lead in being closeminded, insensitive and often hurtful in their ignorance.  By necessity, diversity parents follow the first tact and raise their children accordingly; unfortunately, not everyone else feels the same need.