How to Talk to Young Children About Racism Without Being Racist (Part 3)
A detailed overview of racism for adults and how to explain it to young children — and why 23andme is racist.
Some feel we shouldn’t look into or talk about human differences because doing so results in discrimination.
I think there’s nothing wrong with recognising, looking into, or talking about human differences. However, how we look into them, talk about them, and use the information we find, determines whether we discriminate against each other or not.
Unfortunately, instead of talking about how our physical differences result from our bodies adapting to the climate for survival and mating, they’ve been incorrectly used for classification, dehumanisation, and power, which has resulted in discrimination (racism).
Therefore, this article looks at the concept of racism: what it is, how it came about, why it was created, why it persists, and how to explain it to young children.
The article is the final part of a three-part series with information and suggestions that help you have an honest conversation with young children (below the age of six) about racism without being racist, divisive, dismissive, or instilling fear or shame.
Unlike previous articles, this article requires more time to read and process. How much of this information you share with children and when is up to you.
But before you continue, I’d recommend you first read parts one and two of the series (if you haven’t already).
1. What is ‘Race’?
Audrey Smedley defines ‘race’ as “the idea that the human species is divided into distinct groups [based on] inherited physical and behavioral differences” that other ‘races’ don’t have.
According to ‘race theories,’ the world’s population exists as, and can be neatly divided into, five or so ‘pure races’ (subspecies), whose differences exist because of ‘race.’
In his book, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, professor David Livingstone Smith says most humans see ‘race’ as being “obviously” real and natural because they look at human differences through the lens of ‘race.’
However, Livingstone argues that ‘races’ are mainly random and meaningless social divisions that don’t objectively exist. For example, skin colour differences exist, but the genetic and geographic boundaries between those of different skin colours don’t.
If anything, research shows that humans are 99% to 99.99% genetically identical.
Despite this, ‘race’ has been used to refer to subspecies. Livingstone defines a subspecies as a “variant within a species that’s on its way to becoming a separate species.”
Livingston says subspecies occur when members of a species are geographically isolated. In addition, for an animal to be considered a subspecies, there has to be a certain level of genetic difference, which humans don’t have.
According to the series Race: The Power of An Illusion, “modern humans — all of us — emerged in Africa about 150,000 to 200,000 years ago. Bands of humans began migrating out of Africa only about 70,000 years ago. As we spread across the globe, populations continually bumped into one another and mixed their mates and genes. As a species, we’re simply too young and too intermixed to have evolved into separate races or subspecies.”
Moreover, if ‘races’ were indeed subspecies, people of different ‘races’ wouldn’t be able to have children — or at least fertile and healthy ones.
Livingstone also says many people think there’s something special about racial categories, which is why humans need to be divided by them. However, there are many ways to group people by genetic similarity, and there’s no reason to group them into the current racial categories.
Many also believe you can use ‘race’ to trace one’s origin or ancestry, hence the popularity of home-ancestry testing kits such as 23andme, Ancestry, and Family Tree DNA.
However, Vivian Chou says there’s too much variation between people and populations. Chou goes on to say that although human populations “roughly cluster into geographical regions” (based on aggregates), there’s more variation within a region and too little variation between regions to form distinct ‘races.’ As a result, there’s no “uniform identity.”
Chou also says if separate ‘races’ or ethnicities existed, one group would have “trademark alleles and other genetic features” that other groups don’t have.
According to Chou, “alleles are the different ‘flavors’ of a gene. For instance, all humans have the same genes that code for hair,” but different alleles determine hair colour and texture.
However, a 2002 Stanford study showed “only 7.4% of over 4000 alleles were specific to one geographical region. Furthermore, even when region-specific alleles did appear, they only occurred in about 1% of the people from that region — hardly enough to be any kind of trademark. Thus, there is no evidence that the groups we commonly call “races” have distinct, unifying genetic identities. In fact, there is ample variation within races.”
2. What is Racism?
According to Smedley, racism is “the belief that humans may be divided into separate and exclusive biological entities called ‘races’; that there is a causal link between inherited physical traits and traits of personality, intellect, morality, and other cultural and behavioral features; and that some races are innately superior to others.”
Therefore, anyone who believes in and practices racism is racist, regardless of racialisation, power, position in the racial hierarchy, or bigotry (or lack thereof).
Moreover, a person doesn’t need to adhere to all aspects of Smedley’s definition of racism to be racist.
Furthermore, everyone is socialised into racism, and as far as I know, there’s no ‘racist’ gene. Therefore, people can’t be born racist.
Racism is, first and foremost, the belief that humans can be divided into separate and exclusive biological ‘races,’ which give them the same inherited physical, behavioural, moral, intellectual, and cultural traits and experiences.
Accepting and adhering to this belief results in racist policies, social division, and discrimination. Doing so also allows for the unequal distribution of resources and privileges within the social system, causing social, political, and economic inequality.
3. A Short History of Racialisation
Racism in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America
Racism has existed in some form or another throughout history.
For example, Michael James and Adam Burgos say that during the Spanish Inquisition, Christianity — proven through lineage or “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre) — was used in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) to verify which Jewish and Muslim converts (conversos) were genuinely Christian.
According to Jeffrey Gorsky, conversos were very wealthy, which made many ‘old Christians’ unhappy. Requiring Conversos to have ‘pure blood’ or a Christian lineage of up to four generations became a tool for people to murder them, socioeconomically and politically exclude them, and steal their belongings.
James and Burgos say the Iberian Peninsula was also the first European region to enslave Africans. Gorsky says the idea of ‘pure blood’ also extended to Africans, and Iberians imported it to their colonies in Latin America. There, blood purity meant the absence of ‘black’ (African) and Jewish blood. Those in the colonies used the concept to justify racial slavery and socioeconomic discrimination.
Racism in the United States of America and Beyond
According to Smedley, the story of how racism became part of our culture involves Jamestown, Virginia, USA, “the first successful colony.”
Smedley says Jamestown was established in 1607 by “a crude, rough, and turbulent community of mostly young Englishmen” who had come to Virginia to get rich and go back home.
These young Englishmen intended to get rich by following in the Iberians’ footsteps, enslaving people, and forcing them to mine gold and silver.
However, this plan didn’t work as many Native Americans escaped or died from European diseases, and gold and silver didn’t exist — but tobacco did.
However, tobacco needed a lot of hard work to grow and process, which many colonisers couldn’t or wouldn’t do.
As a solution, they imported indentured servants (primarily from England) who were poor, under-clothed, underfed, and under-housed.
In addition, servants could be bought and sold. Their death toll was high, and colonialists severely punished them for petty crimes. Smedley argues that there was no difference between servitude and slavery, but servitude later became a model for slavery.
If the servants survived four to seven years of servitude, colonial masters freed them, and they could buy land and servants and pursue their economic interests. However, many didn’t survive servitude since many colonial masters treated servants as enslaved people and abused them — with some masters owning them for life.
In 1619, the first Africans with Spanish and Portuguese names arrived in Virginia. They were also familiar with Europe. However, contrary to popular belief, according to Smedley, they weren’t initially or formally sold in Virginia as enslaved people but as indentured servants. The English also weren’t automatically prejudiced against them based on skin colour.
Smedley says that “true slavery” didn’t exist in the early decades of the English North American colonies, as people were more familiar with servitude, which barely differed from slavery.
Once African servants paid off their debts and became freedmen, they could also buy property, servants (including European servants), and livestock, marry, and become planters. They were also full members of society, and there was no stigma.
Moreover, servants of different nationalities befriended each other, married each other, and revolted against their masters together.
However, by the mid-century, a few of the earliest colonial rulers had taken most of the fertile land to grow tobacco, making them wealthy. As a result, there were no longer enough resources for newly freedmen, who grew dissatisfied with their circumstances, corruption, and ill-treatment by colonial rulers, causing them to rebel.
In the last decades of the 17th century, servants were becoming more rebellious, and English labour was declining. Colonial rulers imposed racial slavery to control the situation. Initially, colonial rulers didn’t segregate people based on skin color but religion (or lack thereof).
After that, enslaved people were bought directly from Africa as part of the transatlantic slave trade. Colonial rulers enforced permanent slavery on them, as they considered them ‘heathens’ who weren’t under British law that protected English servants.
Colonisers preferred Africans for slavery because they were skilled, immune to European diseases, and lived longer. Moreover, they produced more tobacco than Europeans and Native Americans, they worked well in groups, respected authority, had no allies, were in a foreign land, and were initially thought to be more civilised than the Irish, who were considered highly rebellious.
By enforcing racial slavery, colonisers realised that they could use people’s physical differences to rank and control the population, ensure cheap and obedient labour through permanent slavery, and permanently manage and divide resources.
Racial slavery socioeconomically excluded ‘non-white people,’ creating new opportunities for racialised white freedmen. Colonial rulers also passed laws that gave poor, racialised white people resources and social privileges, which distanced them from the concerns of lower-ranking ‘races’ and created common interests between them and their wealthy masters.
According to Gorsky, Virginian colonisers took the concept of racial slavery (and the racial categories ‘negro’ and ‘mulatto’) from Iberian colonies in Latin America. Smedley says the term ‘white’ first appeared in a law passed in 1691 prohibiting ‘interracial’ marriage.
It was only later that society was divided into homogenous groups based on origin and skin colour. Those racialised as white were made superior and were allowed to own land and accumulate wealth. People racialised as black were the most inferior and forced into permanent slavery.
From the early 18th century, colonial rulers created stereotypes of Africans as savages to justify their enslavement. Native Americans were also considered savages when they fought against the English stealing their lands, but that changed in the late 18th century, however, the Irish are still considered savages.
Colonial rulers exaggerated human diferences and even lied that those racialised as black had black blood and brains, were subhuman (property), dangerous, child-like, and inferior.
These stereotypes were legalised, institutionalised into a ‘racial worldview’, backed by credible and influential institutions, and spread globally. The racial worldview was then used to determine who gets access to privilege, power, status, and wealth and who doesn’t.
‘Race Science’
‘Race science’ stemmed from a debate between European scholars who argued whether different ‘races’ had a common ancestor and were the same human species (monogenesis) or whether they had different ancestors and were distinct species (polygenesis).
Polygenists believed that different ‘races’ were distinct species and that those racialised as black were inferior in every way to those racialised as white.
Charles Darwin didn’t seem to support polygenist theories. Instead, he observed that couples of different ‘races’ birthed fertile children and that people of different ‘races’ seem to be mentally similar.
Although Darwin squashed the idea of polygeny, he didn’t squash the idea of ‘race.’ Soon, people were using his theory of natural selection to justify ‘race’ and called it eugenics. Eugenics furthered ‘race purity’ and gender and social inequality.
In the 1900s, Ashley Montagu argued that concepts of ‘race’ grouped people based on noticeable differences instead of genetics, which is better at detecting biological changes. As a result, Montagu said the traits used to determine ‘race’ were gross aggregates of various genetic changes between groups.
Montagu also argued that since genes can evolve through the mixture and mutation of the same genes over generations, traits associated with ‘race’ can’t result from distinct genetic descent.
For example, someone might have curly hair and dark skin because of genetic mixture (from mating), while someone else might have the same traits due to mutation.
Montagu’s work led to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) rejecting the biological foundation of ‘race’ in the 1950s.
4. Why Racism Persists
From the beginning, those in power and those seeking power have used racism as a tool for social, economic, and political control and gain.
They’ve used racism to make people who share certain traits seem as though they have a genetic element that makes them the same, making it easy to ‘legitimately’ control, divide, dehumanise, discriminate against, and exclude them for socioeconomic and political gain.
Yet, despite this, many still adhere to and knowingly or unknowingly protect racism.
People do so by believing in ‘race,’ treating ‘race’ as real and natural, identifying as a ‘race,’ creating a sense of community around ‘race,’ seeing and categorising others using ‘race,’ attempting to define and understand themselves and others through ‘race,’ and interacting with each other through ‘race.’
No matter how much evidence is presented refuting ‘race,’ many still uphold it as a crucial part of their identity. It’s difficult not to do so, especially when it’s prized and imposed on them by institutions and society.
Some think ‘race’ is crucial because it creates and represents a collective culture. However, there’s too much cultural diversity within racial groups for a uniform culture to exist.
Of course, there might be some common cultural aspects that people racialised the same have, but there aren’t enough to have a uniform culture.
For example, what’s globally considered ‘black culture’ tends to be some of the most popular elements of ‘black American culture,’ which doesn’t give a complete or representative picture of all cultural aspects of those racialised as black inside and outside of the U.S. The same is true of Africa and any other country with racialised black people.
Others see ‘race’ as representing shared history and experiences that make them a community. However, people of the same ‘race’ don’t have the same history and experiences, even though they might have the same legal and sociopolitical restraints, work in the same place, experience the same traumatic event/s, and live in the same area.
The concept of intersectionality by Patricia Hill Collins and Valerie Chepp argues that constructs of gender, ‘race,’ class, etc., can’t be viewed and understood in isolation.
Depending on how these factors intersect, they can “produce unequal material realities and distinctive experiences for individuals and groups positioned within them.”
As a result, “individuals and groups can simultaneously experience privilege and disadvantage” depending on their social position and the intersection of identities.
For example, people might discriminate against someone because they’re racialised as black. However, the person might also be rich and heterosexual, which gives them an advantage. As a result, this person’s experience and history differ from someone of the same ‘race’ who might be poor and gay.
Moreover, ‘race’ might give someone who’s racialised as white a social advantage. However, if they’re also poor and uneducated, this creates a social disadvantage.
You can also apply the theory to slavery. The experience of a ‘field slave’ differed from that of a ‘house slave,’ even though both were enslaved. The freedmen also had different experiences from the enslaved. In addition, the experience of a light-skinned ‘black’ person differs from that of a dark-skinned one.
People also respond to similar stimuli and situations in different ways that shape their history and experiences.
Ultimately, people hold onto racism because they don’t know better, don’t want to know or do better, or they’re afraid of the horrifying lies and stereotypes they’ve been taught to associate with people of a certain ‘race.’
Others are afraid because of the trauma and discrimination they’ve faced from others. Many are scared of losing their privileges, history, ‘identities,’ and power.
However, the elite are the only ones who truly benefit and gain power from people upholding and protecting racism, because a divided society is easy to control and loot.
5. How To Explain Racism to Children
You can explain the concept of racism to children by saying that everyone on earth is part of one family, called humans. Although we look and act differently from each other, we’re all part of the same human family, and our bodies work the same. So people don’t have to look or act alike to be part of the same family.
Everyone who lived a long, long, long, long time ago lived in a place called Africa. Once people left Africa, their skin colour, eyes, hair, lips, and noses changed so they can live in new places without getting sick. While travelling to different places, people also met people from Africa in other areas and had babies with them. Everyone alive now is the baby of the people who lived in Africa long, long, long ago.
But some people believe we’re not one family because we look different. They think that all people who have similar eyes, hair, skin colour, lips, and noses are one family called a ‘race,’ and that the bodies of people from the same family or ‘race’ work differently from those that aren’t, which isn’t true. Our bodies work the same on the inside.
A long time ago, a few light-skinned men with straight hair lied to people and told them that lighter-skinned people with straight hair, which they called ‘white’ or European, were better than people with dark skin and curly hair, which they called ‘black’ or African. This isn’t true.
There are also no ‘black’ or ‘white’ people because we’re all the same family, and no one has black or white skin. These men also said that all people with similar coloured skin, eyes, hair, and noses speak and act the same, which also isn’t true.
These men lied because they wanted to do not so nice things to people that don’t look like them, and they lied about them so that other people don’t like them and think they’re from a different family, to do things that aren’t nice to them.
But many people still believe the lies these men told them because they don’t know better or are scared, which is why they’re mean to or are afraid of people with dark skin and curly hair and those that don’t look like them. They’re also mean to other people who don’t look like them because they think they’re bad people. Many people still believe that we’re not part of the same family because we look different from each other.
But we know that people came to look the way they do because their bodies changed to help them stay strong and healthy in the places they moved to after they left Africa. It’s also because different-looking people who moved to different places after they left Africa had babies with each other. So although we look different on the outside, our bodies work the same on the inside, and we’re all one big family.
