So a few days ago, I went to pick up Big Boy from preschool. He’s one of four black children of 36 in the classroom. As I was leaving, one of the teachers told me that he and the other black children (she referred to them by name, not as “the other black kids”) had fun all day playing “duck, duck. goose” and other games and told me that they had become great friends since the summer began. I smiled and said something like, oh, that’s nice, and went on my way. Something about it bothered me right then, but I couldn’t really put my finger on it, and besides, I had to go.

After I thought about it that night, I decided I was going to ask her more about it the next day. So the next day, I asked her, “You know, you mentioned yesterday that Big Boy and [the other kids, I also referred to them by name] had become good friends, and it occurred to me that they are all the black kids in the room, and I wondered what you thought of that.” She seemed a bit put off, caught off guard, and then just began nodding her head vigorously, and said, “Yeah, I know, I know. It’s not uncommon for children at this age [ages 3-5] to gravitate towards those who look like them. We often notice that, you know, a Koren child will find out that another Korean child speaks Korean and then they become friends.” I thought it best not to point out that Black people speak English just like everyone else so I wasn’t quite sure how her example provided any elucidation on the situation, but then she paused and said, “But it’s not like they are self-segregating themselves, I mean, they play with the other children too.”

That caused me to pause. Really? The first thing you think to say to reassure me is to make sure I know that the black kids aren’t self-segregating? What about the white children who are also playing in same-race groups? Would it be a question as to whether they are self-segregating? So of course I had to say something to that effect. “Oh, that wasn’t my concern. It was really whether the other children weren’t playing with them so that they felt compelled to play together.” Then she got really flustered. “Well, no, I mean, while they can see that they are different colors, they don’t really ascribe any values to that. I mean, we might, cause we know what that means, color and all, but they don’t.”

I know it’s the sociologist in me, but I know this is a bullshit answer. And I was dissapointed that she gave this answer. This is a research-based preschool, run by Stanford’s psychology department, where people are doing work on race and race relations. Therefore they should know what Van Ausdale and Feagin noted in their 2001 book “The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism,” a book that does an ethnographic study of preschoolers:

The children we observed in the day care center are actually doing life. They are not going through some waiting period during which their main goals are to mirror quietly or aggressively the ways of adults, delaying actual socialization, understanding, and performance until they are older. The children we observed take various bits of racial and ethnic information from the surrounding world and then experiment with and use that information in their everyday interactions with other children and with adults. …Most of the young white children in our study are helping to build, or rebuild, a racialized society with their own hands with the materials learned from the racial order of the adult world surrounding them.

This is crucial to understand. If she understood the adult world that most of these children come from, she would be much less likely to assume that the black children were segregating themselves from the white children, rather than the other way around. Big Boy and Baby Girl are the only black children in our “courtyard,” the area of student housing where we live. His friends here are of all colors – his “best” friend is a white/Asian child whose white mother is a friend of mine. Now some of the white children, on the other hand, I would bet see only white people for the majority of their day as they go along with their parents. They learn, unlike Big Boy, that having exclusively white friends, or friends that look just like you, is the norm. Ahmir learns that mommy and daddy have black friends that look like them, but also Asian friends and white friends and Latino friends – there is really no majority that they are surrounded with every day. So to suggest that my black child is the one that may be self-segregating, instead of looking at the actions of the white children simply flies in the face of the well-established racial research.

But where I am struggling in this is balancing being a parent with being a social scientist. Sometimes I think that being immersed in issues of race and justice all the time may make me too sensitive (ohh, i hate that word) in that I will never find this racial utopia that I so want for my kids and that choosing my battles on the racial front is going to be very important if I want my kids to have a normal life. Doing research on the black middle class has shown me that the racial utopia that perhaps black folk thought they would find with increased education and money does not exist and perhaps the racial issues become even more complex and difficult to identify and manage. I desperately want to recommend that the teachers at this school read The First R, but as a parent, I also do not want to alienate them out of concern for my child. If it was just about me, I would do it – I’ve already had to tell one professor that his lack of showing women and people of color photographers was sexist and racist – but when it comes to my kids, I’m on uncharted territory and I don’t know what to do.

Any thoughts?