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Talking about Race with Kids: Raising a White Child in Africa Doesn’t Make it Easier

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My wife and I stared at each other in horror as our then-three-year-old son stood on his chair and shouted this during a dinner we were hosting for a group of Ugandan and ex-patriate friends. The girl next door, a six-year-old from Zimbabwe, had been learning about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States at her school. As the older and wiser of the two, she often plays the role of “teacher” when they are together in the afternoons. Apparently, on this day, she had been teaching him about segregation, and he was sharing with us what he had learned. Can you say “awkward?” When we moved to Uganda in 2008, our son was just over two years old and seemed to have no awareness of skin color or, really, of the fact that Uganda is a different place from America at all. Even though there were very few mzungu (white) kids in his school, we never heard him talk about being different, or show any awareness of the fact that most people around us on a daily basis are black and that we aren’t. A

“White people over there! Black people over there!” My wife and I stared at each other in horror as our then-three-year-old son stood on his chair and shouted this during a dinner we were hosting for a group of Ugandan and ex-patriate friends. The girl next door, a six-year-old from Zimbabwe, had been learning about the Civil Rights Movement in the United States at her school. As the older and wiser of the two, she often plays the role of “teacher” when they are together in the afternoons. Apparently, on this day, she had been teaching him about segregation, and he was sharing with us what he

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