Wake up call.

Our kids "get it". They notice everything, and they understand far more than they let on.

Let me back up for a moment.

Jon and I work really, really hard to construct a life for our family that concretely illustrates our firm commitment to respect for diversity and affirmation of the value of all others. We have made conscious choices to live in a diverse neighborhood, frequent businesses owned by people from around the world, read books, watch movies, and attend cultural celebrations from many different nations. I honestly don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that our commitment to respectful multiculturalism is at the forefront of nearly every decision we make.

We've been engaging in this immersion exercise for nearly a month now, and yet the most perspective altering experience came tonight: the first night we strayed away from immersion.

It had been a long day, and I needed to not cook. We all agreed that we wanted pizza, so we decided to forego the immersion for the night and try a place we'd recently heard about. It was in a nearby suburb, and the pizza had gotten rave reviews, so we figured, why not?

As we were eating, Izzie suddenly looked around and asked "why are all the adults peach and all the kids brown?"

I looked around and sure enough, everyone in the restaurant was white aside from our kids. I asked Izzie how she felt about that, and she responded "sad". We then began to talk about the different places we go (school, the doctor's office, our health club, the park, other restaurants, etc.) and who is at each of those places.

I'm amazed by the twins' perceptions of people. I learned that they believe that everyone who isn't obviously "brown" is "peach" (i.e. they described their friends who are both Asian and Latino as "peach"), but they have begun to differentiate between shades of brown (some people are "dark brown" while others are "light brown"). Fortunately, they have not yet begun to ascribe either positive or negative value to any skin shade.

They also notice who's in which roles. For example, they understand that at the local Ethiopian restaurant "the cookers are brown and the eaters are brown and peach", but at the pizza place, both the "cookers" and the "eaters" were "peach".

I'm still trying to process this conversation and understand what these experiences might mean in the context of an almost four-year-old mind. On the one hand, perhaps it's a good thing that Izzie called us out on taking them to an "all white" place. It felt to me like it was an out-of-the-ordinary experience for our family to be in such otherwise homogeneous surroundings. And yet while I was feeling relatively comfortable (I say relatively because it was a fairly strange place), my children obviously were not. (I should definitely specify that everyone was extremely friendly to our family and I certainly did not feel any "racial tension" which I think I'm generally fairly good about sensing...)

So white privilege rears its ugly head. I am able to feel comfortable in nearly any place of business that I enter. My children are not. I'm not sure to what extent they can learn to feel comfortable in homogeneous settings where they are the "other", or to what extent they even "should".