Can a Four Year Old Child be Racist?

Nissim Black meets with R' Kanievsky (Life in Israel)

There is a Facebook Page created by Rabbi Yosef Bechhofer dedicated to fighting racism. It’s called Orthodox Jews Against Discrimination and Racism. I applaud Rabbi Bechhofer for setting up and maintaining a website that will hopefully dispel the notion that Orthodox Jews are inherently racist as well as fighting racism anywhere it raises its ugly head – whether in our own community or anywhere else. Unfortunately racism does exist in Orthodoxy just as it exists everywhere else. No society is completely free of the kind of ignorance that generates bigotry and racism.

A recent entry by an American Orthodox Jewish woman now living in Israel is an honest attempt to understand and deal with racism in one’s own very young children.  I have chosen to deal with here since I can give it a much fuller treatment. Here is what she said: 

I'm sharing this because I am guessing that other white members of the group may have had, or will have, similar parenting experiences. 

My kids - like most Orthodox Jewish kids - are growing up in an overwhelmingly white environment. (Unlike most Orthodox Jews, they do have relatives who are black, but we see them infrequently because we live on different continenents.) I try to find a balance of trying to get some diversity into their experience without engaging in tokenism - although often even tokenism isn't easily achievable in our not-so-diverse communi 

Anyway, one day a few years ago my four-year-old announced that she does not like people with dark skin (not the first time I have heard this from a pre-schooler). I needed to take a deep breath, not over-react, and respect her feelings (because "correcting" peoples' feelings usually backfires) while trying to nudge her in the right direction (isn't it wonderful that Hashem made people in so many different beautiful colours!).

I don't honestly remember everything I did and I'm sure some of it could have been improved. The main thing is that I didn't panic, even though I wanted to. (How can you say such a horrible racist thing?!)

Then, when she turned six and I told her she could choose just two girls from her gan to invite for a very small birthday celebration - one of them was the mizrahi girl whose "dark skin" she had specifically objected to the previous year. And when we visited the US, she wanted to spend as much time as she could with the black aunt and uncle she had been shy of on our previous visit and whom she now adores.

So something worked, b"H. Although the challenges of raising tolerant kids in a non-diverse (and not necessarily tolerant) environment will always remain.

I don't know if there are child psychologists in this group who can enlighten us about early-childhood racism. I don't know if anyone has better advice on how to address it. Opening it up for discussion. 

I am not a child psychologist. But I still believe that I can explain why a child whose parents are clearly not racist and abhor the very idea of it in others displayed some racism before she even understood what that word means.

The truth s that it was not racism that her child displayed. It was the fear of seeing something different than what she was used to seeing. Living in an all white society - white people are the only kind of human beings she ever saw from the moment she was born. A 4 year old child that experiences human beings as exclusively white and suddenly encounters a black person might think something terrible happened to them to make them dark skinned. There is a natural fear of seeing something outside the norm that that we can’t explain or understand. 

It has nothing to do with believing that there is anything inherently wrong by virtue of one’s race. It s just that seeing something you are not used to seeing is so different that it might seem threatening to a child. What might be going through the mind of a child that first encounters a black individual are questions like the following: Why are they black? What happened to them to change their color from white to black? What did they do to deserve that? Why did God make them black? They look scary!

The mother of that four year old did nothing wrong and everything right. By living the ideals of abhorring and fighting racism her daughter eventually picked up those values for herself so that by age six she not only realized that black people are not only human beings not to be feared but to seek them out for friendship.

This entire episode raises the possibility that some of the racism that exists among any of us might originate from the kind early childhood fear of difference and the unknown experienced by that four year old

That some of us do not eventually understand what that young girl eventually did is probably the result of that fear being reinforced by parents that might be racist themselves. Even if they don’t realize it. There are subtle cues that a parent might exhibit to a child that will instill in them a racist attitude – long after that fear of the unknown subsides.  

Sometimes parental cues are not so subtle – and instead very overt. I wish I could say otherwise but I have witnessed more than once racist comments from some Orthodox Jews that are otherwise very fine people. Not that any of them would harm another human being for no reason. Nor would they ever say anything to a black person that would be racist. But in private, I have heard such comments being made way too often.

God created all of humankind in His image. And all humankind deserves to be treated with the dignity and respect God’s creations deserve. But too many of us do not live this creed. Which might help to explain a curious comment made to Nissim Black by R’ Chaim Kanievsky. Nissim Black is a Ger Tzaedk  - a righteous convert to Judaism. Rafi Goldmeier who features a picture Nissim Black's visit to R' Kaneivesky on his blog Lifein Israel made the following comment:

I am not quite sure what it means, but Rav Chaim Kanievsky told Nissim Black that Being "Black" is your Mayla (Virtue) not a Chesaron (Lacking). 

What I think R’ Kanievsky might have meant is that Mr. Black’s race is his virtue in the sense that he is an example that proves to the world that race is absolutely meaningless when it comes to Judaism. And that he is living proof of that. Nissim Black exemplifies what is truly valuable in life. Which is one’s relationship with God and with man.  As a black man who has chosen Judaism as the best way to do that makes him uniquely qualified to make that statement. I believe that R’ Kanievsky emphasized that being black is not a deficiency in order to both acknowledge that racism exists in our world and that his very being is the complete repudiation of it.