I work at a children's museum and I
love the conversations with toddlers. They can be hilarious or incredibly
fascinating. But once in a while I hear something jarring and know I shouldn't
be surprised, but it's still alarming to hear such ideas from someone who's
barely more than a baby.
The other week I was in the arts
and crafts area, cutting out shapes for kids to draw on, when a talkative girl
sat beside me and began asking questions. She couldn't have been older than
three. She was wearing glasses, and I'm a complete sucker for bespectacled
toddlers. When I see oversized glasses on a tiny face, I pretty much overdose
on cuteness. She was very precocious for her age.
"Excuse me," she
prompted, "What do you do when everybody leaves? You and the other people who work here? Do you go home?"
"We close up the place, and
then we go home," I told her.
"What do you do to close it?" she asked.
"We clean up, and then we
leave, and then somebody turns off the lights and locks the doors before everyone leaves."
She wrinkled her tiny nose and
looked puzzled. "But if somebody locks the doors, don't they get stuck
inside?"
Amused, I explained that locks work
two ways; they can be used to keep others out. She picked up a brochure for the
museum and studied it with intense fascination.
"Who are the people in these
pictures?" she asked.
"They're people who have
visited the museum," I told her. "Pictures of people doing fun things
here."
Her eyes widened. "Real people? Ones who are still
alive?"
I laughed. "Of course they're
still alive! And yeah, they're real people. Kids just like you. You could even
be in one of those pictures!"
She seemed really excited about
that idea and pored over the photos, seeing if she could spot herself anywhere.
Then she returned to her art project, which she was carefully wrapping in tin
foil and taping together. It was open on one side like a pocket.
"Are you making a purse?"
I asked.
"No, I'm wrapping this up for
my mommy. But I don't think I can take it home, because it needs more
tape." She paused. "What do you do with the things that we leave
here? Do you keep it for us or do you throw it away?"
"I can keep that safe for you
until you come back, if you want to leave it here," I said.
She seemed pacified by that.
"I'm going to give it to my mommy," she said. "She'll have to
lock it up with all her special things. She locks up all her important stuff so
our maid can't find it, because the maid only speaks a little bit of English, so
mommy says she can't trust her. She says Spanish people steal things."
It shouldn't have come as a shock,
but it did. I struggled for the right response. I couldn't just let that one
go, but couldn't exactly say, "Well, your mommy's full of crap and she
sounds racist."
"A lot of Spanish people don't
steal things," I said to her. "And a lot of people who speak English
do." Like whole
cultures. "Anybody who speaks any language can steal things.
That's why they have a word for 'steal' in every language."
"Oh. Yeah, they do." She
shrugged and kept taping the tin foil. When it was time for her to go, she
asked me my name and I told her. Then she told me hers and said, "Thank
you for talking to me." I smiled and shook her hand.
I haven't been able to shake that
exchange. She is such a strikingly smart little girl, probably not even out of
diapers but asking about the structure of our program. I couldn't believe how
articulate she is for her age. But her mother is sowing the seeds of bigotry
in that brand new mind, and her daughter doesn't even know what it means. She
probably has no idea that "Spanish" has ethnic connotations, or a
concept of what race even is. But she's a white child with a maid, and her
mother is training her to distrust that woman. It's so strange to see where it
starts, and how many people never question it. How people grow up only
parroting what they're told and taking it for granted because someone older
than them said it was true.
I don't know if I responded the
right way. She could take the wrong conclusion from what I said. I wonder if
she'll continue to believe that all "Spanish" people steal, but
decide that everyone else does, too. Maybe I could have said more, or less. I
don't know. My hope lies in the possibility that she'll come to a more open way
of thinking--regardless of where she learns it. Maybe her mother will serve as
an example of what not to do.
She's so cute, so inquisitive, so
smart. So impressionable. Advanced in many ways, but severely held back in
another--and, at two or three years old, that's no fault of her own. But it
becomes somebody's responsibility once they're old enough to know better and choose not to know. Once they're echoing
those sentiments to their own children.
I hope she'll break the cycle. She
can, as long as she keeps asking questions.
