Diversity Today: Can I raise a color blind child?

The other night my beautiful child sat in my lap singing a favorite Sunday School song, "Jesus Loves the Little Children" as I read from a children's Bible picture book. Her tiny eyebrows furrowed as she sang, "Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight." Looking at the colorful and diverse images of children dancing around Jesus, she could not pinpoint whether the song referred to the children's clothing or hair color. 

Even a three-year old knows that our skin color designations are nonsense.


At first she pointed to a child with a red shirt as she sang "Red and yellow...", but seeing that no one wore a black shirt, she quickly decided that the colors must refer to hair color. Confidently she pointed to a child with red hair, a colorful little boy with yellow hair, and a young girl with black hair.

American Diversity

In her preschool mind if "red and yellow, black and white" isn't referring to hair color, then what is it referring to?

I didn't bother to correct her, happy to see that at least for now, she could keep her preschool logic on race and color limited to hair. 

Watching my child of Cuban-Dominican-Danish-British-Kentucky-French heritage play with other children with equally diverse histories each day, I am confident that at the least, her generation will see our squabbling over race, ethnicity, and language the same way that we gawk at the idea of "white only" water fountains and laws against interracial marriage. 

Gen X'ers created this diverse young generation, choosing to love outside our cultural boxes. And these beautiful children will grow up outside the infantile designations created by their confused ancestors. 

And maybe someday "red and yellow, black and white" will only refer to colors in a child's crayon box.

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