What if we were all the same?
That is the question I posed to a group of kids after teaching about the Tower of Babel, the event when God scattered the people of the earth.
While discussing skin color, one little girl told us, “Well, there’s only 3 colors of people: white, black and tan.”
I pulled out a piece of blank paper, held it next to my arm and asked her if my skin was white.
She and the other kids were wide-eyed with the discovery of the information that, no, my skin was not even close to white and neither was theirs.
Due to the fact that our society has normalized whiteness, the majority of people who look like me are never made aware of the necessity of talking about skin color.
Because of this, as adults, we may be embarrassed to talk about it because we never have, we may be scared to talk about it in case we offend someone, or we may just be oblivious to the entire issue.
To increase our appreciation of others and to build a better understanding of the variety of people in our world, we can use children’s books to open the racial conversation in our home.
