WELCOME TO THE 7TH ANNUAL
They’re not too young to talk about race.
The truth is that even infants are capable of seeing the physical differences that have been used to create racial categories (e.g., skin tone, eye shape). Infants who come from a place where their race is the majority, for instance, are likely to demonstrate a preference for these faces and become more adept at recognizing them, in part because they learn to scan them more thoroughly.
Balanced exposure to faces of the same and other races can combat this. Babies are not biased, but in our highly segregated world, the seeds for unconscious bias are planted as babies. One way to address this is by examining images of other-race faces with your infant.
The high-quality illustrations like those in the books featured in the BBCBF capture the real facial features of African descended people. When reading them to young children, point out the eyes, noses, and mouths of the black and brown characters to push back on the development of unconscious bias.
