What Color Do We Paint the Bad Guys?

It was a letter that stopped me in my tracks, a plea for help that left me feeling helpless.

She was trying to recover from one of those child-induced catastrophes they don’t warn you about in parenting books . . . the kind of social faux pas she was embarrassed to discuss with co-workers or friends for fear it might reflect badly on her parenting skills and brand her as a closet racist as well.

Her family is white and middle class, living in a Los Angeles neighborhood with a vibrant ethnic mix.

“We are firm believers in tolerance and diversity,” she wrote. “We’ve had guests in our home of all races and ethnic groups and we have tried to shield our children from learning racism and bigotry.”

Yet those credentials counted for little when her 4-year-old son innocently raised the specter of bigotry and race.

A group of preschoolers, accompanied by their parents, were being coached on safety issues. “Can someone tell me, who is a stranger?” the teacher asked.

“And my son, to my great surprise and consternation, popped up and answered, ‘A black guy!’ ” she said. “The silence from the other parents--all African American--was deafening.”

She immediately apologized. “I swear he didn’t learn this from us,” she told the group. “We’ve never spoken like that in our home.” But even to her ears, the protest “sounded tinny and false.”

She gently chastised her son--”We don’t talk that way,” she said--and the class went on. Later, she asked: “Where did you get the idea that strangers are black people?”

It’s on TV, he told her nonchalantly, citing a cartoon show that draws strangers with black faces. And she noticed, as he ran off to play, that the villains among his toy action figures all wore or were decorated in black.

“My strong sense is that my son was referring to the color black, not to a particular race,” she told me. “But I don’t have a legitimate way to explain that to the other parents who I fear were offended . . . and who may now feel that we have taught our son racism.

“How can I explain that we have not?”

*

I wish I had an answer for her . . . and I wish the issue was as straightforward as her question implies--that our children learn only what we teach them.

I remember slamming into the hard wall of that reality myself years ago, when my oldest daughter, then 4, burst into tears at the sight of a Latino man in the cereal aisle of our local grocery store.

“A bad man!” she cried, leaning forward in the grocery cart seat to clutch my shoulder and bury her face in my chest. “Hold me. I’m scared.”

The young man averted his eyes in shame. “I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I don’t know what she means. . . .” He scurried past us, his grocery cart loaded with milk, diapers, lunch meat, cheese . . . just like mine.

He had done nothing more than smile at my daughter. I could not imagine--and she could not explain--what had happened to provoke such pain.

It took me weeks to realize that our baby-sitter had driven my daughter home from preschool each day past a day-laborers’ site and had referred to the men seeking work as “illegals.”

To my young daughter, an “illegal” would be a lawbreaker, a criminal . . . very scary and very bad. And this man--brown-skinned, work boots, grubby jeans--must certainly be one of them.

I had much explaining to do. How to convey to a 4-year-old the conventions of race and class, the concepts of prejudice and inequality?

I realized then that my daughter’s worldview ultimately would be shaped by more than my views and my example. That the influence of our society would be more subtle, and more pervasive, than I could ever have imagined; that no matter how much tolerance I modeled, the world would send her its own messages, uncensored.

*

We tend to tiptoe around the issue of race. In our daily comings and goings, we try hard not to give, or to take, offense. We measure our words, weigh our thoughts, plumb our consciences for evidence of bigotry or prejudice. Or we avoid the subject altogether.

I know some of you don’t like to think about race. Whenever my column broaches the subject, I get a flurry of letters and e-mails such as: “Just what do you hope to accomplish? It just divides us more, this constantly harping on race. Our country has come so far in terms of race relations. . . .”

But I find it hard to think of anything else, as we approach the one national holiday that allows us, encourages us even, to wander through the emotional minefield of race.

Yes, we have come a long way, as individuals and as a nation. We have opened our minds and our hearts in ways my parents’ generation could only have imagined. We have made great strides toward embracing the kind of equality of which Martin Luther King Jr. could only dream.

But we still have a very long way to go. It is not easy, his “content of their character” standard. How much simpler to rely on “the color of their skin”. . . .

The black person is a stranger, the Mexican man is illegal . . . We may not even realize how ignorance and prejudice still shape our collective perspective until we hear such claims from the mouths of babes.

Then, we can recoil in shame, retreat in embarrassment . . . or we can reflect on what we need to do to build the bridges our children must cross to get to that nation at the core of King’s dream.

“I have always tended to keep to myself,” the troubled mother wrote to me. “But maybe this event provides me with an opportunity, a chance to do some personal bridge-building . . . to reach out to my neighbors, my fellow parents, beyond small talk and superficial greetings.”

*

Sandy Banks’ column is published on Sundays and Tuesdays. Her e-mail address is sandy.banks@latimes.com.