What “I Don’t See Color” Actually Does to a Black Child

Every summer my dad would win the vacation argument and we would load up the station wagon and head to Colorado. I was young, probably kindergarten age or a little older, and I remember lying down in the back of that car when we passed groups of motorcycle riders on the highway. Large groups of them, loud and intimidating. I didn't want them to see me. A Black kid sitting in a car full of white people. I didn't have the history or the vocabulary to explain the fear, I just knew in my body that something about how we looked together could bring something bad down on all of us.

I was maybe five or six years old and I was already managing race in my head with no help from anyone around me.

Nobody ever said anything about what it meant to be the only Black person in that car, at that campground, in those small Colorado towns where we stopped for souvenirs. The stares came and went and nobody named them. I absorbed every single one of them alone.

When I hear white parents say "I don't see color" I think about that little boy lying flat in the back of that station wagon. Because what that phrase communicates to a Black child is close to what that silence communicated to me. The part of you that the world sees most clearly is the part we are choosing not to look at.

That is not protecting them. It is leaving them to carry alone something the rest of the world will never overlook.

What it actually communicates

I know the intention behind it. Parents who say it usually mean they love their child for who they are and not the color of their skin. That is a real and genuine love. But a Black child does not experience that phrase as love. They experience it as the conversation being closed before it started.

The world does not see your child without color. By the time your child is old enough to understand what is happening, they have already been clocked by teachers, classmates, and strangers in stores. Their Blackness registers before anything else does. And then they come home to a house where the person who loves them most acts like that part of their daily experience does not exist.

I used to stand in front of the mirror as a kid and cry. I knew, the way a child just knows things in their body before they have words for it, that the world was going to see my skin before it saw anything else about me. And the people in my house were not willing to see it at all. So I had no one to help me figure out what to do with that.

What your child actually needs to hear

Your child needs to hear that you see them fully, including the part that is Black. Being Black is not a problem you are trying to look past. It is something you are paying attention to, learning about, and making room for in your home. Out loud, more than once, they need to know that you understand they move through the world differently than you do, not as something you mention once and move on from but as something you are actively thinking about and working on.

Something as simple as this can open a door that changes things. "I see that you're Black. I know that means the world treats you differently than it treats me and I want to make sure you have what you need for that."

That is seeing your child for who they actually are, not looking past the part of them the world will never overlook.

If you've already said it

If you have said "I don't see color" before, that is not the end of the story. You can go back to your child and say you have been thinking about something and you want to say it differently. Then say it differently.

Kids are more forgiving of parents who keep learning than most parents realize. What they struggle with is a parent who stops trying.

Your child is still watching. There is still time to say something different.