MLK and Kids

Happy Martin Luther King Day!

It's a pretty normal day around here. The baby is pinching his big sister and pulling her hair (as normal), we had school earlier today (although I made reading a little easier for her), and dh is off at work. He doesn't have school but he's going to his friends after work to build a computer, so he might as well be going to school after work.

I tried to explain Martin Luther King day to my 5 year old, but she really wasn't interested. I don't even really think she knows the difference between black people and white people... she knows that people come in lots of different colors, something that she can see in her own family, but she doesn't really know too much about race.

So how do you explain that at one time some people had to drink out of different water fountains and sit at the back of the bus?

She's just starting to get slavery. She knows that a slave is "a person that works for another person" and that they don't get paid. We've discussed that the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, and have touched on slavery in the colonies, because we're studying colonial America this year. But a 5 year old doesn't really understand much more.

I guess that it's good that we live in a world where kids don't know a thing about racism. I'm sure that time will come eventually, but it hasn't yet and in some ways that is good.