I can’t remember reading a single children’s book as a kid that explicitly talked about God’s beautiful design for diversity. I didn’t read books that had illustrations of kids that looked like me or that introduced helpful vocabulary for talking about things like culture, race and identity.
People just didn’t write about those things 30 years ago. I’m so glad that’s changed.
I’ve recently gotten to know Dorena Williamson, a wonderful woman, fellow pastor’s wife and now celebrated author of the book ColorFull: Celebrating the Colors God Gave Us. This is the first of her 3-Book series for B&H publishing, along with Thoughtful (also in print) and Gracefull (coming out in February 2019).
Be ColorFULL, not Colorblind
ColorFull is a sweet and endearing children’s book about how we should be “colorfull” as opposed to colorblind, and the teacher in the story, a wise African American grandmother with silvery curls, instructs the readers how.
Granny Mac takes her grandchildren, Imani and Christopher, along with their Caucasian friend, Kayla, on a nature walk. She shows them how everything from bubbles to bugs are made with unique, vibrant colors, and this is God’s design. He didn’t make the whole earth one color. That would be boring. Her lesson climaxes by then talking about all the different colors that God created people with. God gave us different skin colors on purpose, to show off His creativity, His power, His beautiful design, and we should celebrate this!
She says, “God must love color to have made all of earth’s people with such wonderful shades. That’s something to celebrate! We can celebrate all our differences – the color of our skin, the texture of our hair, the shape of our eyes, nose, and lips. Every single person is part of God’s grand design.”
Are You Chocolate, Caramel or Vanilla?
This is a fantastic introduction to race for our children. My favorite part is Dorena’s language for describing skin colors. She uses the terms chocolate, caramel and vanilla. I even like these terms better than words like olive or peach. Although all of these vocabulary words have something in common: they seek to convey a sweetness to race, an enjoyment, a beauty that is somehow missing in words like white or brown or black.
In the last pages of the book, the three children and their grandma are sitting around a tree, eating ice cream. They are still discussing skin colors and making clear connections to their ice cream flavors. One child even says, “Being colorFULL sure does taste good”, to which Granny Mac replies, “I agree. Being colorFULL is one of God’s sweetest gifts.”
The most beautiful part of this for me was, after I read this to my three-year-old son, he jumped up excitedly and told me, “Yeah! My skin is chocolate!” Dorena Williamson’s book has already given my son language to talk about his unique skin color as the son of an Indian woman and a Latino man, and it is language filled with pride and joy. His skin color is not a point of shame, but something to celebrate. And I’m grateful for the influence that Dorena’s book has played in this conception.
Talk About Skin Color with Your Child
I have one more concluding though, and it is this; ColorFull: Celebrating the Colors God Gave Us helps both parents and children get the conversation on race started, and that’s a good thing. If we can’t start small with topics of skin color, we will never make it to the bigger issues and problems surrounding people of different ethnicities.
Dorena talks about this herself for why she wrote the book in the first place. She says, “I think many of us avoid & struggle with race conversation because it’s uncomfortable. It stirs up painful images of a brokenness we think is in the past. It’s a challenge to our know-it-all-or-google-it society. So we shush our kids questions about other people’s race. We teach them to be “colorblind”. We leave their God-given curiosity open for ignorant and damaging views to fill. We tell ourselves we don’t see color.”
It’s time to start teaching our children about color. It’s time to start talking about color ourselves.
You don’t have to be an expert. You don’t need a Ph.D. You just need to see the beauty of color. You just need to let your kids know that they shouldn’t treat color with ignorance, apathy or condemnation. You just need to let your kids know that God made us with color; color is beautiful; and we should celebrate color, whether we are chocolate, caramel, vanilla or something else entirely.
Let’s start small and let God direct our steps. Thank you, Dorena, for this sweet lesson.
