The Innocence of Childhood

A little boy who was the son of one of the staff members in the department where I taught for a semester at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi. His mother asked him if his playmate was black and he said no, he's brown. And when she told the story to everybody else around there, we all chockrel. Grownups like it and they laugh at it, but the fact that they laughed at it tells me that it's not really the right answer. So the next time he's asked that question, he will know that to ask whether his playmate is black is not to ask for a description, it's to ask for an classification.