Recently I’ve been perusing books specifically about peace, tolerance, the environment, and values I’d like to teach my daughter about at the library. It’s not that generic kids’ books aren’t “good” enough—we still check those, out, too; in fact, right now she will check out anything about dragons or chickens—it’s that I’m really interested in making these concepts a part of our lives early on. What better way to do it than though the books we love to read so much?

I found several awesome reading lists online that I would highly recommend to anyone searching for topics like these. The Global Village School has some great recommendations, as well as Teaching for Change. My newest favorite site, the Institute for Humane Education, has loads of titles to choose from. It was from one of these lists (or perhaps from multiple ones) that I found the title Skin Again, by Bell Hooks.

Skin Again is an exceedingly simple book, which makes it brilliant. After all, it can be difficult to talk about race with a preschooler—especially when nearly everyone you know and everyone you are related to is white and there really isn’t much diversity in your town, let alone life, to begin with. Simple words are best to convey such complex concepts.

Simple pictures work, too. The book is also filled with these, scrawled in thick, graffiti-like paint; they are very curvy and child-friendly. The book itself reads like a long poem, sometimes rhyming and repeating several phrases, including, “The skin I’m in/ is just a covering./ It cannot tell my story.” It goes on to tell how to get to know someone, you have to get inside them “and open your heart way wide.” Hooks states that “the skin I’m in looks good to me. It will let you know one small way to trace my identity.” Then it repeats the lines about skin being merely a covering of what’s inside.

When questions come up, even ones as simple as, “Why is my skin a different color than his?” or even, “What color am I, Mommy?” as I’ve been asked, we find ourselves floundering in a sea of lengthy historical discussions and PC terms and complicated explanations when really all we need to do is say, “The skin we’re in comes in all different colors. It’s just a covering.” And knowing my daughter, she’d giggle something like that off and say, “To hold our bones in? To hold my heart in?” and go on and on.

The thing is, I have no idea what it’s like to not be white, and to have my race be such a prominent factor (that I’m actually aware of) in so many things. I know that I’m privileged, but I want my daughter to be aware of our privilege, too. I wasn’t aware of my own until I was in college, after all, and still probably don’t even understand the entirety of it. I want her to realize what inequality is, and to inspire her about how to face it, change it. 

I think what Hooks does is make it easier for us to talk to children about skin color and being different and being the same; I think kids are automatically born accepting everyone, ready to friend and love the world.