A six-year-old told me that he doesn’t like Scooby Doo cartoons because “everyone is white except Scooby, and he’s a dog.” A fourteen-year-old said that he notices the way that old women look at him, the way they change where they carry their purse when he walks by. One day, after the topic of race had become a normal part of our conversations, an eleven-year-old told me about overhearing his teachers’ comments about his younger brother’s hair—how much tidier it would look if his afro was shorter. He told me how it made him feel.
