When I was 3 or 4 I saw a very stout black woman at the grocery store, and said "Look mom! A gorilla!"

Seriously. WHAT THE FUCK.

Honestly I just hadn't seen very many black people in my life, so I realized that she looked different. But dear god how mortifying for my poor mother.

Weirdly though, I remember being in my catechism class prior to getting my first communion when I was about 8. I remember it well, we went a couple evenings a week and I made lots of new friends and I remember the old lady who gave us worksheets about Jesus. Whatevs, right? I looked at pictures years later and I was literally the only white kid in a class of 15 kids, including the teacher. Everyone else was Mexican. The thought literally never occurred to me. In fact I don't think it ever would have unless I didn't hear my mom make a joke about me being the only white kid. I specifically remember it because it was like a weird lightbulb went off.

I never even realized they looked different or that we may have had cultural differences. I didn't connect the idea that some of these kids spoke Spanish with each other to the fact that half our mass had Spanish songs and a Spanish mass....I honestly thought it was normal. Like, some people speak Spanish, okay cool.

We lived in a small mountain town in New Mexico. Most of the parishoners were Mexican and the mass was very traditional....I never picked up on any of this.

So I think that kids recognize aesthetic differences if their exposure to those differences is not often, but don't make a connection to "looking different = race". The concept of race never occurred to me.

Likewise, I moved with my kids to the Middle East. I expected my older child to notice some differences in dress, in a benign way. Like, "look mommy that man is wearing a white dress" or "That lady is wearing a black hat" (hijab). Nope. Not even a "Why is that lady talking funny?" (referring to different English accents) Nope.

He's 5 and he's never once made a comment or asked me questions pertaining to physical differences like skin color or national dress. Honestly it's bizarre. Like, he knows what a Thobe is, he knows that the thobes in Oman look different than the ones in Qatar, but he's never been like, "why is that man wearing a dress?" lol. I expected him to take more notice. And honestly the only reason why I think he notices now is because they have culture lessons in class and explicitly pointed it out. He has still never asked about why some of his friends moms cover their hair or their faces.

So I guess it's all relative. Maybe if we moved at a different time in his development he would have noticed. Maybe I saw that black lady at a particularly fluid and impressionable time in my awareness, and that's why I never realized that I "looked different" or had any differences from the Mexican kids in my religious education class later on.