This is sort of a tangent, but I discovered last week that my six year-old has made some unusual assumptions about race & ethnicity in society. She goes to school with a number of kids from Africa, probably several in each grade (no concentration from a particular African nation -- their parents are professors and grad students from all over the continent). Her school is also over 50% African-American, and when we were talking about people who speak different languages, it came out that she assumed that *all* the Af-Am kids spoke "African" at home, just like the Mexican students speak Spanish and the Indian students speak Indian one of the Indian languages (edited: yes, I know there are many, and that they include English -- I was sort of writing that from my daughter's perspective). I know they went through the basics of African-American history in her class last year during Black History month, but the time scale obviously hadn't sunk in.

I had to explain that by most measures, the black kids in her class are *way* more American than our family is; my mom and grandparents only came here in the 1950's and I grew up with a lot of involvement their culture of origin. We're the foreigners here.

It's pretty clear that even though we live in a diverse community, my daughter has unfortunately picked up the message that "white" means American, and everyone else are exceptions. I'm going to have to look for more opportunities to challenge that.