Every year in elementary school, the teachers used to have us draw self-portraits. In kindergarten I drew myself with a brown crayon, but with each passing year the crayons I picked got lighter and lighter. So did my self-portraits. By fifth grade, instead of a brown-skinned Latin girl whose mother was from Uruguay, I was whitewashing myself to look the way I wished others would see me. For kids, fitting in is everything. My elementary school was mostly white. There were only two or three other kids in my class with coloring like mine, so we all stuck out. I remember feeling hurt and embarrassed when a classmate on the playground called me “the girl with the brown face.” I started sitting in the shade more, so I wouldn’t get darker than I already was.

Growing up is hard enough to begin with. Nobody should have to juggle problems like internalized racism, negative self-image, and even self-hatred on top of the usual struggles that come with being a child or a teenager. Yet plenty of kids grow up absorbing subtle (and not-so-subtle) messages that depict darker skin and non-white ethnicity as “other,” or just plain bad. How does this happen, and what can we do about it?

Studies have demonstrated repeatedly that children start perceiving racial differences starting at a very young age. There’s nothing wrong with that. The idea of being “colorblind” doesn’t actually make a lot of sense; human beings just aren’t wired that way. Young children and even babies notice when somebody looks different from the people they are used to seeing, and they tend to feel more comfortable with people who look familiar.

As we try to make sense of the world, we categorize things and people. Stereotyping is a common human response to taking in a lot of information. The problem arises when we begin stereotyping people in negative ways. That is, when we attach to the idea that some kinds of people are superior to others, and that we can spot them by their skin color and other racial traits.

In India, for instance, lighter skin is often perceived as beautiful while darker skin is considered ugly. Whether this is because dark skin is associated with poor people who must work outdoors while rich people stay inside, or because Western beauty standards are being aggressively exported around the world, the result is the same: nobody wants to be dark. The same thing happens in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region. Every year, people around the world spend billions of dollars on cosmetics, drugs and procedures to lighten their skin.

There are efforts to combat this trend, similar to the way Dove’s famous “Real Beauty” campaign addressed body image issues. One is called “Dark is Divine,” founded by a young Pakistani woman – but it’s an uphill battle. Respected child psychologist and University of Chicago professor Margaret Beale Spencer, summarized a study demonstrating bias against dark skin among young children in the United States: “We are still living in a society where dark things are devalued and white things are valued.”

In “Strivings of the Negro People,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about how African Americans had to view themselves through their own eyes, and simultaneously through the eyes of the dominant white culture around them. He called this “double consciousness.” Looking in the mirror can be painful for kids (and adults) whose skin color, body size, or gender expression don’t match the cultural ideal. They see themselves as “the other.”

This is very important for the process of children’s psychological development. As my childhood self-portraits reveal, kids are natural conformists. Kids police each other and themselves, and their policing is influenced and guided by the ideas they absorb from their environment. That might include parents, teachers, their peers, TV, movies, books, toys, or advertising. Being different and not fitting in can make kids feel inferior, like they matter less. When we get older, we often romanticize being different: “Think different.” “Be yourself.” “You do you.” My parents tried to reassure me that it was okay to be different, but even when we grow up, these attitudes and feelings about not fitting in stick with us and haunt us. 

Some people grow up absorbing cultural messages about dark skin, and become outright racists; they actively believe people of other races are inferior. For most of us, though, it’s more about what the American Psychological Association calls “unconscious thoughts that lead to subtle discriminatory behaviors.” Either way, we end up treating each other (and ourselves) worse because of lessons we learned as kids. How do we combat such a pervasive, deeply rooted problem?

To begin with, parents can talk to their kids directly about skin color and race. In The Washington Post, Valerie Strauss describes teaching children about race through a process called “racial socialization”: “Racial socialization involves talking to children about the color of their skin and preparing them to live in a world where people will treat them differently and sometimes unfairly because of their skin color. Racial socialization also involves positive lessons such as sharing stories about cultural and family heritage and telling children that they are equal to everyone else despite what racists think.”

Representation is also important. When kids see themselves in the books, movies, shows and toys that are important to them, they feel less like outsiders. It used to be nearly impossible for parents to find dolls that weren’t white. Blonde, blue-eyed Barbie was the standard. Today, there is a much greater variety available, making it easier for kids to play with dolls that look like them. Therapist Maria Pilar Bratko told Parents Magazine, “When parents give a child a doll that looks like her, they’re saying: ‘There are people like you in the world. You matter just as much as anyone else.’” When I was growing up, the shows I watched on the Disney Channel featured very few people of color, but today the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and other media outlets have become much more diverse. Cartoons, kids’ shows and children’s books now feature all kinds of kids as main characters.

All of this is progress, but clearly the problem is not yet solved. It wasn’t that long ago that I made that fifth-grade portrait of myself, and there are still plenty of kids going through what I went through. In addition to the steps mentioned above, we need to be more aware of what messages kids are picking up. We need to actively counter our own built-in habits of stereotyping and categorizing. We need to be there for those kids, because looking in the mirror shouldn’t be painful for anybody.