Learning about legacy racism

Several months ago, as I was putting J to bed, out of the blue, he said, "All the people who sleep outside in sleeping bags are old and black!"  We had not talked to him about "black" people or any other race.  We mention different nationalities because we know people from and eat food from different countries, but I was pretty sure we had never mentioned anything about race.  I managed to say that, while a lot of people who sleep outside are old and black, there are many who are not so old and not so black.  Indeed, I could have pointed to a few on our walk to his preschool the next morning.  Still, that's quite an observation from a newly-turned-four-year-old.

 A day or two later, L cautiously asked him whether people were different colors and what colors those might be.  He answered, "Grey, Black. Orange...".  (I asked who besides John Boehner is orange, but that was a joke for us.)  So it seems like he was not repeating what he had heard, but was just trying to describe what he saw.

A couple days ago, we watched a couple African American city workers taking down flags from a flagpole in the park behind city hall.  J asked what they would do with the flags, saying he thought they would take the flags home with them.  I told him that I didn't think so, and we should ask them.  He wanted me to ask them for him.  I told him he should do it himself.  We wound up not asking them anything.

This morning on the walk to school, I started the conversation about talking to strangers, imagining it going something like this: "It's harder to talk with people you don't know.  You're worried about what they will think and say.  But what's the worst that can happen, and do you think people are likely to do something like that?"  However, when I asked why it's harder to talk with people you don't know, he said, "When I see people with black skin, I think it's weird."  I said that it's probably because we don't talk with black people that much, and if we talked with black people more often, he would think it was normal.  He agreed.  I assured him that there was nothing weird about it; that's just how some people are.  But for the moment, I don't know an easy way to remedy this.  He has one part-time Af-Am teacher at his school and we have a couple friends, but for the most part, we live in a pretty white and Asian world.