My kids are color blind. They can see just fine, all their colors are there, but when they look at people, they see… people.

I don’t mean to sound surprised, this is how we’ve raised them, but the simple ease in which in comes across has had me thinking. How do you maintain this innocence? Is there a way to keep their view of the world this clean? Sadly, I think the answer is no, but how would I love to?

We live in rather homogenous area of Boston and I honestly don’t remember C ever asking us about people’s skin color when he was younger. In fact, the only related memory I have is of my very embarrassed wife trying to keep a straight face after C has asked a very well built, handsome black man if he had a penis (it was our gender exploration period…) in the middle of a supermarket.

M has an Asian boy in his class and another classmate, one of his best friends, is “brown.” That’s how he described him on the first day of school. We naturally had a visceral reaction to hearing him describe a person by their skin color, but honestly, that was the only thing he could think of that made his friend any different than any other boy in the class. “He’s just a boy dad, but his skin is brown,” he explained.

There is obviously something different for us as adults in describing someone by their skin color and not meaning, or trying to not sound like you mean, anything by it. For kids, it seems to just comes naturally. Just this week, I picked the boys up from camp and M told me about the boy he made friends with. As we walked down the sidewalk he gestured to two boys sitting on a wall and indicated that one was his friend (he didn’t remember his name). I went to ask which one and had to hesitate, both boys were sitting, both were in brown shorts and red shirts, both were wearing backpacks and both were playing games on phones. I could have referred to one as blonde, but for whatever reason, M refuses to process what blonde means and always says no if you ask him someone is blonde. His left and right are still weak. So, I was left with the white kid or the “brown” one. M came to my rescue by volunteering the information, “he’s the brown one.”

“Oh,” I said, “the brown one.” I must not have suppressed my chuckle well enough because C piped up with “it’s just his skin, dad.” I was torn between being embarrassed by my son thinking he needed to explain this to me or being proud that he knew enough to explain that to someone.

On a recent trip to Florida, M explained to the flight attendant that he probably wasn’t Mickey’s cousin because he (the steward) was brown and Mickey was more black. The very Latino gentleman laughed hysterically. “I’m brown!” he repeated. “And you’re not a mouse,” M concluded.

The boys watch a show on Nickelodeon called “Pair of Kings,” I know very little about except that there are two brothers who are supposed to be twins. My boys think it’s funny, but are in no way concerned that one brother is black and the other white. “They’re brothers, dad” C explains “they don’t have to look the same.” Yeah dad, keep it straight. Color is just color.

As enamored as I am by their color-blindness, I know it will be put to the test some day. Some event, or some person, will show the ugliness that others can harbor. My only hope is that I can enforce their color neutral view of the world long enough, so that when that veil is parted, they simply shrug off any challenge to the notion that color is simply color.