The 4-year-old boy`s words broke his mother`s heart.
''I want to be white,'' he said.
The young mother was stunned. She always figured that someday she and her husband would have to get around to schooling their children in the delicate questions of race, a duty as inevitable and unenviable as telling your children about sex. But she never unexpected this, certainly not this soon.
It further complicates matters that the child is ''mixed.'' His mother is white and his father is black. They had tried to raise their two children in a racially neutral environment with a racially integrated circle of friends in a racially integrated neighborhood.
Like other mixed couples, they would like their children to appreciate the full array of their racial and ethnic heritages, although our society tends to label everyone as ''black'' who has even a drop of black blood in their veins.
And now her son says he wants to be ''white.''
''I never expected we would have to deal with this at age 4,'' she told my wife and me. She sought our advice because we`re neighbors, we have lifelong experience at being black and are about as proud of it as anyone can be about a condition of birth.
''Where does he get it from?'' she asked.
Where, indeed? It`s hard to be color-blind in a society filled with color-conscious messages like those Jesse Jackson calls ''the five sterotypes that the media perpetuate about black people.''
''We are portrayed as more violent than we are, less hard-working than we are, less intelligent than we are, less universal than we are and less patriotic than we are,'' says Jackson.
A new poll by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago appears to confirm just that. While more white Americans than ever before favor racial desegregation, the poll indicates most still believe the same old, tired stereotypes about black people.
The national survey of 1,372 households found 62.2 percent of whites thought blacks were ''less hard-working'' than whites, 56.1 percent thought blacks were ''more violence-prone,'' 53.2 percent thought blacks were ''less intelligent,'' 50.6 percent thought blacks were ''less patriotic'' and a stunning 77.7 percent thought blacks were more inclined to prefer to live off welfare than to work.
Since I grew up in an African-American family that took great pride in never having had to turn to welfare, not even during the Depression, not even when it meant shining shoes, sweeping floors, cleaning toilets and working as domestics when better work was denied to us, I resent the stereotype that blacks are ''lazy.''
With the proportion of black troops on the ground in Saudi Arabia double their proportion in the nation`s population, I am outraged that anyone would tell a pollster that we are ''less patriotic.''
And, having occasionally seen some pretty well-educated blacks work for white supervisors who were dumb as a post, I scoff at inferences that blacks are ''less intelligent.''
Yet, whites are not the only people who still swallow these stereotypes. A substantial number of the blacks surveyed expressed the same negative sentiments about their fellow blacks as the surveyed whites did.
For example, 30 percent of the blacks surveyed agreed with the 56.1 percent of surveyed whites who thought blacks tended to be ''less
intelligent'' than whites.
That tells me how deeply the message of white superiority/black inferiority has become imbedded in the public mind, particularly in a country where most blacks and whites still live quite separate lives and do much of their learning about each other second-hand.
For example, African-Americans have fought bravely and with pride in every war America has ever fought. But, with such notable exceptions as the movie ''Glory,'' those are not the images most Americans are accustomed to seeing everyday.
Bad news concerning African-Americans still gets more attention than good news, largely because bad news about anything gets more attention than good news. Ironically, when Jesse Jackson and others put a spotlight on problems that have kept many blacks locked in poverty, they inadvertently contribute to more bad news and more stereotypes.
Some whites felt threatened by the ''Black Is Beautiful'' movement that was popular in the `60s or by today`s ''Afrocentric'' education movement, but the NORC survey confirms how much such efforts are needed, not to demean whites but to boost self-respect among blacks.
So many black young people have embraced negative black stereotypes that their youthful rebellion against society has turned into an embracing of failure, illustrated by the disturbing trend among some black youths to ridicule academic success among their peers as ''trying to act white.''
You know we have reached a sorry state as an African-American people when our children associate ''white'' with success and ''black'' with failure.
No wonder our neighbor`s son wants to be ''white.'' He has learned society`s lessons well. But it need not be the only color in his rainbow.