I'm Chocolate, You're Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World, A Guide for Parents and Teachers.

I'm Chocolate, You're Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race-Conscious World, A Guide for Parents and Teachers by Marguerite A. Wright Jossey-Bass Publishing, May 2000, $15.00, ISBN 0-787-95234-6

Wright, a clinical and research psychologist, has spent many years counseling children and families. Here, she provides an exceptionally useful resource for parents and teachers to help them gain the tools to navigate the often murky terrain of race, as adults know it and, more importantly, as children experience it.

With her professional expertise, she dispels contemporary myths about how young children experience race, at what age race becomes important in their psychological development and how to support adolescents as questions of race and self-esteem arise. For example, although many adults believe that preschoolers understand that they are black or biracial, Wright argues that toddlers' identification of skin color as "brown," "peach," "yellow," or even "white," is a color-based perception, not a racial one. Racial identification doesn't begin until the child is in kindergarten, in some cases later. Further, she argues that such color identification does not necessarily indicate that the child suffers from low self-esteem.

I'm Chocolate, You're Vanilla is chock-full with a myriad of special sections such as "Interviews," "Reality Checks," "Teaching Strategies" and "Quizzes for Parents," making it a clear and easy book to read and use. While it would be easy to dismiss the book as one that caters to the specific challenges of raising a biracial child, to do so would be to lose out on what proves to be a wonderful and evocative guide to raising, teaching and loving a child of color.

Crystal Williams is author of a collection of poems, Kin, and teaches at Reed College in Portland, OR.