Colour blind no more

I remember an anti-racism poster when I was younger which featured a row of babies of all different ethnicities lying together and the caption suggesting that it was only amongst these tiny babies that colour blindness really exists.
The advert obviously resonated with me and whilst I hope never to be seen or thought of as a racist In any way, shape or form, I won't claim that I don't see colour. The society I grew up in, albeit cosmopolitan and international was still one where the colour of your skin was an identifier.
I've often looked at Alby over the past few years with admiration for how lovely it must be to be truly colour blind. To refer to people by how fast they run, how many dragons they can fight, how polite they are or how quickly they eat rather than turning to skin colour to describe a friend. (I won't pretend Alby's rural English nursery offers the variety of backgrounds found in London but it's not a total sea of white thank goodness.)
But now those days are gone. For the past few days Alby has made random comments about the colour of people's skin. No embarrassing stories to report of inappropriate comments in the supermarket or anything but a few words here of there that show my little man is no longer as innocent as the babies in the poster.  "Our cousins have the same skin colour as us."  "Why in the olden days were all English people white?"
Obviously having studied anthropology at university I am well equipped to tackle such questions and statements perfectly! Yeah right. Sadly I stumble through my answers most of the time wishing that my words will return me to a racially blind bliss and fearing that in some unintended way they will actually do the opposite (who knows where a conversation with a toddler will take you). Whatever the outcome will be it turns out that by 4 years old you no longer qualify for the poster. Maybe I should be impressed. Perhaps  two hundred years ago not even those poster babies would have been coloured blind. I don't know. But I can't say I'm not a little saddened that the innocence on that one has started to go. I know I can't turn back time but how I wish I could, for all of us on this one.