Talking to Kids About Race
Newsweek cover story “See Baby Discriminate” reviews research on how children come to understand race. According to the article, many parents want their kids to be colorblind, and worry that “even a positive statement . . . still encourages a child to see divisions within society.” This is because, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman of Newsweek write, people assume “that children see race only when society points it out to them.” This is not the case. The authors note that parents’ silence on the topic merely tells children that race is something about which they cannot ask. As shown in a study by Rebecca Bigler, children notice differences, and “it takes remarkably little for children to develop in-group preferences.” Based on a longitudinal study done over the first six years of 100 white children and 100 black children’s lives, Professor Phyllis Katz concluded that “this period of our children’s lives, when we imagine it’s most important to not talk about race, is the very developmental period when children’s minds are forming their first conclusions about race.” Furthermore, a number of studies suggest there may be “developmental windows—stages when children’s attitudes might be most amenable to change.” Researchers have found that, in order to be effective, “conversations about race have to be explicit, in unmistakable terms that children understand.” Telling children that “everybody’s equal” is not enough. For more information on the latest child development findings, read “NurtureShock”—a new book by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.
- Birgitte Vittrup recruited 100 Caucasian families with a child between the ages of five and seven. Based on entry surveys, Vittrup found that parents “might have asserted vague principles—like ‘Everybody’s equal’ or ‘God made all of us’ or ‘Under the skin, we’re all the same’—but they’d almost never called attention to racial differences.” Why do you think many parents choose not to talk to their kids about race? How can adults help kids think about issues of race without letting their own discomfort get in the way?
- The Newsweek article states “We all want our children to be unintimidated by differences and have the social skills necessary for a diverse world. The question is, do we make it worse, or do we make it better, by calling attention to race?” After reading the article, what are the arguments for talking to children about race? What are the arguments for not calling attention to race? What strategies might you use to talk with young kids about race?
- Based on her longitudinal study of 100 white children and 100 black children over the first six years of their lives, study leader Phyllis Katz noted that “parents are very comfortable talking to their children about gender, and they work very hard to counterprogram against boy-girl stereotypes. That ought to be our model for talking about race.” Why do you think many parents are comfortable talking to their children about gender, but not about race?
- When the children in her longitudinal study were five and six years old, Phyllis Katz gave them a small deck of cards with people drawn on them. She asked the kids to sort the deck into two piles, however they wanted. Katz found that “only 16 percent of the kids used gender to split the piles. But 68 percent of the kids used race to split the cards, without any prompting.” Why do you think most children chose to sort the deck by race rather than using another category?
- According to the Diverse Environment Theory, “talking about race [is], in and of itself, a diffuse kind of racism.” Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?
The work of psychologist Mahzarin Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard University, focuses on unconscious biases and their social consequences. Banaji heads the Project Implicit research group at Harvard and helps to maintain an online test—the Implicit Association Test (IAT)—which is designed to make people more aware of their unconscious biases. Click here to take the IAT.
