Newsweek Article - "See Baby Discriminate"
This week's Newsweek magazine has a new feature article, "See Baby Discriminate" that talks about researchers' efforts to study children and their perceptions in race. It's a worthy read since both the Avatar: The Last Airbender animated series and The Last Airbender film are targeted towards families and children. One researcher even studied if media with multicultural storylines affected how white children view race.
The Children's Research Lab at the University of Texas tried to conduct an experiment to learn if typical children's videos with multicultural storylines (like Avatar!) had any beneficial effect on the racial attitudes of white children 5 to 7 years old.
According to Vittrup's entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They 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. They wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But Vittrup's first test of the kids revealed they weren't colorblind at all...
...Vittrup hoped the families she'd instructed to talk about race would follow through. After watching the videos, the families returned to the Children's Research Lab for retesting. To Vittrup's complete surprise, the three groups of children were statistically the same-none, as a group, had budged very much in their racial attitudes. At first glance, the study was a failure.
Combing through the parents' study diaries, Vittrup realized why. Diary after diary revealed that the parents barely mentioned the checklist items. Many just couldn't talk about race, and they quickly reverted to the vague "Everybody's equal" phrasing.
Of all those Vittrup told to talk openly about interracial friendship, only six families managed to actually do so. And, for all six, their children dramatically improved their racial attitudes in a single week.
...What parents say depends heavily on their own race: a 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that out of 17,000 families with kindergartners, nonwhite parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than white parents; 75 percent of the latter never, or almost never, talk about race.
In contrast, a clinical psychologist/profesor at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, learned that almost all minority parents talk to their kids about discrimination.
But if children heard these preparation-for-bias warnings often (rather than just occasionally), they were significantly less likely to connect their successes to effort, and much more likely to blame their failures on their teachers-whom they saw as biased against them.
Harris-Britt warns that frequent predictions of future discrimination ironically become as destructive as experiences of actual discrimination: "If you overfocus on those types of events, you give the children the message that the world is going to be hostile-you're just not valued and that's just the way the world is."
The article also comments briefly on ethnic pride:
hat leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If "black pride" is good for African-American children, where does that leave white children? It's horrifying to imagine kids being "proud to be white." Yet many scholars argue that's exactly what children's brains are already computing. Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence. So a pride message would not just be abhorrent-it'd be redundant.
University of Colorado professor Phyllis Katz led a study following 100 black and 100 white children for the first six years of life. Katz found that six month old babies will stare at photos faces that are a different race from their parents much longer--they noticed the difference in skin color.
When the kids turned 3, Katz showed them photographs of other children and asked them to choose whom they'd like to have as friends. Of the white children, 86 percent picked children of their own race. When the kids were 5 and 6, Katz gave these children a small deck of cards, with drawings of people on them. Katz told the children to sort the cards into two piles any way they wanted. 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.
...The point Katz emphasizes is 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.
Katz's study also found that parents are very comfortable about counterprogramming their kids against boy-girl stereotypes, for example, teaching their kids that girls are just as good as boys andcan do anything boys can do, but are uncomfortable about talking about race.
Another researcher at the lab in Texas, Rebecca Bigler, conducted an experiement with preschoolers where they were put in red or blue t-shirts. While the distinctions were not ever mentioned, and the kids did not segregate in their behavior, the kids still favored other kids in the same colored shirt as their own.
Children naturally try to categorize everything, and the attribute they rely on is that which is the most clearly visible.
We might imagine we're creating color-blind environments for children, but differences in skin color or hair or weight are like differences in gender-they're plainly visible. Even if no teacher or parent mentions race, kids will use skin color on their own, the same way they use T-shirt colors.
Bigler contends that children extend their shared appearances much further-believing that those who look similar to them enjoy the same things they do. Anything a child doesn't like thus belongs to those who look the least similar to him. The spontaneous tendency to assume your group shares characteristics-such as niceness, or smarts-is called essentialism.
Bigler also ran a study that taught kids about Jackie Robinson and other famous African Americans. Half the kids learned about how he was the first African American in the major leagues. The other half learned, additionally, about the discrimination he faced.
After the two-week history class, the children were surveyed on their racial attitudes. White children who got the full story about historical discrimination had significantly better attitudes toward blacks than those who got the neutered version. Explicitness works. "It also made them feel some guilt," Bigler adds. "It knocked down their glorified view of white people." They couldn't justify in-group superiority.
Other studies have placed children in cross-race study groups to see if interracial classroom time led to interracial play at recess. It worked with first graders but not with third graders, so perhaps by age eight, it's harder to reach kids. The Newsweek article goes on to discuss how diversity in high schools results in self-segregation and makes the odds of interracial friendship actually go down.
The authors of the Newsweek article conclude that children don't talk about race in their first five years--not because they are colorblind--but because their parents' silence communicates that race is a topic that is off limits. When this happens, any stereotypes, misconceptions, or prejudices that children independently form around race cannot actually be addressed or corrected.
As The Last Airbender movie comes out, these studies seem to indicate that some children may notice that the heroic characters in the television series are no longer people of color in the film. It will be interesting to see how parents address the casting controversy in talking to their children.
Anyhow, the article is really fascinating, so please take a read! I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!
The Children's Research Lab at the University of Texas tried to conduct an experiment to learn if typical children's videos with multicultural storylines (like Avatar!) had any beneficial effect on the racial attitudes of white children 5 to 7 years old.
According to Vittrup's entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They 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. They wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But Vittrup's first test of the kids revealed they weren't colorblind at all...
...Vittrup hoped the families she'd instructed to talk about race would follow through. After watching the videos, the families returned to the Children's Research Lab for retesting. To Vittrup's complete surprise, the three groups of children were statistically the same-none, as a group, had budged very much in their racial attitudes. At first glance, the study was a failure.
Combing through the parents' study diaries, Vittrup realized why. Diary after diary revealed that the parents barely mentioned the checklist items. Many just couldn't talk about race, and they quickly reverted to the vague "Everybody's equal" phrasing.
Of all those Vittrup told to talk openly about interracial friendship, only six families managed to actually do so. And, for all six, their children dramatically improved their racial attitudes in a single week.
...What parents say depends heavily on their own race: a 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that out of 17,000 families with kindergartners, nonwhite parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than white parents; 75 percent of the latter never, or almost never, talk about race.
In contrast, a clinical psychologist/profesor at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, learned that almost all minority parents talk to their kids about discrimination.
But if children heard these preparation-for-bias warnings often (rather than just occasionally), they were significantly less likely to connect their successes to effort, and much more likely to blame their failures on their teachers-whom they saw as biased against them.
Harris-Britt warns that frequent predictions of future discrimination ironically become as destructive as experiences of actual discrimination: "If you overfocus on those types of events, you give the children the message that the world is going to be hostile-you're just not valued and that's just the way the world is."
The article also comments briefly on ethnic pride:
hat leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If "black pride" is good for African-American children, where does that leave white children? It's horrifying to imagine kids being "proud to be white." Yet many scholars argue that's exactly what children's brains are already computing. Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence. So a pride message would not just be abhorrent-it'd be redundant.
University of Colorado professor Phyllis Katz led a study following 100 black and 100 white children for the first six years of life. Katz found that six month old babies will stare at photos faces that are a different race from their parents much longer--they noticed the difference in skin color.
When the kids turned 3, Katz showed them photographs of other children and asked them to choose whom they'd like to have as friends. Of the white children, 86 percent picked children of their own race. When the kids were 5 and 6, Katz gave these children a small deck of cards, with drawings of people on them. Katz told the children to sort the cards into two piles any way they wanted. 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.
...The point Katz emphasizes is 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.
Katz's study also found that parents are very comfortable about counterprogramming their kids against boy-girl stereotypes, for example, teaching their kids that girls are just as good as boys andcan do anything boys can do, but are uncomfortable about talking about race.
Another researcher at the lab in Texas, Rebecca Bigler, conducted an experiement with preschoolers where they were put in red or blue t-shirts. While the distinctions were not ever mentioned, and the kids did not segregate in their behavior, the kids still favored other kids in the same colored shirt as their own.
Children naturally try to categorize everything, and the attribute they rely on is that which is the most clearly visible.
We might imagine we're creating color-blind environments for children, but differences in skin color or hair or weight are like differences in gender-they're plainly visible. Even if no teacher or parent mentions race, kids will use skin color on their own, the same way they use T-shirt colors.
Bigler contends that children extend their shared appearances much further-believing that those who look similar to them enjoy the same things they do. Anything a child doesn't like thus belongs to those who look the least similar to him. The spontaneous tendency to assume your group shares characteristics-such as niceness, or smarts-is called essentialism.
Bigler also ran a study that taught kids about Jackie Robinson and other famous African Americans. Half the kids learned about how he was the first African American in the major leagues. The other half learned, additionally, about the discrimination he faced.
After the two-week history class, the children were surveyed on their racial attitudes. White children who got the full story about historical discrimination had significantly better attitudes toward blacks than those who got the neutered version. Explicitness works. "It also made them feel some guilt," Bigler adds. "It knocked down their glorified view of white people." They couldn't justify in-group superiority.
Other studies have placed children in cross-race study groups to see if interracial classroom time led to interracial play at recess. It worked with first graders but not with third graders, so perhaps by age eight, it's harder to reach kids. The Newsweek article goes on to discuss how diversity in high schools results in self-segregation and makes the odds of interracial friendship actually go down.
The authors of the Newsweek article conclude that children don't talk about race in their first five years--not because they are colorblind--but because their parents' silence communicates that race is a topic that is off limits. When this happens, any stereotypes, misconceptions, or prejudices that children independently form around race cannot actually be addressed or corrected.
As The Last Airbender movie comes out, these studies seem to indicate that some children may notice that the heroic characters in the television series are no longer people of color in the film. It will be interesting to see how parents address the casting controversy in talking to their children.
Anyhow, the article is really fascinating, so please take a read! I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!