It’s from the book Nurture Shock. It’s a fabulous and interesting book (I’m not a parent, heard about it on NPR). I gave mine away to a good friend. The CNN study is probably based on the findings from the initial study cited in that book. I believe it was conducted in Texas and the grad student was crying because she didn’t get the results she was looking for but decided to look at the data another way.
The book is divided into multiple chapters and each one confronts a common parenting myth. It’s entirely based on research and not on anecdote.
It also means that you’re letting your kids develop all of their ideas about race from other sources. Here are some excerpts from another article on the same study on cnn.com:
But what’s the point of pointing that out, when the skin color has nothing do with playing soccer? My daughter is aware of people of all colors doing wonderful things–she just doesn’t think their wonderfulness is based on what color they are.
I do point out diversity of cultures, and encourage appreciation.
How can we ever achieve a society where color doesn’t matter if we keep teaching our kids that it does? We must be the change we wish to see.
As I said, as the need arises, I have been and will continue to talk about historical facts and ongoing common perceptions, so that she understands why things are the way they are and why people may be saying the things they say about “race.”
We have two children - one who is Caucasian, one who is Asian. We talk about race all the time. We always have. We discuss the civil rights movement (I taught it in Sunday school). My son has a lot of Hmong friends - and we talk about race as it relates to culture (many of them eat a lot of rice, but not all his Asian friends eat a lot of rice). We talk about economics.
I can’t afford to wait until we reach a society where color doesn’t matter. Because it does matter for my kid RIGHT NOW and I have to make sure he’s prepared to face that.
I’m not quite understanding what the CNN study is actually testing for. For example, showing a child an array of dolls identical except for skin tone and asking “which is the dumb one”. Isn’t that equivalent to showing five Priuses of different colors and asking “which is the fast one”?
If we take as a given that there’s no correlation between skin tone and dumbness (or color and speed), then what’s the correct answer to the question? Maybe “I can’t tell”? Did the researchers give the subjects that option? How much pressure did the adult researcher implicitly put on the child subject to give an answer?
I’m very skeptical of drawing any conclusions from that study.
That said, the OP question is a good one. I’m a parent in a multiracial household, but haven’t had to think about this yet. My “default” assumption is that actively leading by example should be enough (i.e., having racially diverse family, friends and neighbors), but it’s probably wishful thinking to hope that will always work.
Well, this is wandering into debate territory, but my personal view is that people have been encouraging this ideal of a color blind society for a while now, and the disparities continue to grow between races. These disparities are systemic, and deep, and just treating everyone the same isn’t going to fix them. I firmly believe that.
But, you know, that’s just me. (It’s also a VERY macro perspective, and I’m not sure what relevance it has to a kid making friends at school. I suppose I’ll learn that lesson soon enough.)
My twins gave ME a lesson about racism once. I was trying to talk to them about “bad people”. They were 3.5 yrs old and my son had dashed away from me at the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis, which is a huge place. He went all the way to the basement on his own! A nice mother brought him back upstairs as the museum staff was going into full alert.
And he couldn’t begin to imagine WHY his running off was a bad thing. I’d never taught my kids that “every stranger’s a monster” and didn’t want to start. But clearly I needed to instill some caution.
So I gave it some thought and the next day I sat down with them and explained that MOST people are good, but a FEW people are bad and could hurt them, and if they go running around they might cross paths with those bad people.
And knowing that my kids were extremely literal and visual, I added a demonstration. I had a little pile of salt to which I’d added a couple of specks of pepper. When they picked up a pinch, they generally got only the salt (the “good” people) but occasionally they picked up a speck of pepper (“bad guys”).
Then my Aunt stopped by our house and my son told her, with great excitement, about how he’d learned that “The white people are good and the black people are bad!”
SO I repeated the process. With a pile of oregano (“Look at all those good people in all those different, beautiful colors”) to which I added a couple of big specks of rock salt.
I was then, and am still, disturbed by the prevalence of dark-skinned characters as villains in children’s cartoons. People think it’s meaningless, but I don’t agree.
The book is probably most well-known for the chapter on the consequences of over-praising (what types of praise have unintended responses in children). There’s another increasingly famous chapter on language acquisition. I was talking about it to my friend and she was stunned because she was making the exact praising mistakes they talk about in the book (praising intellect-both her kids are ridiculously good looking and people comment on it all the time, so she was emphasizing the fact that they were smart to counter-act it…totally in good faith). I gave it to her because I’d already finished it and knew I wouldn’t really be re-reading. It also has an awesome chapter on why teenagers lie etc.
I saw the CNN study piece on race this weekend and knew exactly where they got the idea from.
My original response to this was I don’t think that a child finding a picture that most looks like her most favorable necessarily says much. If you showed me five dolls, all identical and devoid of any facial expression or context, I’d probably like the one that looks most like me. If they all looked the same except the color of their sweaters, I’d like the one with the green sweater because green is my favorite color. If they were all the same, except one wore glasses, I’d like the one with glasses. I’d also choose the ugly one as the one least like me. And then I saw the video. I still don’t think it *necessarily *says anything, but it would appear more probable than not.
They’re equally ridiculous questions to answer, and that is exactly the point. If 76% of children decided that the red car was the fast one, I’d say these children were led to believe that red cars were fast, for some reason. Obviously the color of paint on the car doesn’t affect its speed, but red equals fast in their minds, no matter how illogical. Similarly, the fact that 76% of the young white children identified the darkest pictures of the kids as “dumb” and 66% as “mean” leads me to believe this is beyond coincidence. You’d think each characteristic trait would be assigned more or less evenly among all of the pictures, but no, they were very skewed.
What’s more, is if you watched the video, many of the children, when asked to explain why they chose the dark one as “dumb,” replied rather frankly “because he has dark skin” or “because he’s black.”
Parents also don’t realize the impact they have on their children when they aren’t actively trying to.
Say you live in a place where it happens that there’s a lot of gang violence and the gangs are skewed to a certain race. So there’s a lot of news coverage featuring members of that race being involved in crime. You might make the offhand comment ‘well, that’s the 5th teen in a week involved in a daytime robbery! It’s obvious they aren’t in school.’ Your child might take ‘not in school = dumb (because school is where you learn)’ and ‘[race] = not in school = dumb’.
My mom hasn’t stopped using the word ‘negro’. Every time I hear it, I think of things like blackface and lynchings, just because my generation uses ‘black’. Now, that’s not being racist, but it definitely changes the way I think for a few seconds whenever she says it.
I dunno–this just seems kind of…tacky to me. I’m nonwhite and the idea of being the model minority held up to the little white kids just kind of pisses me off.
My parents never talked about race to me–I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I don’t really think “I’m notwhite”–I just think I’m Freudian, you know? I don’t want to have to think of colors. Sometimes I’ll forget I’m non-white. Like we had a poll about dating outside of one’s race and I said that I’d only dated my race, forgetting that I’m not actually white. (I’ve only dated white people so I guess I identify as white?) One time actually before we went back to Pakistan for a visit, my mom was all, “And you’ll get to see people who look like you” and it was kind of a mindscrew…like wait, I never noticed that I wasn’t like everyone else. Weird, I guess.
Underlining added. This is the problem I have with the study–there’s no evidence about what the “unbiased” result should be. Maybe it should be a random sampling, or maybe it should be a refusal to answer. We don’t know. And that means we can’t conclude that the study shows bias when we don’t know what an unbiased result would look like. In science terms, there’s no control group.
(And I’m not sure how a control group could be done, but maybe by asking neutral or nonsense questions. “Show me the young one”, or “the talking one”, or “round” or “vorpal”, etc. Then we have correlations that can be compared.)
All the study shows, as far as I can tell, is that there’s a correlation between the questions asked and responses answered.
Now this is actually informative. If the study systematically recorded the subjects’ reasons for their responses, then that’s something conclusive.
We talk about it like everything else – when it comes up and answer only the questions the kids have. My daughter is 7 and we’ve talked about slavery (“that’s so wrong!”), skin color of her friends (all different shades of tan & brown), etc.
I think my MIL is actually a great role model in this – she’ll come home from the store and talk about the sales clerk with the gorgeous chocolate-brown skin – just as another attribute like hair color.
Note – we are white
ETA – that article referenced above was either in Time or Newsweek, and didn’t recommend talking about race to find role models. IIRC, the gist was that if white parents refuse to talk about skin color, than kids start to think that skin color is something shameful to talk about. Better to just be matter-of-fact.
Hell, my dad hasn’t stopped using the word “negro” and he’s black. He’s also old, and will never let go of the terms he grew up using.
Well I can’t say I’ve ever forgotten that I’m not white (and I’m guessing you don’t mean that literally), but yes, I agree that at times and in limited places in the world, it’s easy not to think of your race, or anyone else’s, as an issue. Yes, I notice that our skin color is not the same as much as I notice that we’re wearing different colored shirts, but it makes no actual difference in how we’re both perceived or treated. I grew up thinking racism was not yet extinct, but for the most part, real deal racism, as in “I have an opinion about what you’re like based upon your race” was something that mainly existed among old people who were going to die soon anyway, and people in the South. And then I moved to Minnesota. Oh boy! Nothing will remind you real fast like that you’re “notwhite” like moving to MN. I should start a blog about it some day.
We don’t know. The only way to know would be to important sentient beings from outer space who have no idea about human race relations, but I don’t think there unreasonable speculation about the results. Although perhaps it *is *natural, with no external biases, to associate dark skin with dumb?
I really don’t know what the children’s responses were systematically, but there were a lot of clips saying they thought negatively of the dark pictures because they had dark skin, and less frequently, because they were black.
What was reported to be systematic was white children associating positive attributes to the pictures that looked like them. I think it was unfair that there was little mention of whether or not the black children did the same, because I would imagine most people would have positive associations with people or things that remind them of themselves. I think if you showed kids five pictures of kids of their own race, they’d view still view the one who looked most like them most favorably.
Well, I kind of do mean literally…like when we had that poll in IMHO about whether or not you date outside the race. I’ve only dated white people and I’m nonwhite, but I put that I’d never dated someone who wasn’t my race. Then about three minutes later I posted in the thread to clarify because it was only then that I realized I’d gotten it wrong as it were. So, in that way I kind of do.
The other thing that kind of annoys me is the whole “We’re so liberal and accepting of your non-whiteness” which I kind of felt at college a couple of times. Stuff like, “Dinners for students of color” or the time a woman when I was at the caf asked me if I wanted to join a group for students of color to talk about issues that people of color (apparently) face…I just never got that. I also really hate the phrase person of color.
Boy, I’m glad you didn’t go to my college. There was a lot of enthusism for encouraging diversity, mostly liberal white kids whining about how we should recruit lots more non-white students. And the whys for wanting that were all about how it would be good for us white kids to be exposed to other cultures via these kids, never a word about what the students they wanted to lure here would get out of it. It stuck me as rather distasteful (I thought of museums and nature preserves, frankly), and I know non-white students who hated the idea too, since no one signs up for the role of race representitive when they enroll in college.
Anyway, as for the OP, when/if I have kids, I intend to make sure that I bring up good things that non-white people have done. Not like “Joe is black, and he saved a bus full of nuns” but more subtly. I don’t think there’s a need to point out that Joe is black, since you should be able to see that in the picture of him saving the nuns…I don’t want the message to be X people are good too, but for them to realize that there are good people of all colors and someone being good and not white is not a remarkable exception.
Skin color conversation is likely to come up at a fairly young age, because if they see my family photos, they’ll see that half of my mom’s family had/has dark skin and dark hair, having been from Bermuda and the Azores. I mean, this guylooks a lot like my great-grampy did, so I’m sure they’ll notice the differences between pictures of those relatives and my fair freckled skin!
I find this conversation really interesting. It reminds me of the first time my little brother saw a black person, he thought they were really sunburned or that something had happened to them.
It wasn’t that we avoided race conversations, it just never came up. He grew up in a place where the county is, even now, something like 98% white. We also didn’t have a TV in the house at the time so he had never seen someone that wasn’t white.
Actually, in 2006, someone redid the doll study that was originally done in 1930s & 1940s. Black kids don’t think favorably of dolls of their own race; they view white dolls more favorably and assign words like “good” and “pretty” to the dolls that aren’t like them.
All I know is that I was never taught anything about race, but I also grew up in a racially homogeneous* community. So it’s not like the idea of non-white people came up except in the books that were teaching you that everyone was the same. In other words, I never learned any of the bad stuff.
*I had an all-white graduating class, In fact, I only went to school with a nonwhite person once, in ninth grade. Dude was an amazing artist and really fun to hang around with. It sucked when he moved away.
