At the Children’s Research Lab at the University of Texas, a database is kept of thousands of families in the Austin area who have volunteered to be available for scholarly research. In 2006, doctoral student Birgitte Vittrup recruited from the database about a hundred of these families, all of whom were Caucasian with a child five to seven years old. This project was her Ph.D. dissertation. The goal of Vittrup’s study was to learn if typical children’s videos with multicultural story lines actually have any beneficial effect on children’s racial attitudes.
Her first step was to test the children, and their parents, with a Racial Attitude Measure designed by one of her mentors at the university, Dr. Rebecca Bigler. Using this measure, Vittrup asked the child a series of questions, such as:
“How many White people are nice?”
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)
“How many Black people are nice?”
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)
Over the test, the descriptive adjective “nice” was replaced with over twenty other adjectives like “Dishonest,” “Pretty,” “Curious,” and “Snobby.” If the kid was too shy to answer, he could point to a picture that corresponded to each of the possible answers.
Of the families, Vittrup sent a third of them home with typical multiculturally-themed videos for a week, such as an episode of Sesame Street where the characters visit an African American family’s home, and an episode of Little Bill, where the entire neighborhood comes together to clean the local park.
In truth, Vittrup didn’t expect that children’s racial attitudes would change very much from just watching these videos. Prior research by Bigler had shown that multicultural curriculum in schools has far less impact than we intend it to—largely because the implicit message “We’re all friends” is too vague for children to understand it refers to skin color.
Yet Vittrup figured that if the educational videos were supplemented with explicit conversations from parents, there would be a significant impact. So a second group of families got the videos, and Vittrup told these parents to use the videos as the jumping-off point for a conversation about interracial friendship. She gave these sets of parents a checklist of points to make, echoing the theme of the shows. “I really believed it was going to work,” Vittrup recalled. Her Ph.D. depended upon it.
The last third were also given the checklist of topics, but no videos. These parents were supposed to bring up racial equality on their own, every night for five nights. This was a bit tricky, especially if the parents had never put names to kids’ races before. The parents were to say things like:
Some people on TV or at school have different skin color than us. White children and Black children and Mexican children often like the same things even though they come from different backgrounds. They are still good people and you can be their friend. If a child of a different skin color lived in our neighborhood, would you like to be his friend?
At this point, something interesting happened. Five of the families in the last group abruptly quit the study. Two directly told Vittrup, “We don’t want to have these conversations with our child. We don’t want to point out skin color.”
Vittrup was taken aback—these families had volunteered knowing full-well it was a study of children’s racial attitudes. Yet once told this required talking openly about race, they started dropping out. Three others refused to say why they were quitting, but their silence made Vittrup suspect they were withdrawing for the same reason.
This avoidance of talking about race was something Vittrup also picked up in her initial test of parents’ racial attitudes. It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin, every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity. But Vittrup had also noticed, in the original surveys, that hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles in the home—like “Everybody’s equal” or “God made all of us” or “Under the skin, we’re all the same”—but they had almost never called attention to racial differences.
They wanted their children to grow up color-blind. But Vittrup could also see from her first test of the kids that they weren’t color-blind at all. Asked how many white people are mean, these children commonly answered “Almost none.” Asked how many blacks are mean, many answered “Some” or “A lot.” Even kids who attended diverse schools answered some of the questions this way.
More disturbingly, Vittrup had also asked all the kids a very blunt question: “Do your parents like black people?” If the white parents never talked about race explicitly, did the kids know that their parents liked black people?
Apparently not: 14% said, outright, “No, my parents don’t like black people”; 38% of the kids answered, “I don’t know.” In this supposed race-free vacuum being created by parents, kids were left to improvise their own conclusions—many of which would be abhorrent to their parents.
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. As Vittrup expected, for the families who had watched the videos without any parental reinforcement and conversation, there was no improvement over their scores from a week before. The message of multicultural harmony—seemingly so apparent in the episodes—wasn’t affecting the kids at all.
But to her surprise, after she crunched the numbers, Vittrup learned that neither of the other two groups of children (whose parents talked to them about interracial friendship) had improved their racial attitudes. At first look, the study was a failure. She felt like she was watching her promising career vanish before her own eyes. She’d had visions of her findings published in a major journal—but now she was just wondering if she’d even make it through her dissertation defense and get her Ph.D.
Scrambling, Vittrup consulted her dissertation advisors until she eventually sought out Bigler.
“Whether the study worked or not,” Bigler replied, “it’s still telling you something.” Maybe there was something interesting in why it had no effect?
Combing through the parents’ study diaries, Vittrup noticed an aberration. When she’d given the parents the checklist of race topics to discuss with their kindergartners, she had also asked them to record whether this had been a meaningful interaction. Did the parents merely mention the item on the checklist? Did they expand on the checklist item? Did it lead to a true discussion?
Almost all the parents reported merely mentioning the checklist items, briefly, in passing. Many just couldn’t talk about race, and they quickly reverted to the vague “Everybody’s equal” phrasing.
Of all the parents who were told to talk openly about interracial friendship, only six managed to do so. All of those six kids greatly improved their racial attitudes.
Vittrup sailed through her dissertation and is now an assistant professor at Texas Women’s University in Dallas. Reflecting later about the study, Vittrup realized how challenging it had been for the families: “A lot of parents came to me afterwards and admitted they just didn’t know what to say to their kids, and they didn’t want the wrong thing coming out of the mouth of their kids.”
We all want our children to be unintimidated by differences and have the social skills to integrate in a diverse world. The question is, do we make it worse, or do we make it better, by calling attention to race?
Of course, the election of President Barack Obama has marked the beginning of a new era in race relations in the United States—but it hasn’t resolved the question as to what we should tell children about race. If anything, it’s pushed that issue to the forefront. Many parents have explicitly pointed out Obama’s brown skin to their young children, to reinforce the message that anyone can rise to become a leader, and anyone—regardless of skin color—can be a friend, be loved, and be admired.
But still others are thinking it’s better to say nothing at all about the presi
dent’s race or ethnicity—because saying something about it unavoidably teaches a child a racial construct. They worry that even a positive statement (“It’s wonderful that a black person can be president”) will still encourage the child to see divisions within society. For them, the better course is just to let a young child learn by the example; what kids see is what they’ll think is normal. For their early formative years, at least, let the children know a time when skin color does not matter.
A 2007 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that out of 17,000 families with kindergartners, 45% said they’d never, or almost never, discussed race issues with their children. But that was for all ethnicities. Nonwhite parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than white parents; 75% of the latter never, or almost never, talk about race.
For decades, we assumed that children will only see race when society points it out to them. That approach was shared by much of the scientific community—the view was that race was a societal issue best left to sociologists and demographers to figure out. However, child development researchers have increasingly begun to question that presumption. They argue that children see racial differences as much as they see the difference between pink and blue—but we tell kids that “pink” means for girls and “blue” is for boys. “White” and “black” are mysteries we leave them to figure out on their own.
It takes remarkably little for children to develop in-group preferences once a difference has been recognized. Bigler ran an experiment in three preschool classrooms, where four- and five-year-olds were lined up and given T-shirts. Half the kids were given blue T-shirts, half red. The children wore the shirts for three weeks. During that time, the teachers never mentioned their colors and never again grouped the kids by shirt color. The teachers never referred to the “Blues” or the “Reds.” Bigler wanted to see what would happen to the children naturally, once color groupings had been established.
The kids didn’t segregate in their behavior. They played with each other freely at recess. But when asked which color team was better to belong to, or which team might win a race, they chose their own color. They liked the kids in their own group more and believed they were smarter than the other color. “The Reds never showed hatred for Blues,” Bigler observed. “It was more like, ‘Blues are fine, but not as good as us.’ ” When Reds were asked how many Reds were nice, they’d answer “All of us.” Asked how many Blues were nice, they’d answer “Some.” Some of the Blues were mean, and some were dumb—but not the Reds.
Bigler’s experiment seems to show how children will use whatever you give them to create divisions—seeming to confirm that race becomes an issue only if we make it an issue. So why does Bigler think it’s important to talk to children about race, as early as age three?
Her reasoning is that kids are developmentally prone to in-group favoritism; they’re going to form these preferences on their own. Children categorize everything from food to toys to people at a young age. However, it takes years before their cognitive abilities allow them to successfully use more than one attribute to categorize anything. In the meantime, the attribute they rely on is that which is the most clearly visible.
Bigler contends that once a child identifies someone as most closely resembling himself, the child likes that person the most. And the child extends their shared appearances much further—believing that everything else he likes, those who look similar to him like as well. Anything he 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. Kids never think groups are random.
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. We don’t have to label them for them to become salient. Even if no teacher or parent mentions race, kids will use skin color on their own, the same way they use T-shirt colors.
Within the past decade or so, developmental psychologists have begun a handful of longitudinal studies to determine exactly when children develop bias—the general premise being that the earlier the bias manifests itself, the more likely it is driven by developmental processes.
Dr. Phyllis Katz, then a professor at the University of Colorado, led one such study—following 100 black children and 100 white children for their first six years. She tested these children and their parents nine times during those six years, with the first test at six months old.
How do researchers test a six-month-old? It’s actually a common test in child development research. They show babies photographs of faces, measuring how long the child’s attention remains on the photographs. Looking at a photograph longer does not indicate a preference for that photo, or for that face. Rather, looking longer means the child’s brain finds the face to be out of the ordinary; she stares at it longer because her brain is trying to make sense of it. So faces that are familiar actually get shorter visual attention. Children will stare significantly longer at photographs of faces that are a different race from their parents. Race itself has no ethnic meaning, per se—but children’s brains are noticing skin color differences and trying to understand their meaning.
When the kids turned three, 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% picked children of their own race. When the kids were five and and six, 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% of the kids used gender to split the piles. Another 16% used a variety of other factors, like the age or the mood of the people depicted. But 68% of the kids used race to split the cards, without any prompting.
In reporting her findings, Katz concluded: “I think it is fair to say that at no point in the study did the children exhibit the Rousseau-type of color-blindness that many adults expect.”
The point Katz emphasizes is that during 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.
Several studies point to the possibility of developmental windows—stages when children’s attitudes might be most amenable to change. During one experiment, teachers divided their students into groups of six kids, making sure each child was in a racially diverse group. Twice a week, for eight weeks, the groups met. Each child in a group had to learn a piece of the lesson and then turn around and teach it to the other five. The groups received a grade collectively. Then, the scholars watched the kids on the playground, to see if it led to more interaction cross-race. Every time a child played with another child at recess, it was noted—as was the race of the other child.
The researchers found this worked wonders on the first-grade children. Having been in the cross-race study groups led to significantly more cross-race play. But it made no difference on the third-grade children. It’s possible that by third grade, when parents usually recognize it’s safe to start talking a little about race, the developmental window has already closed.
The other deeply held assumption modern parents have is what Ashley and I have come to call the Diverse Environment Theory. If you raise a child with a fair amount of exposure to people of other races and cultures, the environment becomes the message. You don’t have to talk about race—in fact, it’s better to not talk about race. Just expose the child to diverse environments and he’ll think it’s entirely normal.
I know this mindset, because it perfectly describes the approach my wife and I took when our son, Luke, was born. When he was four months old, we enrolled him in a preschool located in San Francisco’s Fillmore/Western Addition neighborhood. One of the many benefits of the school was its great racial diversity. For years he never once mentioned the color of anyone’s skin—not at school or while watching televisio
n. We never once mentioned skin color either. We thought it was working perfectly.
Then came Martin Luther King Jr. Day at school, two months before his fifth birthday. Luke walked out of class that Friday before the weekend and started pointing at everyone, proudly announcing, “That guy comes from Africa. And she comes from Africa, too!” It was embarrassing how loudly he did this. Clearly, he had been taught to categorize skin color, and he was enchanted with his skill at doing so. “People with brown skin are from Africa,” he’d repeat. He had not been taught the names for races—he had not heard the term “black” and he called us “people with pinkish-whitish skin.” He named every kid in his schoolroom with brown skin, which was about half his class.
I was uncomfortable that the school hadn’t warned us about the race-themed lesson. But my son’s eagerness was revealing. It was obvious this was something he’d been wondering about for a while. He was relieved to have been finally given the key. Skin color was a sign of ancestral roots.
Over the next year, we started to overhear one of his white friends talking about the color of their skin. They still didn’t know what to call their skin, so they used the phrase “skin like ours.” And this notion of ours versus theirs started to take on a meaning of its own. As these kids searched for their identities, skin color had become salient. Soon, I overheard this particular white boy telling my son, “Parents don’t like us to talk about our skin, so don’t let them hear you.”
Yet our son did mention it. When he watched basketball with us, he would say, “That guy’s my favorite,” and put his finger up to the screen to point the player out. “The guy with skin like ours,” he would add. I questioned him at length, and I came to understand what was really going on. My young son had become self-conscious about his curly blond-brown hair. His hair would never look like the black players’ hairstyles. The one white, Latvian player on the Golden State Warriors had cool hair the same color as my son’s. That was the guy to root for. My son was looking for his own identity, and looking for role models. Race and hairstyle had both become part of the identity formula. Making free throws and playing tough defense hadn’t.
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