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Why and how should parents talk to kids about race? A (long) thread. First, and importantly: Kids see race even if you don't think they do. Research has shown that 3-month-olds can discern racial differences, and that racial awareness & prejudice develop in the preschool years.
In one study, psychologist Phyllis Katz followed 200 infants and their families — half white, half black — over 5.5 years, concluding that "at no point in the study did the children exhibit the Rousseau type of color-blindness that many adults expect.” https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2004-10969-016
In her study, 3-year-olds were shown photographs of children of different races and asked to choose whom they might like to be friends with. One-third of black kids chose only photos of other black kids, but 86 percent of white kids only chose photos of other white kids.
And in a 2012 study, researchers asked white parents how racially prejudiced they thought their kids were; most assumed their kids weren't at all. But the researchers found that many of these kids said they wouldn’t want black friends. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22537347/
Why do kids develop racial prejudices? Because of what they observe and infer in the world. Kids see that all but one U.S. President has been white, that the students at school with the nicest houses are white, that the heroes and doctors in TV shows and movies tend to be white.
They also tend to notice de facto segregation — that whites, Asians, Latinx, blacks and other people of color often live in separate neighborhoods, and that schools are often majority white or majority black.
So kids inevitably notice all these things about race, and then they make inferences about them in part because their parents and teachers aren’t filling in the gaps.
“They think there has to be a reason and no one explains it, so then they make up reasons — and a lot of kids make up biased racist reasons,” developmental psychologist Rebecca Bigler, now a professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Austin, told me.
Children also engage in essentialist thinking, which means that they assume that superficial differences, such as skin color, reflect deeper innate biological differences — that if people are the same on the outside, they must also be the same on the inside.
Kids use transductive reasoning, too, which means they assume that when people are alike in one way (such as skin color) they are alike in other ways as well (e.g. they are all equally smart or capable).
Children (as well as adults) also exhibit a type of bias known as “in-group” bias, which means that we tend to prefer people who are members of groups we also belong to. In-group bias helps to explain patriotism and school pride. But it can also foster racism.
These psychological tendencies fuel stereotypes — ideas that all black or Latinx people are one way, and all white people are the other. When you combine these ways of thinking with the hierarchical differences that kids can readily see, they start to make dangerous assumptions.
Far better that they learn about race from you. Developmental psychologist Brigitte Vittrup and her colleague found that kids whose parents talked with them about race as part of a 2011 study became less prejudiced than kids whose parents didn’t. https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1530-2415.2010.01223.x
But be sure to actually and explicitly talk about race. Don't speak in vague euphemisms like "We need to be nice to everyone, even if they look different from us." Kids won't get that you're alluding to race.
In a 2010 study, researchers had kids read a book about a teacher’s efforts to promote racial equality. For half of the students, the teacher’s efforts were described vaguely, like that “we need to focus on how we are similar to our neighbors rather than how we are different.”
For the other half of the kids, the teacher they read about referred explicitly to race, in that she said things like “we want to show everyone that race is important because our racial differences make each of use special.”
After the students finished the books, they were tested to see how well they could recognize racial prejudice portrayed in short vignettes. The kids who had been talked to explicitly about race were much better at identifying bias than were the kids given vague messages.
As the authors concluded, “our findings raise distressing practical implications, including the possibility that well-intentioned efforts to promote egalitarianism via color blindness sometimes promote precisely the opposite outcome.” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610384741
Also: expose your kids to diversity. Read books and watch TV shows and movies with diverse characters. Support and encourage cross-racial friendships (among your kids and, importantly, yourselves as parents.)
In one study, 5- to 7-year-old kids who watched short videos that portrayed positive interracial friendships (one was Sesame Street, and another was the show Little Bill) developed more positive racial attitudes than kids who didn’t watch these shows. https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1530-2415.2010.01223.x
Finally, talk about white privilege and racism and what you can do together to fight it. If you aren't sure, read books that provide context and ideas, such as Ibram X. Kendi's "How To Be An Antiracist" and Ijeoma Oluo's "So You Want To Talk About Race."
There are also lots of children's books that can make these conversations easier. Some ideas here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/11/22/childrens-books-can-help-start-conversation-about-race-parents-have-continue-it/
I'll end this thread with a quote from @DrIbram's book. “To be antiracist is to recognize that there is no such thing as White blood or Black diseases or natural Latinx athleticism. To be antiracist is to also...
...recognize the living, breathing reality of this racial mirage, which makes our skin colors more meaningful than our individuality. To be antiracist is to focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages, not to ignore the mirages that shape people’s lives.”
