Parenting Forward by Cindy Wang Brandt

Author:Cindy Wang Brandt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

Are Children Racists?

A white parent sitting next to me at the playground was talking about the way her children were playing carefree with children of color at the playground. “It’s so cute how they don’t see color,” she said with a soft, sentimental voice. Her apparent belief was that children were able to engage in joyful, imaginative play, disregarding their differences in skin tone. I cringed at the sentimentality and whiteness of the remark. But it raises a question for parents: Can children be racists? Could an innocent toddler with blonde curls and blue eyes and chubby cheeks, trotting around in curiosity and mischief, possibly be accused of being a racist?

The answer depends on the definition of racism. If we define racists to be people who recognize differences in skin tones and color, then actually, yes, studies have shown that even babies as young as six months old will stare at a photograph of faces with different skin tone than their own parents for a longer period of time.6 The same study follows these kids to three and five years old, asking them to sort decks of cards with pictures of people of various colors and races. The children consistently sorted the cards according to racial lines as opposed to gender lines. Researcher Phyllis Katz, then a professor at the University of Colorado, concluded it simply isn’t true that children are color-blind when it comes to race. They are observant and see differences in color. According to some definitions, that makes them racist—though it seems harsh to accuse six-month-old babies of racism simply because they recognize differences in physical attributes between people of different races.

If our definition of racism is malice and ill will against individual people of color, can children be said to exhibit these traits? When I witness a four-year-old shouting racial slurs and taunts on a playground, I attribute his behavior to what he has heard in his home. Preschoolers, grade schoolers, and even high schoolers are rarely willfully malicious; they are still growing and making mistakes, but we give grace to young people in their errors. This is why juvenile sentencing is far less severe (although children of color are disproportionately incarcerated and given harsher consequences,7 and some, as in the case of Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice, are dealt a death penalty on the streets).

Children, white children, are for the most part socialized to be civil and respectful of their peers of color, and yet somehow my black and brown and Asian friends in college, at the young age of eighteen or nineteen, had already experienced a lifetime of racial woundedness as they interacted with white peers. This is because racism is not and should not be defined as personal prejudice, where one person overtly hates the other because of their skin color. In that case, other than a few fringe white supremacy groups, we can basically declare the oppression of racism over in the overwhelming majority of society today.

But it’s crucial we frame the conversation using different tools that the field of sociology provides us.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.