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“You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people your relatives hate . . .”
- Oscar Hammerstein, South Pacific, 1949 Peanuts creator Charles Schulz showed new kid Franklin in a schoolroom with white kids in 1968. Fred Rogers shared a foot bath with Officer Francois Clemmons in 1969. Hammerstein, Schulz, and Rogers withstood pushback for messages on race that were daring for their times. Having grown up on “You’ve got to be taught,” I’ve been jolted to read of research suggesting infants a few months old prefer their own race. Is bias innate or does it have to be taught? I’d guess preference for people who look familiar is innate, especially those who resemble one’s primary caregivers. Pale-skinned babies raised by pale-skinned parents prefer pale skin. Babies raised primarily by mothers prefer women. My infant long ago, in a household of nearsighted adults, was fretful around people who didn’t wear glasses. Some babies are more timid by temperament, others more drawn to novelty. While I no longer believe humans are born a blank slate, it matters what they’re taught. We can encourage safe exploration to cultivate curiosity and stretch tolerance for the unfamiliar. We can expose children to safe people of various shapes and colors, with and without glasses.
4 Comments
Allan Gibbard
8/26/2019 12:38:16 pm
My old colleague Lawrence Hirschfeld, now at the New School for Social Research, has long pursued scientific evidence for how prejudice, racial and regarding other in-outgroup matters, is engendered. So when I read this post, I googled "Lawrence Hirschfeld prejudice". One highly relevant piece is "Seven Myths of Race and the Young Child". I haven't read much of it yet, but I know from long ago that he is judicious and discovers fascinating things. The article is from 2012, and the URL is
It's a fascinating article, Allan. Thanks for the tip! I'm having so many responses and questions, no room for many of them here. What does it mean to say infants' recognition of race isn't mainly a matter of visual cues, when the experiments are done by showing them visual representations? There's mention but not much discussion of the societal definition of race in relation to infants' perceptions. Surely he isn't arguing that 10-month-olds in the early 1900s distinguished images of Jews and Italians as "other" in a way they wouldn't today. I think that children notice skin color. That's not a surprise. How they interpret it depends a lot on their parents and caregivers. Who are their parents' friends? If a child grows in a diverse community, that will form their expectations. At the same time, representation matters and all ethnicities and skin colors need to see themselves mirrored positively in books, the media, plays, newspapers, not just Europeans. That also helps to diffuse the white is the norm myth.
Rebecca, yes, children notice, and they mention it because they haven't yet learned adult expectations not to. When my child said something about "brown people" long ago, the word was a clue that he was commenting on what he saw, not what he'd been taught. (Few of us are the color of coal or snow.) Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. Archives
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