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For years, the prevailing notion was that children do not see color. But as Dr. Erin Winkler explains, it is clear that children are not colorblind. Listen to Dr. Winkler's speech from the Fall 2018 P.R.I.D.E. Speaker Series.
Children see race. We want to learn more about what that means. Hear parents, scholars, illustrators, artists, and more explore how race impacted them as a child and how it affects their lives today. In My Skin is a production of P.R.I.D.E. -- Positive Racial Identity in Early Education -- a University of Pittsburgh Office of Child Development program.
Race doesn't limit you from anything. I feel like they learn about race from... I teach them what you're aspiring for. ...who you are with somebody else and look like you. ...and love who you are. ...to love themselves.
...and love who you are with racial identity.
This is In My Skin, a podcast about race and childhood. I'm Adam Flango.
So this week we're doing something a little bit different. We're working on a couple different episodes right now, but in the meantime, we wanted to let you know about the Pride Speaker Series. So twice a year, every spring and fall, we bring speakers to Pittsburgh to talk about things relating to race and young children. We've had speakers like Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria, Dr. Valerie Kinloch, Dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Education, and Dr. Aaron Winkler, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who is an expert on race and young children. Our next speaker series is on May 2nd and features Muffy Mendoza, an author, speaker, parent, and founder of brownmamas.com. She's going to be talking about nurturing black children, how parents and educators can support children's positive racial identity on May 2nd, 2019, at the Homewood Library Auditorium.
The event is totally free, and that includes childcare. So parents, caregivers, make sure to register your child if you're interested at our website, racepride.pit.edu. The talk will begin at 5.30 p.m. and doors open at 5. And you can reserve a ticket at our website, racepride.pit.edu. Again, that's racepride.pit.edu.
For this episode, we wanted to give you a taste of what the speaker series is like and share with you the remarks from our September 27th, 2018 speaker series event with Dr. Aaron Winkler, author of the article "Children Are Not Colorblind." Here's Dr. Winkler speaking at the Frick Auditorium. - Hi, I'm Dr. Winkler, author of this introduction. It's such a treat to be here. I'm so pleased to be here. So what we're going to talk about today is how children learn about race and how adults can help. So I'm a firm believer in letting folks know what they're in for. So here's what I'd like to talk about in my time today. First, spend a little bit of time about how do ideas about race form in the first place, why this starts young, often younger than we think, and how it affects all of us.
What we really want is what we can do. But first, I want to tell you a little bit about myself because I know the unspoken question is, "How did this white lady end up in African American studies and what does--what does she really have to say about all of this?" So I want to tell you a little bit about myself.
As Aisha said, I do research on how children and youth develop their ideas about race, how they develop their racial identities, and also how they cope with and negotiate racism in their daily lives and racial inequity in their daily lives. So I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Has anyone been there or heard of it? Oh, my gosh, some clapping even. I can't believe it. Okay, okay. So Ann Arbor, Michigan is a college--a predominantly white college town of about 100, 150,000 people.
And when I was growing up there, it was very, very overly comfortable in its own liberalness. So even if you haven't been to Ann Arbor, maybe you know a place like this that sort of pats itself on its back, right? Racial problems exist but not here. We do a good job with it. So Ann Arbor really thought of itself as, you know, very diverse and open-minded. And as a young kid, we'd hear a lot of this. I would hear a lot of this, and it didn't match up with what I was seeing around me. So even though we were being taught, you know, the American dream, that everyone, if they work hard enough, can get where they want to be. Everything's equal. There used to be problems but not anymore. And this didn't match with what I saw around me, which was that my peers of color, and particularly my African-American peers, were definitely not treated the same way as I was in the classroom, you know, off campus. We weren't supposed to go off campus for lunch, like in high school, but I could go to McDonald's and the cops didn't follow me. And the same wasn't true for my African-American peers, for example. So I was very perplexed from a young age, and I have early memories-- first grade is the earliest memory I have of this-- of being really confused and asking adult questions. Questions about why what we were being taught didn't match up with what I was experiencing and being really shut down. So knowing that, you know, this sort of rhetoric, national rhetoric, about colorblind meritocracy wasn't true-- I wouldn't have said it in that way as a six-year-old, but I knew it wasn't true--
but I didn't have the language or the facts or the information to sort of fight it and challenge it. So I got very, very frustrated. And so as I got older, I was very interested in studying how do people get these ideas about race in the first place? So that's how I got into it. So part of what I wanted to study was how do these ideas, many of which are stereotypes, come to be in the first place? Now, if I were to ask you to make a list of racial stereotypes about every racial group we could think of, you'd be able to come-- I won't make you do it. I do make my students do this. I won't make you do it. But you would be able to come up with a list for every racial group. You'd be able to come up with a list of stereotypes you know about white people and black people and Asian-American people, Latino-American, Arab-American, Native American. We could make lists, not necessarily that you believed, but that you have heard of. And if we made up those lists, one thing that they would all have in common is, first of all, that there are stereotypes about every racial group. Second of all, they would have in common that, you know, that they're dehumanizing, that they take, you know, they're dehumanizing in the sense that we make judgments about what people are like based on a racial category in which we place them. But there would also be some things that would be very different. And specifically, what would be different is,
to what effect those stereotypes affect people's life outcomes in important areas like education, health, employment, incarceration, and so on. And so what I'm getting at here is, even though there are stereotypes about all racial groups, not all stereotypes are equal. And what I mean is, the pattern that we see in those stereotypes is a privileging of whiteness. So it's not that there aren't stereotypes about white people, but if the stereotype about me is, I can't dance, I have no rhythm, I'm a little uptight, I think I know everything, that's very unlikely to mean that my teacher thinks that, consciously or unconsciously, that I'm not capable or ready to learn. It's very unlikely to mean that then a landlord will think I'm not a trustworthy tenant. It's unlikely to mean that an employer will think I just don't fit their culture, so on and so forth. So yes, there are stereotypes about every group, but they're not all created equal. The stereotypes that we see really privilege whiteness. And children see this in their everyday lives as well. They see it through media, through neighborhoods, through stores, through school, through textbooks, they're seeing these same patterns. So adults often think if we don't directly say racist things to kids, they won't develop racist ideas, but they're living in our society, which is privileging whiteness everywhere.
So the second thing I want to say about ideas about race, first, not all stereotypes are created equal.
Second, I want to make the point that race gets falsely naturalized. And what I mean by this is ideas in our society about race are often consciously or unconsciously thought of as natural or just common sense or just the way it is.
And what scholars like to say is that race is actually socially constructed. Has anyone heard that term before? Scholars always try to say things in two complicated ways. What that means is race is something that we have developed as a society to serve those in power. And that's why racial categories are different in the US than they are in Brazil, than they are in South Africa, and so on and so forth. Because the ways in which those in power wanted to build and maintain power was different in different political contexts. You see, I'm getting to that race and play stuff that Ayesha said I love, and it's true.
But the problem is we construct these ideas about race, but then also we attach ideas to what races are like, and that becomes subconscious thought as well.
So what I really want to disrupt here is the notion of that race is something natural and that the ways in which people behave are tied to that sort of natural category. Race is a constructed category that's constructed to serve those in power, and similarly with the ideas about race that get attached to those categories. So let me give you an example here. This is from the day after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. So here are two news stories from August 30, 2005. And what we see here is two different pictures of people engaged in the exact same behavior, in the exact same place, for the exact same reason. They stayed in New Orleans. They didn't realize their home would be flooded. They don't have food and water that they need. And so they have to go and get that food and water. The stores are not open. They take what they need to survive. But how is the person who appears to be of African descent described as being behaving?
Looting. And how are the people who appear to be white described as behaving? Finding what they need. So this is an example of what I mean about ideas about race and what people in different categories are like or prone to do, become subconscious thought and get falsely naturalized. Now, I don't know. I can't say that the person or the people who wrote these blurbs for these images, I can't say whether or not this was unconscious for them. There's possibility that it is. It's a possibility that it was conscious. But what I can say with certainty is that we're all bombarded with these kinds of messages constantly. So children are too from a young age. Basically, normalizing the white people's behavior or that white people should get the benefit of the doubt, and othering or criminalizing or not giving the benefit of the doubt to the behaviors of black and brown people. So this is just one example of the ways in which those ideas get pounded into us and eventually become subconscious thought.
So the third thing I want to say, third and last thing I want to say about ideas about race in general and racial stereotypes in particular,
is that stereotypes are not based in reality but in the perceiver's beliefs. Now, this is another sort of complicated academic psychology way of say the perceiver, talking about people as the perceiver. But what this means is how many of you have heard like, "Well, there's a reason that stereotype exists, right? It's kind of true." Or, "There's a grain of truth in all stereotypes." We hear this all the time. But what research shows is actually that is not at all accurate. What is accurate is that once I believe something, if I'm the perceiver, once I believe something, well, I'm looking for it. And so it's not that our stereotypes are accurate. It's that our brain selectively focuses on only those who fit our stereotype. And this is a very well-documented phenomena, that if I have a stereotype about any group and I meet someone who fits that stereotype, my brain says, "Ahahsee, I told you they were like that." But if I meet someone from that same group who does not fit that stereotype, does my brain say, "Huh, perhaps my worldview was incorrect. Perhaps I should shift it." No, it says that person is an exception to the rule. That person is not, he's not like the rest of them. He's one of the good ones. So this is what sort of leads to what we call implicit bias, which in a way, I mean, often bias is not implicit, it's explicit. But it can be even more insidious when it is implicit because we think, "I don't have a prejudice bone in my body." And we're not examining the ways in which these ideas are getting pushed into our subconscious and then, in fact, affecting our behavior.
So I was interested in my research. If this is how racialized thinking works in our society, how do these ideas come to be? And I was curious about this as a researcher. So I set about researching this, and I started with teenagers. And I love working with teenagers, and I had a great time studying teenagers, but I said, "Well, those ideas are really imprinted by then. I have to go younger." And then I had to go younger. How young do you think we have to go to learn about how children first start developing ideas about race? - Preschool. - Preschool, too? - Babies. - Babies? Yes, okay. I got a well-read group here. Okay, what we know is that infants categorize people by race by three to six months. Now, I know you're like, "You don't know what a three-month-old is thinking. How do you think you know what a three-month-old is thinking?" So let me tell you about these studies. The reason, first of all, that it says three to six months is the first study that studied this and found this was in 1997, and it only went as young as six months old. And it found it in six months old. Subsequent studies in the early 2000s repeated this and found this phenomena as young as three months old. So the way that we test this is non-verbally, of course. And this is just done with experiments of how long does an infant gaze at a new or novel face, a face of someone they don't know, whose same race as their primary caregiver or different race than their primary caregiver. Now, these studies are done with sort of one-race families. These studies were not done in multiracial families. That's often a question I get about this. These were done not in multiracial families. And so this means that we know that kids are starting to categorize by three to six months. This shouldn't be surprising to us. We do a lot to teach young kids to categorize. And categorizing in and of itself is not a problem. Noticing that I present as a woman is not necessarily a problem. It's when you start thinking that I wouldn't be a very good president because I'd be too emotional, that it becomes a problem, right? So it's not the categorization of the problem, but that's a step towards then when it does become a problem, which is when we reason about people's behaviors based on the categories in which we've placed them. And we have evidence of two-year-olds doing this, so using racial categories to reason about people's behaviors. Now, in the two-year-olds, though, this doesn't yet always match that pattern that we saw of privileging whiteness. So when we study this with two-year-olds, they are reasoning about when they're asked, like, do they look at a picture and they're asked to sort of think about or hypothesize about why that person might have been doing what they're depicted as doing. They will see race as a category around which to sort of reason about people's behaviors, but at this point, it doesn't always match that bias of privileging whiteness that we talked about a minute ago.
When do we see that? Well, not very far after. So by three years old is when we start seeing children more consistently expressing bias based on race. So what does this look like? What's going on? Am I saying that three-year-olds are little horrible people, little horrible racists? No, this is not what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is that there's the perfect storm with their cognitive development and with the messages that they're getting from society. So I want to talk about both those internal cognitive development factors and also the external societal factors that are leading, pushing kids towards this kind of racial bias.
So first, the internal factors.
So their immature cognitive structures in this preschool age means that they have trouble categorizing using multiple dimensions at once. And what this means is that if they think,
if they notice that people are alike in one way, like skin color, they presume they're alike in all these other ways. And this is what we call transductive reasoning. I keep using these boring academic terms. You're probably drifting over towards Emily. She's going to make it more simplified. Transductive reasoning just means like, I have light skin and mommy has light skin and daddy has light skin and we're all nice, so light skin people are nice.
Or I have brown skin and I'm good at coloring, so having brown skin makes you good at coloring. This is transductive reasoning and this is the internal factor. Those immature cognitive structures are really pushing them towards making these kinds of assumptions. But that doesn't explain why we see racial bias in particular in three to five year olds. In other words, transductive reasoning, the internal part, could just as easily lead kids to say, well, left-handed people are smart. Or tall people are nice. But we don't see them showing consistent bias based on left-handedness or height or hair length or whatever else, you know, one of the many, many other ways in which children could categorize people. We see them expressing bias based on race. So why race?
Well, Rebecca Bigler and her colleagues found that young children learn from their environments which categories seem to be the most important.
And then they will attach meaning on their own. So sometimes we have all heard stories about a kid saying something that seems racially biased. And the teachers say, well, they didn't learn it here, they must have learned it at home. And the parents say, well, they didn't learn it here, they must have learned it at school. Because our presumption is that an adult must have said this explicitly. And that's where the idea came from for the child. But in fact, what research shows us is that children are observing the world around them. It's what Bigler and her colleagues call a cognitive puzzle for them. We are teaching them the rules. We're trying to teach them, why does, you know, why does this yellow ball fit in this yellow hole in your toy? We're trying to teach them to figure out the rules. We're establishing rules for them. Well, they are noticing a pretty big pattern in their daily lives. And they want to know what the rule is. They want to try to figure out the rule. So, for example, Bigler and Patterson and Bigler, they found that this around gender. That if teachers say in class something that's seemingly as innocuous as, good morning boys and girls, versus good morning students,
which classroom do you think ends up with kids showing more gender bias?
The one where the notion that gender is an important category is being perpetuated. So the teacher doesn't have to say things that the kids came up with, like, girls are smarter and only boys can be president. The teacher wasn't explicitly saying those things, but if the teacher is showing that gender is an important category to her and in this classroom, then we see more gender bias popping up in the kids. So they're learning that it's a social category of significance and then they are attaching meaning on their own.
So children are learning from their environments. Everyone has heard or even said that children are sponges, soaking everything up. So we shouldn't be surprised that they're noticing patterns around race. So they are likely to notice that the people in their neighborhood, some may be left-handed, some may be right-handed, some may be tall, some may be short. Maybe some wear glasses and some don't. None of those seem to be organizing social categories for who lives in their neighborhood. But they're likely to notice that perhaps most people in their neighborhood have the same skin color. And I'm not equating race and skin color, but when we're talking about two and three-year-olds, they are not understanding race as a socially constructed category. They're mostly seeing it through skin color at that age. And so they see, okay, this seems to be an important organizing category. And if adults don't explain to them what's going on and why they're seeing these unequal patterns, the children generally infer that these are norms or rules and more so that they've been caused by meaningful, inherent differences between groups. And it's not just their neighborhoods. Perhaps they go to school or to the doctor or to the store and they see what positions, what jobs people are in, are racialized. Perhaps they see patterns there. Perhaps they're watching Disney movies and they see patterns about who seems to be the most favorite princess. Or perhaps they are looking at children's books and noticing that not many people like them seem to be showing up as often as they should be. So when they're seeing these patterns, they're trying to figure out what the rule is. And so it doesn't actually take an adult directly saying something to them. In fact, ironically, it's often adults' silence explaining why these patterns exist and how they're unfair that actually ingrains these biases into children.
Let me tell you about one study. Katz and Koffkin did a study where they followed 200 African-American and white children, meaning about half of their study participants were black children and about half of their study participants were white children. They followed them from six months through six and a half years. And what they found was at two and a half years old, all the children in their study were showing an in-group bias. This, again, is the psychology's way of saying, "My group is better than your group." And this is such a strong pattern that we see that right now, if I put you all in groups and you worked on something together for 10 minutes, I guarantee you that at the end you would think your group was better than everybody else's group. That's what we call an in-group bias. If you meet someone with your same birthday and you feel like you have a kinship with them, that's an in-group bias. Well, Katz and Koffkin are studying this with race. And what they're doing is they're giving kids photographs of new potential playmates. So they're saying, "Who would you like to be your friend?" And these are photos of kids that they don't know. It's not kids that they know. They're new faces. And what they find at two and a half years old is the white kids are choosing white potential playmates and the black kids are choosing black potential playmates. Now, this is perhaps what we could expect from the cognitive development, that transductive reasoning. They think, "I'm pretty okay, so this other person who looks like me is probably pretty okay as well." So if that's all that was going on, if it was only the sort of transductive reasoning at play, we'd expect to see that in-group bias continuing.
And we do see it continue for white children. White children rarely show anything other than a pro-white bias and in-group bias, rarely in these studies. But what we saw in this study and in other studies is that by three years old, just six months later, now a significant majority of both the white and black students are showing a pro-white bias.
The good news here is that by five years old, although the pro-white bias held, it had decreased slightly for African-American children.
And there have been other studies like this. I just want to show you one since I'm so interested in place. One done in England that found something similar. Overwhelmingly, white children show a pro-white bias, but children of color are also showing a pro-white bias, and less than half are showing a bias towards their in-group.
So what explains this? If we can't explain it all with the internal cognitive development,
we have to realize that it's these societal norms coming in. So the authors of this particular study argue that this is a reflection of societal norms. And they say that while children of color as young as five show evidence of being aware of and negatively impacted by stereotypes of their own group, white children rarely exhibit anything other than a pro-white bias. So it's those messages from society getting in that we talked about at the beginning, privileging whiteness, sending this message that whiteness is better. And so this is why families feel they have to fight back with racial socialization. Yet another academic word, but I want to define it for you here. This is a little bit of an older definition. So they use the term ethnic minority that probably isn't the term we would use today. But what Hughes and Chen define racial socialization is strategies that ethnic minority parents use to rear competent and effective children in a society that is largely stratified by race. So even if you've never heard of the term racial socialization, you probably engaged of it, or you've heard, you've engaged in it, or heard about the practices. So something like black parents having to teach their kids to switch codes, whether this means like the way that they speak in different environments or the way they dress in different environments or behave in different environments, that would be one example of racial socialization. The message that you have to work twice as hard and be twice as good to get maybe the same kind of attention as your white peers would be another example of racial socialization.
However, many studies, including Hughes and Chen's study, found that parents don't usually begin this kind of racial socialization, this kind of preparing their children for racial bias in the world until they're older, usually more like nine, so outside of the range of early education.
So what research finds is that black, Latino, Asian American, and Native American parents are much more likely than white parents to talk about racial identity and culture with young children. So things about history, heritage, pride, those kinds of things.
But that no racial group, in no racial group, are parents likely to discuss racial inequities with their young children. And again, as we've established, we know that children are observing these inequities, perhaps in media, on playgrounds, at schools, at stores, between neighborhoods. So parents feel, especially parents of color, feel more empowered to talk about racial identity with young children, but are still avoiding, and white parents also, still avoiding, helping their kids understand those patterns, uneven patterns, that I would call racial inequity, that they're seeing in their everyday lives. So why are parents avoiding this? Well, they're avoiding it because they think their children are too young to understand, and this goes for parents of all races.
And they don't want to poison their minds. Adults worry, not just parents, teachers too, that if we talk about these issues that we're shattering our children's innocence, that we're going to create more bias by bringing it up, we think they have pure minds and haven't noticed these things yet, perhaps because they haven't brought them up with us. But again, research shows that these ideas are getting solidified. Did any of you see that when CNN sort of did a reenactment of the Clark and Clark doll study a few years ago? So the Kenneth and Mamie Clark doll study was conducted at Howard University in the 1940s, and it was where African American children were shown a black doll and a white doll and asked questions like, "Which doll is the nice doll? Which doll is the bad doll?" Those kinds of things. And the kids tend to attach the negative traits to the black doll and the nice traits to the white doll. But then they're asked, "Okay, so which doll looks like you?" And they have to choose the one that they've just said all these nasty things about. This was also sort of redone by CNN with drawings instead of dolls. And the parents were like weeping, watching their children say all these things, and they're thinking, "I don't know where they got these ideas." Often we're not aware that children are developing these ideas, but we shouldn't be surprised because they're seeing patterns in the world around them. And unless we help them explain why those patterns are unfair and that they internalize them as just sort of the way it is, those ideas getting naturalized. So although parents and teachers are trying to do the right thing by avoiding talking about these issues until their children are older, what we know is that that silence backfires. Because what it does is we let go of our chance to help children understand and fight against this privileging of whiteness that they see around them. And instead we're allowing, we're basically through our silence, allowing society to send the messages that then get solidified in children's thinking.
So if their parents or teachers aren't talking to them about these things, does that mean that they're not learning about them? No. They're still observing the world around them. They're still trying to solve that cognitive puzzle. And those ideas are forming.
Okay. So when adults think they should be silent about this, or even when adults use colorblind language, when something about race comes up, it actually increases prejudice in children.
So how so? Well first, like I said, if there's silence, it allows children to believe or presume that the patterns that they see are natural and justified. But what about the times when kids bring up something about race and we use colorblind language to answer them? It doesn't, again, it doesn't get rid of their presumptions about race. It just teaches them that mom's not comfortable talking about that. Okay. So and then when with young children in school, do we tend to bring up racism? If we're going to teach young kids in school about racism, what are we teaching them about?
Black History Month, civil rights. So this is if they're going to get anything, they're going to get something about racism in the past. A path that seems so far away to them as to just be, might as well be dinosaurs. And so what we're teaching them is that racism was in the past. Thank goodness Rosa Parks and everything's better now. Aren't we lucky that they did those things to make it equal for everyone now? This is literally what we tell kids. And this in fact increases racial prejudice. Because when they see these patterns now that no one is explaining to them why they exist, their thinking is there used to be racism. Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King took care of it. Maybe I learned about Jackie Robinson too. And now there's no more problems. So when I see this unequalness by race that I see, it must be their own fault because Martin Luther King took care of that. So we're teaching them to recognize historical racism and leave it in the past as a thing of the past. So our silence or even the areas in which we are not silent is actually increasing prejudice for children.
So now what you really want to know, what can we do? So now I have to give my caveat at the beginning that the answer about what you should do with your particular child or your particular classroom really can depend on the child's age, their development level, their own racial identity, the racial context in which they're living. So for example the racial makeup of their neighborhood or their school or their extended family and so on. So there's a lot of particulars. But I do want to give you some broad recommendations
that can work for everyone.
And then I'm happy to email with you, you really can email me specific questions, but you've got to give me like a couple weeks to a month to get back to you. So don't be like, "Ugh, don't start getting mad at me until it's been like three weeks maybe, okay?
Don't get mad at me, give me some time." But I'm also going to hand out at the end, Yuling has some resource sheets with some things that I also think can be helpful in thinking through the specific situations that you and your child are facing.
Okay, so the first thing I'm going to say is that we have to get comfortable talking about racism and racial inequality period. And what I mean here is that if a child asks you about an issue like segregation in Pittsburgh,
if you don't know how to explain that to another adult, it's going to be impossible for you to try to explain it to a four-year-old in age-appropriate language. So the first thing we have to do is really take responsibility for educating ourselves, getting comfortable talking about this, and then actively putting into our schedule times that we're going to talk about it if we are people who don't already feel comfortable talking about it. So that's the first step, because it is difficult to talk in age-appropriate ways. So first we need to be comfortable answering these things or talking about this with other adults. But then what I want us to do is normalize talking about race with children. And here I really want you to avoid silence about race. So the first thing I want to say is ask questions. I get many, many stories about a child saying something that appears on its surface to be biased. And often parents will use colorblind language to sort of shut it down. They might say something like, "We don't want to hurt feelings," or "We don't say bad things about other people." So they're using colorblind language to shut down a conversation that was racialized in the first place. Again, this doesn't get kids to think that race doesn't matter. It gets them to think that mom's really freaked out about it when I bring up race, and I'll get in trouble if I talk about it. But it doesn't change their ideas or their thinking about race. So I really--I'm going to be honest with you. I use this with adults, too.
The "what makes you say that" is a great question to have in your back pocket when you're sitting on the airplane and someone next to you asks you something crazy when they find out what you do for a living. Huh, what makes you say that? It's important to put it back on the person to really explain to you their thinking. And I'm being silly here, but it's true. We're rarely going to change someone's mind if we say, "That's the most racist thing I ever heard, and I never want to-- I can't believe I had to sit next to you. Can I choose my-- you know, move my seat?" You're rarely going to change people's mind. But if you start with where they are and ask them to explain their thinking, you can begin to poke holes in reasoning in a way that may, in fact, eventually lead to their thinking differently. But back to kids. So I like this question with kids because often we presume from an adult standpoint that we know what they're thinking when they make some of these comments. So one example is from a Latino boy who said to his parents that he wanted to be white. And they were really upset about this because they felt like they did a good job of instilling pride in him and teaching him about his heritage and his culture and all these kinds of things.
And then when they went back and asked the question, you know, "What makes you say that?" or "Why are you thinking that?" It turned out that he wanted to be a doctor. And his doctor was white, and he had seen some other doctor on TV that was white. And so again, he's engaging in that transductive reasoning at that age. He wants to be a doctor. First step is to become white.
So sometimes we presume that we know what kids are talking about. So always starting with this, "What makes you say that?" Even if they are coming at it from the place you thought they were coming at it from, right, a more biased place, it can still-- you can still do this whole thing of sort of helping them see the illogic in their thinking by asking, "What makes you say that?" Well, because so-and-so in class was mean, so I think Asian people are mean.
Okay, well let's think of some other example, right? You can start poking holes in their logic. So what about so-and-so? You don't think she's mean. Or what about so-and-so? And by the way, you think Jeffrey's mean and he's white. So are we sure that meanness is tied to race? So when you ask them these questions, you can start sort of poking holes in that logic that is getting cemented from a young age. But let's not just wait for them to ask questions, because often they won't. If they're learning, maybe if not from you, but maybe from other adults at school or other places, that race is a taboo subject. So it's possible that they're not going to bring anything up or ask questions. Again, this doesn't mean that those ideas aren't forming.
So bring it up.
And don't use colorblind language. Bring it up in an explicit way. So let's think about a way in which we could do this. You can do this about very serious topics. You could bring up that you know that you are sad because there's another story today of police being unfair to a black or brown person. And this is something that you feel really frustrated and sad about because it's unfair. You can bring up serious things like that. You can bring up, let's say you're watching a cartoon, and you can say, "We've been watching this cartoon for a long time, and I haven't seen any black or brown characters." And you think of a cartoon that does have a black or brown character, why are they so hard to find or something like that? So you can bring it up in many ways that would be age appropriate, depending on the age of your child.
And I really, really recommend that you use the concept of fairness to help because if you spend time with children, you know that they are very keenly attuned to fairness, right? So this is something that's going to hook them right in. So use the concept of fairness. Let me give you an example of there was a white mother in Milwaukee of a white son who was four at the time who talked to me about an experience she had with her son. So in Milwaukee, Lake Michigan is the eastern border. And so you know the fancy part of town is along the lake because who doesn't want to live along the lake? So there's a long east-west thoroughfare called North Avenue that goes all the way from Lake Michigan through Milwaukee and out into the suburbs. And she and her son were going to a shopping mall out in the suburbs, but they lived on this east side right by the lake. And so they started the morning and almost all the way east on North Ave is a shiny new Whole Foods. So they started the day they're getting snacks or something to eat and then they drove out North Ave. When you cross over the highway and get on the other side of North Ave is overwhelmingly black population. Milwaukee is the most segregated city in the United States. And they're seeing, it depends on if you measure by the city or the metro area. So Detroit is usually number one because Detroit literally doesn't have enough non-black people to actually be by census measures the most segregated city in the U.S. Does that make sense? It's actually not diverse enough to be the most segregated city. But if you take the suburbs into account, Detroit is number one. Milwaukee is about 40% black, about 42% white, and then the rest is Latino and Asian. So it is generally has been for the last few census the most segregated city in the United States. So they're driving from the shiny, predominantly white east side by the lake all the way to North Ave and they're going through an overwhelmingly African-American neighborhood and then they make it out again to the predominantly white suburbs. But what the son asked along the way is, "Where's the Whole Foods?
How come there's no Whole Foods here?
And then, well then, where do these people get their groceries?"
And so she wasn't sure how to answer this with her son and I encourage her to really talk about unfairness. That is unfair that there's no Whole Foods in this neighborhood and it is unfair precisely because there are black and brown people here. So it's not a coincidence. This is unfairness to really talk about that with him. And then he understood that. But then safety is important and I'm going to stay here, especially for children of color. So what you don't want to do is be like, "Well, life's going to treat you unfair, kid. Good night."
Right? And leave it at that. We want to be honest with them but we don't want to crush them. And so empowerment is critical. Please use the concept of fairness. It'll help you every time. But don't leave that on its own. Definitely, it's important to empower kids. So in this particular story, what I encourage her to do was to talk to her child about people who are working and actively fighting against this. And introduce kids to people in your neighborhood who are doing something about this. In this case, in Milwaukee, Mr. Will Allen had one, a MacArthur Genius grant for his work called Growing Power, which is urban farming and urban fisheries.
And so she could give this as one example. And there's many examples in Milwaukee, but here was one example of someone who was working against this kind of unfairness. Because did her son think it was fair that white people should have access to fresh and healthy food down the block and that black people should not? No, of course he didn't think that was fair. So what could we do about this? So let's go and meet Mr. Will Allen and see what he's doing and maybe we can help out. So that's one example. It's a small example. But this empowerment part is especially important, especially for children of color. And thinking about learning about the unfairness, but then learning about the ways in which people have fought it, are still fighting it, and how they and you as their family members can be involved in that fight. It has to be really tactile at this age. Kids are learning concretely. They need to feel it. They need to experience. They need to see it. You can't sort of just tell them about it. They need to do it. Hands on. I wanted on the last point when we were talking about the concept of fairness, I wanted to just read you a quote from Deborah Van Osdale and Joe Fagan. They did a study in the Chicago suburbs of a preschool called the First R that really showed about how adults don't think kids are talking about race, but kids in their own environments are negotiating power, and race is one tool that they use to negotiate that power with one another. So Van Osdale and Fagan give this advice.
"Don't encourage children to believe that negative racial talk or discriminatory action is the conduct of only sick individuals,
or that it indicates a peculiar character flaw or just bad behavior." In other words, don't individualize it to just a mean person. Talk about the fact that the social world we live in is unfair to people of color simply because they are people of color, and that persisting racial and ethnic inequalities are unjust and morally wrong. Make it clear that racial ethnic prejudice and discrimination are part of a larger society that needs reform, and not just something that individuals do. Because when we individualize it too much, it's so easy for the kids to be like, "Oh, well then that has nothing to do with me. I'm good, so nothing to do with me." So it's very important to think about that unfairness on a social scale, and I'll get back to that in just a minute, about how we can help young kids understand things like social scale. So modeling behavior for your kids is very important. How many of you think your kids are buying the do as I say, not as I do?
They're not going for that. So if you say things to them like, "It's important to have a diverse group of friends," or, "We value diversity, racial diversity in this household and we love everyone," and then they see you're only having folks of your own race over, they know it's not that important to you. That's just one example, right? If teachers say in the classroom, "Oh, we care about being fair to everyone," but then the kids see different patterns of who's getting kicked out of the room or who's getting placed in what reading group, they know it's not that fair to you, that important to you, excuse me. So kids are hearing what we say, but they also see when our behaviors don't match, and they're going to put more stock in our behaviors than in what we say. So it's really important for us to model for children. Now, the other modeling behaviors for children, though, doesn't mean you have to always have the answers. So a lot of times adults, I'm just keeping watching my time, because I get all excited about this and I can go over it. A lot of times adults don't want to talk about these issues with kids because they're not sure that they'll say the right thing. They're not sure they have enough expertise to answer all the questions. But what you can model for children and what will matter, regardless of your knowledge level, is respectful and open conversation about race. And you can tell them, like, let's say you're a teacher and they ask you something and you don't know the answer. It is perfectly fine to say, "I'm frustrated and kind of angry that I don't know the answer to that, because I think the reason I didn't learn it in school was because of this kind of unfairness that we're talking about." I think I learned the stories about white people and the things they did, and I didn't learn the stories about the things other people did, and that wasn't fair. So I don't know the answer, but I'd like to research it and come back to you, or maybe we could work on it together. But sort of just openly acknowledging, "Gosh, I don't know that, and I'm frustrated because I think it's part of this racial unfairness." That's a good thing to model. You don't have to always know the answer. So don't avoid the discussion because you're scared of not knowing the answer.
Okay. Especially for these young kids we were talking about, encourage complex critical thinking. So remember I said about how their cognitive structures are still developing and they're having trouble seeing people by different dimensions at once. Like, "I have brown skin and I'm good at coloring, so brown skin makes you good at coloring." Try to really disrupt that by getting them to think about people in multiple dimensions at once. So again, you can help them think about someone who has the same skin color as they do, but who doesn't have the same talent or characteristic that they have. And then maybe help them think about someone who has a different skin color than they do, but is also good at drawing. Like maybe Emily over here, for example. All right, so those are ways that we can get people to think in more complex-- get little kids who are prone to this simplistic thinking, thinking in more complex ways. And once you're training them to do this, it'll actually-- they'll start doing it on their own. And it'll expand out into other areas besides race as well.
Something that you can do no matter the age of your child or the children with whom you work is to teach critical race literacy. And so what I mean by this is to help them identify and pick out and critique racialized messages in the world around them. So that example that I gave about, you know, if you were watching the cartoon and you said, gosh, I'm not seeing anyone who looks like us in this cartoon or I'm not seeing any black and brown people in this cartoon, that's an example of teaching critical race literacy. And the thing about this is everyone can do this. It doesn't matter the racial demographics of your neighborhood. It doesn't matter the age of your child.
I know I did this in college and nobody ever wanted to watch a movie with me because we couldn't ever just watch the movie, right? So this is something that you can start teaching your kids. So I don't like how this cartoon seems to be only showing Native Americans in one way. You know, I know in real life Native Americans dress and speak and behave in all different kinds of ways. So why is this movie only showing Native Americans in one way? It's bothering me and I don't think it's fair. Can you think of any other movies we've watched that show Native Americans in a different way?
Maybe they can, maybe they can't. If they can't, let's see if we can find one together. So here's an example of you bringing up things and pretty soon they're going to start being able to do that on their own because unfortunately there's no shortage of things to critique in pop culture around racial representation.
And then the last recommendation I want to make here is to connect the past with the present and future. So here's where I'm getting back to that thing where we tend to only teach kids about racism in the past.
And again, this has real consequences. We know it actually increases racial prejudice in children. And I know this isn't what adults intend, but now that we know that that is the outcome, we need to work to try to change it. So if we only teach them about what racism looks like in the past, segregated baseball teams, fire hoses, turned on marchers, then that's how they define racism and that's the only racism they're able to recognize.
And what that means is that they're not going to be able to recognize contemporary, perhaps more subtle, not always, but occasionally more subtle forms of racism. And if we can't identify it, we can't do anything about it. So we need to teach kids also about how racism manifests today. But how do you with a really young child say, well, even though that happened a long time ago, it's built into our structures, and therefore it's still around, right? The three-year-old, the four-year-old isn't going to get that or understand that. So one activity that I like to do with kids is what I call a spiderweb activity. And this is where if you have a group of kids, you give them each a ball of string and have them go crazy and make a spiderweb and get it as tangled up as you can. If you only have one kid, you could maybe do this with a friendship bracelet or something like that. But the goal is get it as tangled up as it can. They'll have a great time doing that. And then once they're done, you say, great, now untangle it. Well, that's a lot less fun and a lot more work. They're not going to get very far through it, and then that's it. And we can say, well, you know that unfairness we've been talking about? It has been tangled up in America for a long time. Before mommy was born, before grandmommy was born, before grandmommy's grandmommy was born, it's been really tangled. And you learned about Martin Luther King, and he did a lot of untangling. And you learned about Rosa Parks, and she did a lot of untangling.
So we've made great progress, but there's a lot of untangling left to do. So here's a way that you can tell-- you can teach kids about structures in a very concrete way. You know, you don't have to be over their heads. And then you get to that empower. So what are things that you as a family can do to help move the needle on social justice? And then every time you do something like that, okay, untangle a little bit more. Now, the only problem is one day they're going to get all untangled, and they're going to be like, "Mom, I fixed racism!" And that's when you'll have to tell them that, well, unfortunately, you know, this unfairness in our society is even more tangled than our spiderweb was. So we have to still keep doing work to help untangle. So there's ways that you can really take these big complex things and make it digestible for even the youngest kids in ways that they understand. And again, I know that adults don't mean to intentionally increase prejudice when we teach and talk about race in the ways that we traditionally have, but we need to disrupt it. It's not about intent. It's about the outcomes for our children. And the outcomes are an increasing of prejudice and really furthering the system of racism. So I will stop there. Thank you.
[applause]
In My Skin is a production of the University of Pittsburgh PRIDE program, which stands for Positive Racial Identity Development in Early Education. You can find every episode at racepride.pit.edu. PRIDE is also part of Pitt's Office of Child Development, and you can find out more about that at OCD.pitt.edu. Music for this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions.
This episode was produced by me, Adam Flango, with help from PRIDE director Aisha White and PRIDE director of engagement, Minina Jackson.