No Pride in Prejudice: Teaching Children the Value of Diversity

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“When children come into the world, they are natural allies or friends to each other,” agrees Cherry Steinwender, co-executive director of the Center for the Healing of Racism in Houston. “Little children have big ears. They simply act on stuff they hear from adults.” Some psychologists disagree. One of them is Dr. Frances Aboud, a professor of developmental psychology at McGill University in Quebec, Canada who studies how children develop racism. Through her research, she has discovered that North American children seem to have an innate, negative response to people who look different. Her research is supported by that of other psychologists, such as Dr. Mahzarin Banaji at Harvard University. “The roots of prejudice —in the form of preference for what’s familiar, one’s own group, and for what’s socially dominant — are in us from the start,” Dr. Banaji says. “If you are interested in the question of a simple preference, such as eye gaze, we see that even infants show a preference for their own group. We suspect this preference is based in familiarity.” New research being conducted by Harvard graduate student Katie Kinzler even suggests that infants show something we might call a “real preference”: they are more likely to take a toy offered by somebody who speaks their language as opposed to a foreign language. “There appears to be a natural, possibly biologically-based, inborn bias toward preference for those who appear to be similar to us,” says Dr. Cindy Carlson, the program director of the school psychology program at UT-Austin. Despite this innate tendency toward racial bias, researchers say parents can —and should— help their children overcome it. Much of children’s development is learning to think and behave in ways that are appropriate and useful to society, says Dr. Carlson, which is why it’s not surprising that the message of most religious is to treat others equally. The Persistence of Prejudice Dr. Aboud’s research seems to suggest that prejudice begins to decline in children about the time they become cognitively mature and are able to process a person’s individual qualities—typically around seven years of age. 4
Despite this, prejudice continues into adulthood. Dr. Banaji says all human beings reveal some form of prejudice: on age bias tests, close to 90% of subjects favor young people; on race bias tests, 80% of white and Asian subjects demonstrate a favoritism for whites; and on the gender-career tests, 75% of male subjects, and an even larger percentage of female subjects, associate females with family rather than career. These findings may seem at odds with the conventional wisdom that prejudice has dramatically declined since the repeal of the Jim Crow laws 40 years ago. It’s true, says Dr. Killen of the University of Maryland, that explicit prejudice in terms of calling people names or passing laws based on skin color has decreased. However, people’s implicit prejudices have not diminished, she says. “Today, people don’t care whom they sit next to on a bus [or] train,” she says. “But who their child is friends with or gets married to is a big deal.” Cherry Steinwender, of the Center for the Healing of Racism in Houston, points out that, while adults may work in diverse companies, their behavior mirrors that of the playground: they often associate with colleagues who look like them. “Many of us cling to our stereotypes because it seems to make life easier,” she says. “It means we don’t have to think.” Raising Children Free Of Prejudice So how do parents raise children free of prejudice? By talking to them about it, says Dr. Bigler. Not talking to kids about prejudice can lead to some startling assumptions on their part. For instance, in a recent study, Dr. Bigler queried children about U.S. presidents. Children who had never discussed why all of the presidents were white men developed their own rather shocking reasons for the gender disparity. For example, roughly onethird of African American children said the reason all U.S. presidents were white is because it’s against the law for a black person to be president. Dr. Bigler says the results of the study suggest that parents have to talk with their children openly and explicitly about what race means if they want their children not to be racist. 5
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No Pride in Prejudice: Teaching Children the Value of Diversity

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