by Chris Bober
Given the political and social climate of the last few months, America needs to have a meaningful, national dialogue about race and we need to have it soon.
Of course, I’m not the first to argue this point.
James Johnson, in his recent Imagine 2050 blog, “Can We Talk? (About Race)” underscored the detrimental impact our lack of communication on issues regarding racism, oppression, and systems of privilege has on us as adults. This is especially true when we continue to “(talk) over each other, at each other, and about each other.” Therefore, it should come as no surprise that when we try to talk with our children about race we have similar difficulties.
In a Newsweek article entitled “See Baby Discriminate,” Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, authors of the new book “Nurtureshock: New Thinking About Children,” explore recent scientific research in the field of child development and discuss race and children’s perception of difference. In the article, a study which included over a hundred Caucasian families is featured. Its participants were divided into three groups. One third was asked to watch videos with multicultural themes and to use the videos to set-up conversations with their children about race, another third was asked to watch the videos and not have a conversation, and the final third was asked to simply bring up the discussions without the aid of the videos. The goal was to assess the childrens’ “racial attitudes” before and after each experiment. Immediately, five of the families dropped out and said they did not want to have conversations with their children about race. Out of the remaining families, how many actually followed through on the discussion component?
Only six families.
What the authors and the researcher involved in the study found is that the majority of the families wanted their children to grow up colorblind and they felt discussing racial issues was harmful. However, when the six families made the effort to address race, skin color, and difference (in explicit, regular conversations) their children showed significant improvement in their racial attitudes.
The authors also found many of our assumptions about what children perceive about race to be false. Three other studies in the article challenge our notions of nature vs. nurture. The take away message from these studies is that children as young as 6-months-old can recognize differences in skin color (through a commonly used photographic test), 4 and 5-year-olds, under certain circumstances, demonstrate in-group favoritism, and that when asked, 3-year-old white children will pick friends of their own race 86% of the time. The latter study used a deck of cards containing a wide variety of children faces.
So why is this important and what does it have to do with communication?
According to the authors, when it comes to addressing these important issues with our children, we struggle and get it wrong, just like we do with one another. The conventional wisdom within certain well-intentioned white families has been that talking to young children about skin color or race will make them more likely to notice differences and to discriminate based on those differences at an earlier age. Some parents fear their children will begin to choose friends based on racial similarities or voice an abhorrent preference for their own race if they develop racial consciousness at a young age. Therefore, these parents tend to avoid the conversation.
The problem, it would seem, is that young children have this consciousness and are already making decisions based upon race.
Instead of making an attempt to promote cultural competence within the family, parents have relied on the colorblind theory or the environment (multicultural or otherwise) to promote a sense of equality and level-headedness in their children. Taken a step further, the hope is that a diverse environment will lead to an elimination of any future race based discrimination in our society.
Therefore, we’re relying on a system which is run by adults who aren’t communicating well with one another and hoping that if we don’t say anything to our children maybe they won’t notice color or difference; that it will just slip by them. This assumption is a part of our communication disorder and is sending the wrong message to our children—a message that everyone is on an equal playing field and that it is not OK to talk about race or difference.
Indeed, many of us know that difference isn’t the problem; it’s the meanings that we assign to those differences. As responsible parents we have to find ways to communicate messages like this to our children.
If we don’t, how can we ever expect to talk with one another?