NurtureShock (7 page)

“How many Black people are nice?”

(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)

Over the test, the descriptive adjective “nice” was replaced with over twenty other adjectives like “Dishonest,” “Pretty,”
“Curious,” and “Snobby.” If the kid was too shy to answer, he could point to a picture that corresponded to each of the possible
answers.

Of the families, Vittrup sent a third of them home with typical multiculturally-themed videos for a week, such as an episode
of
Sesame Street
where the characters visit an African American family’s home, and an episode of
Little Bill
, where the entire neighborhood comes together to clean the local park.

In truth, Vittrup didn’t expect that children’s racial attitudes would change very much from just watching these videos. Prior
research by Bigler had shown that multicultural curriculum in schools has far less impact than we intend it to—largely because
the implicit message “We’re all friends” is too vague for children to understand it refers to skin color.

Yet Vittrup figured that if the educational videos were supplemented with explicit conversations from parents, there would
be a significant impact. So a second group of families got the videos, and Vittrup told these parents to use the videos as
the jumping-off point for a conversation about interracial friendship. She gave these sets of parents a checklist of points
to make, echoing the theme of the shows. “I really believed it was going to work,” Vittrup recalled. Her Ph.D. depended upon
it.

The last third were also given the checklist of topics, but no videos. These parents were supposed to bring up racial equality
on their own, every night for five nights. This was a bit tricky, especially if the parents had never put names to kids’ races
before. The parents were to say things like:

Some people on TV or at school have different skin color than us. White children and Black children and Mexican children often
like the same things even though they come from different backgrounds. They are still good people and you can be their friend.
If a child of a different skin color lived in our neighborhood, would you like to be his friend?

At this point, something interesting happened. Five of the families in the last group abruptly quit the study. Two directly
told Vittrup, “We don’t want to have these conversations with our child. We don’t want to point out skin color.”

Vittrup was taken aback—these families had volunteered knowing full-well it was a study of children’s racial attitudes. Yet
once told this required talking openly about race, they started dropping out. Three others refused to say why they were quitting,
but their silence made Vittrup suspect they were withdrawing for the same reason.

This avoidance of talking about race was something Vittrup also picked up in her initial test of parents’ racial attitudes.
It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin, every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity.
But Vittrup had also noticed, in the original surveys, that hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children
directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles in the home—like “Everybody’s equal” or “God made all of us”
or “Under the skin, we’re all the same”—but they had almost never called attention to racial differences.

They wanted their children to grow up color-blind. But Vittrup could also see from her first test of the kids that they weren’t
color-blind at all. Asked how many white people are mean, these children commonly answered “Almost none.” Asked how many blacks
are mean, many answered “Some” or “A lot.” Even kids who attended diverse schools answered some of the questions this way.

More disturbingly, Vittrup had also asked all the kids a very blunt question: “Do your parents like black people?” If the
white parents never talked about race explicitly, did the kids know that their parents liked black people?

Apparently not: 14% said, outright, “No, my parents don’t like black people”; 38% of the kids answered, “I don’t know.” In
this supposed race-free vacuum being created by parents, kids were left to improvise their own conclusions—many of which would
be abhorrent to their parents.

Vittrup hoped the families she’d instructed to talk about race would follow through.

After watching the videos, the families returned to the Children’s Research Lab for retesting. As Vittrup expected, for the
families who had watched the videos without any parental reinforcement and conversation, there was no improvement over their
scores from a week before. The message of multicultural harmony—seemingly so apparent in the episodes—wasn’t affecting the
kids at all.

But to her surprise, after she crunched the numbers, Vittrup learned that neither of the other two groups of children (whose
parents talked to them about interracial friendship) had improved their racial attitudes. At first look, the study was a failure.
She felt like she was watching her promising career vanish before her own eyes. She’d had visions of her findings published
in a major journal—but now she was just wondering if she’d even make it through her dissertation defense and get her Ph.D.

Scrambling, Vittrup consulted her dissertation advisors until she eventually sought out Bigler.

“Whether the study worked or not,” Bigler replied, “it’s still telling you something.” Maybe there was something interesting
in why it had no effect?

Combing through the parents’ study diaries, Vittrup noticed an aberration. When she’d given the parents the checklist of race
topics to discuss with their kindergartners, she had also asked them to record whether this had been a meaningful interaction.
Did the parents merely mention the item on the checklist? Did they expand on the checklist item? Did it lead to a true discussion?

Almost all the parents reported merely mentioning the checklist items, briefly, in passing. Many just couldn’t talk about
race, and they quickly reverted to the vague “Everybody’s equal” phrasing.

Of all the parents who were told to talk openly about interracial friendship, only six managed to do so. All of those six
kids greatly improved their racial attitudes.

Vittrup sailed through her dissertation and is now an assistant professor at Texas Women’s University in Dallas. Reflecting
later about the study, Vittrup realized how challenging it had been for the families: “A lot of parents came to me afterwards
and admitted they just didn’t know what to say to their kids, and they didn’t want the wrong thing coming out of the mouth
of their kids.”

We all want our children to be unintimidated by differences and have the social skills to integrate in a diverse world. The
question is, do we make it worse, or do we make it better, by calling attention to race?

Of course, the election of President Barack Obama has marked the beginning of a new era in race relations in the United States—but
it hasn’t resolved the question as to what we should tell children about race. If anything, it’s pushed that issue to the
forefront. Many parents have explicitly pointed out Obama’s brown skin to their young children, to reinforce the message that
anyone can rise to become a leader, and anyone—regardless of skin color—can be a friend, be loved, and be admired.

But still others are thinking it’s better to say nothing at all about the president’s race or ethnicity—because saying something
about it unavoidably teaches a child a racial construct. They worry that even a positive statement (“It’s wonderful that a
black person can be president”) will still encourage the child to see divisions within society. For them, the better course
is just to let a young child learn by the example; what kids see is what they’ll think is normal. For their early formative
years, at least, let the children know a time when skin color does not matter.

A 2007 study in the
Journal of Marriage and Family
found that out of 17,000 families with kindergartners, 45% said they’d never, or almost never, discussed race issues with
their children. But that was for all ethnicities. Nonwhite parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than
white parents; 75% of the latter never, or almost never, talk about race.

For decades, we assumed that children will only see race when society points it out to them. That approach was shared by much
of the scientific community—the view was that race was a societal issue best left to sociologists and demographers to figure
out. However, child development researchers have increasingly begun to question that presumption. They argue that children
see racial differences as much as they see the difference between pink and blue—but we tell kids that “pink” means for girls
and “blue” is for boys. “White” and “black” are mysteries we leave them to figure out on their own.

It takes remarkably little for children to develop in-group preferences once a difference has been recognized. Bigler ran
an experiment in three preschool classrooms, where four- and five-year-olds were lined up and given T-shirts. Half the kids
were given blue T-shirts, half red. The children wore the shirts for three weeks. During that time, the teachers never mentioned
their colors and never again grouped the kids by shirt color. The teachers never referred to the “Blues” or the “Reds.” Bigler
wanted to see what would happen to the children naturally, once color groupings had been established.

The kids didn’t segregate in their behavior. They played with each other freely at recess. But when asked which color team
was better to belong to, or which team might win a race, they chose their own color. They liked the kids in their own group
more and believed they were smarter than the other color. “The Reds never showed hatred for Blues,” Bigler observed. “It was
more like, ‘Blues are fine, but not as good as us.’ ” When Reds were asked how many Reds were nice, they’d answer “All of
us.” Asked how many Blues were nice, they’d answer “Some.” Some of the Blues were mean, and some were dumb—but not the Reds.

Bigler’s experiment seems to show how children will use whatever you give them to create divisions—seeming to confirm that
race becomes an issue only if we make it an issue. So why does Bigler think it’s important to talk to children about race,
as early as age three?

Her reasoning is that kids are
developmentally
prone to in-group favoritism; they’re going to form these preferences on their own. Children categorize everything from food
to toys to people at a young age. However, it takes years before their cognitive abilities allow them to successfully use
more than one attribute to categorize anything. In the meantime, the attribute they rely on is that which is the most clearly
visible.

Bigler contends that once a child identifies someone as most closely resembling himself, the child likes that person the most.
And the child extends their shared appearances much further—believing that everything else he likes, those who look similar
to him like as well. Anything he doesn’t like thus belongs to those who look the least similar to him. The spontaneous tendency
to assume your group shares characteristics—such as niceness, or smarts—is called
essentialism.
Kids never think groups are random.

We might imagine we’re creating color-blind environments for children, but differences in skin color or hair or weight are
like differences in gender—they’re plainly visible. We don’t have to label them for them to become salient. Even if no teacher
or parent mentions race, kids will use skin color on their own, the same way they use T-shirt colors.

Within the past decade or so, developmental psychologists have begun a handful of longitudinal studies to determine exactly
when children develop bias—the general premise being that the earlier the bias manifests itself, the more likely it is driven
by developmental processes.

Dr. Phyllis Katz, then a professor at the University of Colorado, led one such study—following 100 black children and 100
white children for their first six years. She tested these children and their parents nine times during those six years, with
the first test at six months old.

How do researchers test a six-month-old? It’s actually a common test in child development research. They show babies photographs
of faces, measuring how long the child’s attention remains on the photographs. Looking at a photograph longer does not indicate
a preference for that photo, or for that face. Rather, looking longer means the child’s brain finds the face to be out of
the ordinary; she stares at it longer because her brain is trying to make sense of it. So faces that are familiar actually
get shorter visual attention. Children will stare significantly longer at photographs of faces that are a different race from
their parents. Race itself has no ethnic meaning, per se—but children’s brains are noticing skin color differences and trying
to understand their meaning.

When the kids turned three, Katz showed them photographs of other children and asked them to choose whom they’d like to have
as friends. Of the white children 86% picked children of their own race. When the kids were five and and six, Katz gave these
children a small deck of cards, with drawings of people on them. Katz told the children to sort the cards into two piles any
way they wanted. Only 16% of the kids used gender to split the piles. Another 16% used a variety of other factors, like the
age or the mood of the people depicted. But 68% of the kids used race to split the cards, without any prompting.