NurtureShock (9 page)

All told, the odds of a white high-schooler in America having a best friend of another race is only 8%. Those odds barely
improve for the second-best friend, or the third best, or the fifth. For blacks, the odds aren’t much better: 85% of black
kids’ best friends are also black. Cross-race friends also tend to share a single activity, rather than multiple activities;
as a result, these friendships are more likely to be lost over time, as children transition from middle school to high school.

It is tempting to believe that because their generation is so diverse, today’s children grow up knowing how to get along with
people of every race. But numerous studies suggest that this is more of a fantasy than a fact.

I can’t help but wonder—would the track record of desegregation be so mixed if parents reinforced it, rather than remaining
silent?

Over the course of our research, we about race when they’re very young? What jumped out at Phyllis Katz, in her study of 200
black and white children, was that parents are very comfortable talking to their children about gender, and they work very
hard to counterprogram against boy-girl stereotypes. That ought to be our model for talking about race. The same way we remind
our daughters, “Mommies can be doctors just like daddies,” we ought to be telling all children that doctors can be any skin
color. It’s not complicated
what to say.
It’s only a matter of how often we reinforce it.

Shushing children when they make an improper remark is an instinctive reflex, but often the wrong move. Prone to categorization,
children’s brains can’t help but attempt to generalize rules from the examples they see. It’s the worst kind of embarrassment
when a child blurts out, “Only brown people can have breakfast at school,” or “You can’t play basketball, you’re white, so
you have to play baseball.” But shushing them only sends the message that this topic is unspeakable, which makes race more
loaded, and more intimidating.

Young children draw conclusions that may make parents cringe, even if they’ve seen a few counterexamples. Children are not
passive absorbers of knowledge; rather, they are active constructors of concepts. Bigler has seen many examples where children
distort their recollections of facts to fit the categories they’ve already formed in their minds. The brain’s need for categories
to fit perfectly is even stronger at age seven than at age five, so a second grader might make more distortions than a kindergartner
to defend his categories. To a parent, it can seem as if the child is getting worse at understanding a diverse world, not
better.

To be effective, researchers have found, conversations about race have to be explicit, in unmistakeable terms that children
understand. A friend of mine repeatedly told her five-year-old son, “Remember, everybody’s equal.” She thought she was getting
the message across. Finally, after seven months of this, her boy asked, “Mommy, what’s ‘equal’ mean?”

Bigler ran a study where children read brief historical biographies of famous African Americans. For instance, in a biography
of Jackie Robinson, they read that he was the first African American in the major leagues. But only half heard about how he’d
previously been relegated to the Negro leagues, and how he suffered taunts from white fans. Those facts—in five brief sentences—were
omitted in the version given to the other half of the children.

After the two-week history class, the children were surveyed on their racial attitudes. White children who got the full story
about historical discrimination had significantly better attitudes toward blacks than those who got the neutered version.
Explicitness works.

“It also made them feel some guilt,” Bigler added. “It knocked down their glorified view of white people.” They couldn’t justify
in-group superiority.

Bigler is very cautious about taking the conclusion of her Jackie Robinson study too far. She notes the bios were explicit,
but about
historical
discrimination. “If we’d had them read stories of contemporary discrimination from today’s newspapers, it’s quite possible
it would have made the whites defensive, and only made the blacks angry at whites.”

Another scholar has something close to an answer on that. Dr. April Harris-Britt, a clinical psychologist and professor at
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studies how minority parents help their children develop a racial identity from
a young age. All minority parents at some point tell their children that discrimination is out there, but they shouldn’t let
it stop them. However, these conversations are not triggered by their children bringing it up. Rather, the parent often suffers
a discriminatory incident, and it pushes him to decide, “It’s time I prepared my child for this.”

Is it good for them? Harris-Britt found that some preparation for bias was beneficial to children, and that it was necessary—94%
of African American eighth graders reported to Harris-Britt that they’d felt discriminated against in the prior three months.
But if children heard these preparation-for-bias warnings often (rather than just occasionally), they were significantly less
likely to connect their successes to effort, and much more likely to blame their failures on their teachers—whom they saw
as biased against them.

Harris-Britt warns that frequent predictions of future discrimination ironically become as destructive as experiences of actual
discrimination: “If you overfocus on those types of events, you give the children the message that the world is going to be
hostile—you’re just not valued and that’s just the way the world is.”

Preparation-for-bias is not, however, the only way minorities talk to their children about race. The other broad category
of conversation, in Harris-Britt’s analysis, is ethnic pride. From a very young age, minority children are coached to be proud
of their ethnic history. She found that this was exceedingly good for children’s self-confidence; in one study, black children
who’d heard messages of ethnic pride were more engaged in school and more likely to attribute their success to their effort
and ability.

That leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If “black pride” is good for African American children,
where does that leave white children? It’s horrifying to imagine kids being “proud to be white.” Yet many scholars argue that’s
exactly what children’s brains are already computing. Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group
with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth,
and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence. So a pride message would not just be abhorrent—it’d be
redundant.

When talking to teens, it’s helpful to understand how their tendency to form groups and cliques is partly a consequence of
American culture. In America, we encourage individuality. Children freely and openly develop strong preferences—defining their
self-identity by the things they like and dislike. They learn to see differences. Though singular identity is the long-term
goal, in high school this identity-quest is satisfied by forming and joining distinctive subgroups. So, in an ironic twist,
the more a culture emphasizes individualism, the more the high school years will be marked by subgroupism. Japan, for instance,
values social harmony over individualism, and children are discouraged from asserting personal preferences. Thus, less groupism
is observed in their high schools.

The security that comes from belonging to a group, especially for teens, is palpable. Traits that mark this membership are—whether
we like it or not—central to this developmental period. University of Michigan researchers did a study that shows just how
powerful this need to belong is, and how much it can affect a teen.

The researchers brought 100 Detroit black high school students in for one-on-one interviews. They asked each teen to rate
himself on how light or dark he considered his skin tone to be. Then the scholars asked about the teens’ confidence levels
in social circles and school. From the high schools, the researchers obtained the teens’ grade point averages.

Particularly for the boys, those who rated themselves as dark-skinned blacks had the highest GPAs. They also had the highest
ratings for social acceptance and academic confidence. The boys with lighter skin tones were less secure socially and academically.

The researchers subsequently replicated these results with students who “looked Latino.”

The researchers concluded that doing well in school could get a minority teen labeled as “acting white.” Teens who were visibly
sure of membership within the minority community were protected from this insult and thus more willing to act outside the
group norm. But the light-skinned blacks and the Anglo-appearing Hispanics—their status within the minority felt more precarious.
So they acted more in keeping with their image of the minority identity—even if it was a negative stereotype—in order to solidify
their status within the group.

Over the course of our research, we heard many stories of how people—from parents to teachers—were struggling to talk about
race with their children. For some, the conversations came up after a child had made an embarrassing comment in public. A
number had the issue thrust on them, because of an interracial marriage or an international adoption. Still others were just
introducing children into a diverse environment, wondering when and if the timing was right.

But the story that most affected us came from a small town in rural Ohio. Two first-grade teachers, Joy Bowman and Angela
Johnson, had agreed to let a professor from Ohio State University, Dr. Jeane Copenhaver-Johnson, observe their classrooms
for the year. Of the 33 children, about two-thirds identified themselves as “white” or even “hillbilly,” while the others
were black or of mixed-race descent.

It being December—just one month after Copenhaver’s project had begun—the teachers both decided to follow up a few other Santa
stories they’d read to their classes with
Twas the Night B’fore Christmas,
Melodye Rosales’ retelling of the Clement C. Moore classic.

The room already dotted with holiday paraphernalia, Johnson had all of her first graders gather around the carpet for story
time. As she began reading, the kids were excited by the book’s depiction of a family waiting for Santa to come. A couple
children burst out with stories of planned Christmas decorations and expectations for Santa’s arrival to their own houses.
A few of the children, however, quietly fidgeted. They seemed puzzled that this storybook was different: in this one, it was
a black family all snug in their beds.

Then, there was the famed clatter on the roof. The children leaned in to get their first view of Santa and the sleigh as Johnson
turned the page—

And they saw that Santa was black.

“He’s black!” gasped a white little girl.

Another white boy exclaimed, “I thought he was white!”

Immediately, the children began to chatter about the stunning development.

At the ripe old ages of six and seven, the children had no doubt that there was a Real Santa. Of that fact, they were absolutely
sure. But suddenly—there was this huge question mark. Could Santa be black? And if so, what did that mean?

While some of the black children were delighted with the idea that Santa could be black, still others were unsure. Some of
the white children initially rejected this idea out of hand: a black Santa couldn’t be real. But even the little girl who
was the most adamant that the Real Santa must be white considered the possibility that a black Santa could fill in for White
Santa if he was hurt. And she still gleefully yelled along with the black Santa’s final “Merry Christmas to All! Y’all Sleep
Tight.” Still another of the white girls progressed from initially rejecting a black Santa outright to conceding that maybe
Black Santa was a “Helper Santa.” By the end of the story, she was asking if this black Santa couldn’t somehow be a cousin
or brother to the white Santa they already knew about. Her strong need that it was a white Santa who came to her house was
clearly still intact—but those concessions were quite a switch in about ten pages.