I just read a pilot
study that CNN released on the racial attitudes of children. And nearly 60
years after the watershed Brown v. Board of Education case - in which the Supreme Court invalidated Jim
Crow school segregation - it seems that the
more things change, the more they stay the
same.
In the study, three psychologists tested 133 students in
the 4 to 5 and 9 to 10 age ranges. Eight
schools were involved, half from Georgia, and
half from the New York metropolitan area. The
study was designed to simulate the Kenneth
and Mamie Clark study used in the Brown case, in which African-American children were asked
whether they preferred a white doll or a black
doll. Having expressed an overwhelming
preference for the white doll, they
demonstrated the negative effects of
segregation on “ego development and
self-awareness in Negro children.”
Curiously, the results were about the same six decades
later. In the recent study, the researchers
asked the 4 and 5 year olds a series of
questions and had them answer by pointing to
one of five cartoon pictures that varied in
skin color from light to dark. The 9 and 10
year olds were given the same questions and
cartoons, but were also asked questions
concerning a bar chart showing light to dark
skin tones.
Essentially, white children responded with a high degree
of “white bias,” meaning that they viewed
their own skin tone positively, they
associated darker skin with negative
characteristics, and they were far more
stereotypical in their racial attitudes,
beliefs and preferences. There was no
difference between age groups. And black
children also had a bias towards whiteness,
although not nearly as great as white children
did.
The lesson that I take from these results is clear: 1)
Parents, teach your kids well, but better than
you’re doing now, and 2) this is a nation that
still upholds whiteness and denigrates
blackness. To be sure, black self-esteem is a
lingering, unresolved issue in a racist nation
that cannot grapple with the whole race thing
- even with a black president of
biracial parentage named Barack Obama. But
that white children are internalizing white
skin superiority and negative black
stereotypes so intensely should tell you that
they are not learning the right things at home
when it comes to diversity, tolerance and
inclusion, if they are learning anything at
all. Unfortunately, that is how white-skin
privilege works. As the self-proclaimed
standard bearers, white Americans often may
not feel as if they have to worry about
talking to their children about such matters.
Parents of color, however, don’t have that
luxury. And in a nation where the color of
your skin can determine where you live, your
livelihood and even your life or death,
parents of color may feel the need to help
their children navigate through a color-coded
society fraught with obstacles and pitfalls.
And in this environment screaming for racial
understanding, states such as Texas and
Arizona would further exacerbate things by
whitewashing their public school curricula and
eliminating ethnic studies courses.
The negative labels assigned to blackness and all things
black are readily apparent in the English
language. And the badges of slavery and Jim
Crow remain, even as those dreaded
institutions are supposedly a thing of the
past. Lynchings in this country have a
shameful history, and typically they were
committed upon a rumor that a black man raped
a white woman. Black equals poverty,
inferiority, laziness and all of the horrible
and distasteful things one can conjure up.
Black man equals all of those dreadful things
plus criminality. (Apparently, a black man
with the title of President of the United
States equals
Nazi-Communist-Kenyan-Muslim-black-radical
terrorist.)
So, when Charles Stewart, a white man in Boston, murdered
his pregnant wife in 1989, he said a black man
did it. And everyone believed it. When a white
woman named Susan Smith murdered her two young
sons in South Carolina in 1994, she said that
she had been carjacked by a black man, who
drove away with her children. And everyone
believed it, even though Smith said the man
wore a knit ski cap. As an aside, I’ve never
seen any of my South Carolinian relatives wear
a knit ski cap. And typically, when this sort
of thing occurs, the police will wage ultimate
war on the chocolate side of town, rounding up
all the brothers just for the hell of it.
And just the other day, a white Philly
cop shot himself and claimed it was the work of a black
man with cornrows and a tattoo. Why do they
keep doing it? Obviously because they know, or
at least think, they can get away with it in a
nation that tells you that these are the acts
expected of darker-skinned folks. With
negative stereotypes in the media, and black
and brown inmates filling up to 70 percent of
the nation’s prison beds, why not?
This problem is far greater than one study can solve, but
the CNN report is instructive. Consequently,
we need to remind ourselves that the more
things change, the more they stay the same.
This reality must be unsettling for those who
risked life and limb to build a better
society. It tells you the work ain’t over, and
it would serve us well to reach the children.
