Not Talking About Race Is Not the Same As Not Being Racist

In 2006, a researcher in Austin recruited a few hundred white families with children between 5 and 7 to do a study about race. She gave the kids a survey then divided the families into groups. One group was asked to watch videos with multicultural themes, and another group was asked to watch the videos and have conversations with their children about racial equality. At this point, something strange happened—five of those families quit the study abruptly. They were that unwilling to discuss race with their children.

This story is from the book NurtureShock, which argues that a number of commonly accepted ideas about raising children often backfire. For example, giving kids lots of praise doesn’t necessarily help them (sometimes it can lead to a lack of effort, or an emphasis on results over effort), and not talking about race, it turns out, can lead to racism. (Newsweek excerpted the section on race, which you can find here.)

Back to that study, the writers recount how the parents in the study all considered themselves individuals who embraced diversity. Almost none of them, however, had talked to their children about race. Instead, they had asserted statements like “Everybody’s equal.” The idea was that by ignoring race, their children would be less likely to be aware of racial differences, and therefore less likely to be racist. However, things didn’t work out this way.

They wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But [the researcher's] first test of the kids revealed they weren’t colorblind 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 the questions this way.

As for the study’s results, watching the videos, it turned out, didn’t make much of a difference, and neither did the conversations about race. The researcher was surprised about this last part. But looking through the parents’ study diaries, she started to discover why. Even many of the parents who said they talked to their kids about race hadn’t actually managed to do so, but instead reverted back to those vague statements like “Everybody’s equal.” Only six families actually managed to speak openly about race and interracial friendship. Of those, their children’s racial attitudes dramatically improved in a single week.

This lack of conversation about race is nothing specific to Austin, either. NurtureShock also mentions another study done of 17,000 families with young children. Of those families, 45% had never spoken about race. And of the white families, this was true of a whopping 75%.

A big part of the issue, it seems, is that while parents hope that by not speaking about racial differences their children will be unaware of them, children notice them on their own-even babies as young as 6-months have been found to be aware of race.  (You can find more about that in this article about the book.) And it is leaving children to come to their own conclusions about these differences that often leads to prejudice.

The book also argues that while many parents try to wait as long as possible to speak to their children about race, it is best to start this conversation very young.

Several studies point to the possibility of developmental windows-stages when children’s attitudes might be most amenable to change. In one experiment, children were put in cross-race study groups, and then were observed on the playground to see if the interracial classroom time led to interracial play at recess. The researchers found mixed study groups worked wonders with the first-grade children, but it made no difference with third graders. It’s possible that by third grade, when parents usually recognize it’s safe to start talking a little about race, the developmental window has already closed.

As a blogger at the site Cocoamamas points out in a post about NurtureShock, “Something I’ve believed for a long time is that you cannot teach anti-racism or even have successful integration if you can’t talk about race.” This makes a lot of sense to me.

But about those parents in Austin, it seems they wanted to discuss race with their kids, they just didn’t know how. Many came to the researcher later, it turned out, and told her “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.”

So for anyone reading, what would you advise them? Have you spoken to your kids about race? What are some things that worked, or didn’t work? I’d love to hear.