Colour-Blind Children

Conventional Wisdom
Attendance at multi-racial schools will have a beneficial effect on kids’ attitudes towards people of other races.

NurtureShock Wisdom
The best way to produce racially-tolerant children is to explicitly address the topic of racism.

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Many parents and teachers assume it’s better to create colour-blind environments by integrating children of different races and treating the differences as not worthy of comment. But children do notice the differences and they often draw conclusions that make adults cringe. Just throwing kids of different races into a school frequently results in self-segregation within the school, and the more diverse the school, the more likely it is that students will self-segregate. However, racial tolerance can be taught.

The excerpt discusses how best to teach racial tolerance (p. 63).

“To be effective, researchers have found, conversations about race have to be explicit, in unmistakeable terms that children understand. A friend of min 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 towards blacks than those who got the neutered version. Explicitness works.“

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