Social psychology and childhood innocence
The early studies by the Clarks were substantiated over and over by subsequent studies. They showed consistently that children were aware of race and that racism impacted negatively on Black children’s self-esteem. These findings contradicted a commonsense view that children were too young to understand race or to understand when they were being discriminated against on the basis of race. In 1952 Mary Goodman published her research on race awareness in young children. She used psychological tests together with observation, school records and interviews with parents of a sample, balanced for race and gender, of 103 children at nursery schools to research the extent of race awareness amongst young children. She found that very young children are aware of race but that they are not necessarily antagonistic towards people of other races. Her study replicated the findings of the Clarks that a large majority of the African American children (74 per cent) showed a preference for the company of white children; only 8 per cent of white children showed a preference for the company of African American children. She also found that mothers found it difficult to explain race to their children and tried to put it off until they thought the children might be able to understand it; this was truer of African American mothers than of white mothers. She referred to children’s ‘precocious raciality’ against parents’ conviction that their children were unaware of race. Although the cumulative evidence that young children have some understanding of race is pretty convincing, we still have no empirical evidence about this for children younger than 3 years old (Katz 1976).
In-group, out-group
When the Clarks devised their doll studies their interest was in the impact of racism on the self-esteem and racial identification of Black students. Their work set the stage for much of the subsequent thinking in social psychology on the impact of racism on Black children’s psyches. The other major strand in social psychology on race and racism in childhood draws on Henri Tajfel’s (1981) concept of social identity and intergroup relations. Tajfel’s theory is a general theory that postulates that all human societies establish group identities and that prejudice operates to maintain the boundaries of the in-group against the out-group. The basis on which this sorting into groups happens can be entirely random. The most famous test of this is the experiment in which a school teacher on the day after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated divided her all-white class of school children into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and treated one group as superior to the other on an arbitrary basis.1 Like Clark’s doll test, Jane Elliot’s classroom experiment also showed that children who are treated as if they are expected to do well tend to do well and children who are expected to do badly tend to do badly.
Frances Aboud (1988) argues that children start to recognize the existence of racially based social or group identities at about the age of 3 years and that between the ages of 4 and 8 years children align themselves with a racial group based on perceived similarities between themselves and the group. Katz (1987) claims that young children have a tendency to overgeneralize and an inability to manage contradictory information and that ‘their greater receptivity to global and affect-laden statements may make them particularly prone to prejudicial thinking’ (Katz 1987: 95, see also Wells 2018).
Learning the first R: school studies of race and racism
Many studies of race and racism in the lives of children and young people have focused on urban neighbourhoods (Back 1996; Kusserow 2004; Winkler 2012; Kromidas 2016). However, most research on race and racism in children’s lives has been done in schools by ethnographers, social psychologists and educationalists. This is partly for the simple reason that children in schools are relatively easy to access and most children in the population will be attending school. It is easy to draw a random sample of schools and a random sample within schools; claims can therefore be made about the likelihood that the findings of the study can be extended to the general child population. The interest in race and racism in schools also reflects the concerns of educationalists that African American children underachieve in public (state) schools and the suspicion that this is because, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, Black students are still getting a lower standard of education than their white peers and that Black students have to contend with racist attitudes in schools.
Amanda Lewis’s Race in the Schoolyard (2003) is an ethnography of three schools in California: a mainly white school in a suburban neighbourhood, a mixed Latino/a and African American urban school, and an elective school with a mainly Latino/a student body. Her main contention is that schools are ‘central places where race is made and remade in the everyday’ (Lewis 2003: 11). Learning the First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism (Van Ausdale and Feagin 2001) has a similar premise that educational institutions are one of the key sites in the learning of race. Van Ausdale and Feagin’s study is an ethnography of an urban pre-school in the USA in which they argue that young children are aware of racial privilege and that white children use racist statements as ways of demonstrating their racial privilege. Whilst I found some of their interpretations overdone, their argument that the children in their study were aware of racial categories was convincingly demonstrated. Since these children are very young (3 and 4 years) Van Ausdale and Feagin also argue that their study undermines Piagetian claims that moral and abstract reasoning is absent in young children.
Learning the First R is one of a handful of ethnographic studies of young children in school that focus on race and racism. The other major studies are Paul Connolly’s Racism, Gender Identities and Young Children (1998) and Barry Troyna and Richard Hatcher’s Racism in Children’s Lives: A Study of Mainly White Primary Schools (1992). Both of these were done in English primary schools. The subjects that Connolly’s study focused on were mainly Black and South Asian boys and girls in an urban primary school. He does not discuss the attitude of white children in the school towards race and racism. Troyna and Hatcher’s study was designed to fill the gap in empirical research on primary schools into relations between Black and white children. Despite the claims of Ausdale and Feagin that their findings are novel, Troyna and Hatcher, writing ten years earlier, albeit in the UK, agreed that ‘young people are “racialised” by the time they experience primary school education’ (Troyna and Hatcher 1992: 21). Their own study focused on the use of racist language by white children in school and the extent to which efforts at using the curriculum, for example the study of slavery, to undermine racist attitudes were seen by many white students as another opportunity to display racial privilege. Troyna and Hatcher report that many Black children interpreted the teaching of the history of racial oppression as a racist (sic) discourse.
Most studies of how race and racism shape schooling are about how Black and Latino/a students navigate the racism they have to contend with in the school environment. In the last few years a new stream of research has developed on understanding the way that whites benefit from and reproduce racism in schools, even while (for some) having a personal commitment to anti-racism (Lewis-McCoy 2014; Hagerman 2018; Underhill 2018).
The intersections of class, race, gender and age
Class has become an increasingly marginalized explanation for inequality. Social policy is more likely to use concepts like ‘social exclusion’ in preference to ‘class’ to describe the persistence of intergenerational poverty. Social exclusion implies that inequality is not structural and persistent, woven into the very fabric of society, but personal and redeemable. Social exclusion can be overcome by increasing social networks or getting back to work (no matter how poorly paid and tedious); governments can do things to encourage social inclusion – like forcing people to go to work by cutting welfare benefits – but ultimately it is the personal responsibility of excluded individuals to