Race study, 1st views on raceFollow

The first friend I ever had spend the night at my house was a little black boy named Demetrius. Looking back, I believe he lived in "the ghetto", but I never really knew any different at the time. We lived in some apartments in the heart of Austin, TX, so I got a lot of exposure to all kinds of skin/hair color and attitudes. It wasn't until I got to about 4th grade that the differences in perception of race became apparent to me. In a way, I guess I can be thankful for growing up in a family where none of that really mattered. As it stands today, I'm pretty white and nerdy, and when it comes to guy friends, I don't think race has ever come into the picture, but I definitely have soft spot for latinas and lighter skinned black chicks. I assume it's purely a visual thing, since I'm pretty open, culturally speaking.

With regard to the study, I find it obvious, but still disheartening that kids today are still presented with such bias at an early age and learn to accept it as their own without giving much thought one way or the other.

You'd play victim too if you didn't get your 20 acres and half a mule.

Second grade, 1986 or '87. He was named Theophosis and he was black and two feet taller than me. He sat a row over to my right, and one day he had a seizure. He fell out of his chair and smacked his skull on the cement floor and started spazzing. His thick, plastic-framed glasses snapped and there was blood leaking from his temple. I was probably in junior high before I realized that not all black folks freaked the fUck out. Well, I mean they do, but they don't all have seizures like that.

Yeah. Several of the comments on that page tend to go in the same direction. What do you expect the kid to do? I think there's a distinction between the very natural tendency to order things in relation to proximity to yourself or those you know and choices in which an unrelated characteristic (skin color) is used to make judgments. In this case the *only* difference was the color of the dolls. That may seem to make a stronger point, but it's actually weaker.

A strong point (and what defines racism really) is documenting people weighting their choices about others by skin color in situations where they should use other criteria. This study (I'm not sure it can even be called that) doesn't tell us if race is the first or last criteria used to make a choice. If it's the first, or even close to the first, that's a problem. If it's the last, then there's nothing wrong with it at all.

There's also the finding in the same study that white parents rarely talked about race to their kids, while black parents overwhelmingly did. The question is what is being tested? The video clip makes it appear as though the racial bias is being expressed by the white girl while her mother weeps, but the reality is that the alarming bias is being expressed by black kids who are making the same choice.



I think it's quite possible to over think these things. This might be one of the cases where no message is better than trying to figure out the right message.

My first exposure to non-white people was a family that moved into the half of the duplex we owned. The mother was a nice-enough woman, just a little slow. I think there was something wrong with her two youngest, down syndrome or autism, something. (I was a kid, I didn't know anything other than they were slow and one was a little misshapen with bulging eyes).

Her oldest, somewhere between 16-19, was a delinquent. She beat up my friend, we were like... 8 or 9 at the time, because he dropped a rock on the sidewalk (That was her reason when his parents called the police).

It wasn't exactly the best experience with black people that a kid could have. The black families after I moved were just fine though.

Reading Allegory and gbaji's comments about race really does lend my mother's advice a certain gravitas.

I'm not about to blame the children for something that is encouraged, even nurtured, by the environment in which they are raised. I just think it's less than desirable that such bias is instilled in them so early, often far before they are able to counter it with rational thought. Some people overcome it, but far too many do not.

The view that your race is something that is a natural barrier to success is pretty prevalent in most minority cultures in the U.S.. Some are completely blown out of proportion and crutches that enable people to blame their lack of success on something out of their power to fix, and some are legitimate based on the sorts of knee-jerk attitudes that the CNN study shows we develop at an early age. It could also be that, being light-skinned and fluent (and, I assume accent-less), you did not experience as much prejudice in your life because your ethnicity is not as easily discerned. I sometimes get a pass because people think I am Asian. I used to have an accent in my early teens, but I made an effort to work it out of my speech. I wish I hadn't now, but I'd be lying if I said the fact that I sound so white didn't help me get interviews or anything. By the time you see me and realize I am brown, it's too late!!!

To be fair, my father is the same way as your relatives, and he is a very successful man, but his experiences are colored by his early immigration experience to the U.S.. In the 50s, he was very discriminated against in CA for his accent, despite the fact that he could pass for white. He was conditioned to think that was the way Americans thought by people who had signs on their restaurants that read "No n---, dogs or S---s. In that order." He came here from a culture where his "white" looks gave him an elevated status to that, and I think it was a defining experience for him and put him on his guard. Most of the old school (Black and Hispanic)is that way.

I have a cousin from Thailand. She's the same age as me and moved here when she was four (adopted by my Uncle who knocked up her mom while stationed over there in the service). I knew she was of a different nationality as she didn't speak English very well.

I recognized she had different traits than me. I don't recall thinking her differences made her meaner, nicer, prettier etc, though I was pretty scared of her mom (my Aunt) way back then as she seemed to shriek a lot.

I scanned the study pretty good. It is informal as stated. The only correlations strong enough to be valid are that the kids would consistently choose the opposite skin tone for the opposing trait.



It would have been interesting to compare other physiological traits that are not considered racial. Maybe 5 little cartoon girls with varying hair lengths, or different color clothing.

I don't doubt that racial bias begins early and presents barriers to, but I'm not sure that this study is proving that to any great extent.

Eloquent as always.

Locked,



I'm sure the policeman knew what he was talking about. While that may be offensive it's the truth. And just as importantly your father knew that the cop was actually doing a good job which was probably at the root of his anger.

I can remember, as a kid, my brother playing with our neighbors Elie and Mono and they had a little sister, who's name I can't remember. I remember them trying to get me to race their sister around our house. We moved from that house when I was four or five years old, so I was pretty young when this happened. I remember my mom taking me across the street to Denise's house and telling her that I was starting kindergarten the next year. She asked me if I was going in the morning or the afternoon (in my area in MI, kindergarten was only half a day, and they had two classes a day) and I remember telling her that it was in the morning, and I was excited because all of the big school kids had to get up and go to school in the morning, so it was sort of like I was a big girl.

Looking back, Elie, Mono, their sister, and Denise's family (my brother was really close with her son, Dennis) were all Latino. I didn't know it at the time, and I don't recall anyone bringing it up, but they all had darker skin and black hair. I don't remember them having an accent, but I was three or four at the time, so...

Going to elementary school, we had moved to a different subdivision, and at our school there was only white kids. I vaguely remember taking a dance class and there was a black girl in there. I was fascinated by her skin color, and I remember touching her arm and excitedly saying, "It feels the same as mine!" I had to have been five or six at the time. I was actually a little envious, 'cause I thought her skin was so pretty. After that novelty wore off, though, I didn't find her any different than me. My last year there, in the fifth grade, we had two black kids move into our school district, a boy and a girl. The boy was in the elementary school and his sister was in the middle school. I can't remember his name, and he wasn't in any of my classes.

We moved to Tennessee when I was ten. My first of school, it was mid-week and my mom drove me in. When I got to the class, everyone was already seated, and I don't remember whether there were a lot of other races in my class. I was too nervous worrying about fitting in. I found out rather quickly that some of the kids didn't really want me there, because a lot of their parents were bitter about Saturn coming down from Michigan and offering their jobs to the old GM employees that had been laid off. I guess that Saturn had told them there would be jobs for them there, but they didn't tell them it would be mostly on the janitorial staff, which was pretty sh*tty of them. I remember some of the kids making a comment here and there about "damn yankees," but mostly I remember two of the teachers seemed to dislike me, and I had never had a teacher dislike me. I wondered much later if it was because I was from Michigan.

When I went on to the middle school, I remember climbing on the bus and suddenly realizing there were a lot of older, large black boys on our bus. They scared me a little, but mostly because of their size and because they were so loud. I was a little surprised by the amount of black people in our school. It was almost half white and half black, it seemed. We only had a few Latino students, and I remember there was one Latio boy and I can't remember his name, but he used to tell me very loudly and obnoxiously that he thought I was pretty, and he would blow me kisses when he got off the bus. It always made me feel strange and, for some weird reason, a little dirty. I didn't like it. I remember he had an older brother named Oscar that I liked. He seemed a little rough, but he was always nice to me.

I asked my mom why we had so few black kids in the elementary school in Michigan. I remember her saying something about how the neighborhoods up there were usually really segregated by race, but it was ok, because the black people "wanted it that way." At the time I was like, "Oh, ok." Looking back, I don't think that was necessarily true...

When I went to college, my roommate was black. I was a little apprehensive, becuase I'd never had any really close black friends. Living with her was interesting, and I learned that for a black person, getting a perm means straightening your hair. She and I were pretty close, and we elected to live together for three of my four years at college. By the end of the third year, she was getting on my nerves pretty badly, but I knew it was because of her attitude and not her race.

ETA: Poldoran, did you ever ask your family why they had those feelings about white people? It might have helped you understand them a little more if there were specific things that happened to them.


Edited, May 19th 2010 10:47am by Belkira