Regardless of your race — if you haven’t started talking to your children about skin color, you might want to start now. Last night’s CNN special “Black or White: Kids on Race,” revealed that a racial bias exists even among young kids today. Pop the hood for video and details on the study
Last night’s special showed American kids may still have a long way to go when it comes to their beliefs about race.
Just watch the footage below of a 5-year-old white girl who is part of a CNN pilot study on children’s attitudes toward race.
The girl consistently identifies a white or lighter skinned child as “smarter and good” because she “looks like me,” while pointing at the black or darker skinned child when asked which is ugly, because “she’s a lot darker”. Her mother, who watches the study in near tears, says she has no idea where her child has picked up the beliefs, adding her daughter has never asked about color.
CNN hired child psychologist and University of Chicago professor Margaret Beale Spencer, a leading researcher in the field of child development to design the pilot study. She used a team of three psychologists to implement it: two testers to execute the study and a statistician to help analyze the results. Her team tested 133 children from schools that met very specific economic and demographic requirements. In total, eight schools participated: four in the greater New York City area and four in Georgia.
One of the major findings of the study was that white children have an overwhelming bias toward white, and that black children also have a bias toward white but not nearly as strong as the bias shown by the white children.
The difference in the kids seems to point to how much parents have discussed race with them.
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