What Happens When Minority Kids Are Taught Not to Talk About Race
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/08/when-minority-kids-are-taught-color-blindness.html
Racial color-blindness sounds pretty good in theory. After all, aren't we supposed to be judging people based only on the contents of their character, rather than the color of their skin? But critics of the idea say it has some serious downsides. They argue that since race is a major contributing factor in all sorts of societal outcomes, from who goes to jail to what educational opportunities a child has, to adopt color-blindness as an ideology is to ignore important discrepancies, thereby allowing them to fester. If you can't really even talk about racism, in other words, how are you supposed to address it?
An interesting new study in Social Psychology and Personality Science sheds some light on how color-blindness may affect minority kids. The authors, Kristin Pauker of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Evan P. Apfelbaum of MIT, and Brian Spitzer of NYU, start by explaining that there's good reason to think minority kids don't benefit from a color-blind approach: a body of research has shown that "race is central to their identities, a source of psychological well-being, and a lens through which others perceive them." Ignoring race, then, may well have a negative impact on those for whom it's most salient. (Make sure to read Lisa Miller's piece from May on a school in New York taking the exact opposite approach — splitting kids up by race at a young age specifically to have conversations about it.)...
Among the kids who didn't talk ask about race during the game, 58 percent of them (as coded by observers who reviewed the video and who didn't know what the study was testing) said that doing so would be "inappropriate, rude, [or] offensive," while a full 23 percent said it would be outright racist or prejudiced. "We were surprised to find that racial minority children also avoided race to the same extent [as the white kids] and espoused reasons such as trying not to appear prejudiced," Pauker said in an email to Science of Us.
It's striking to compare the message these kids have internalized to the social norms color-blindness is supposed to be imparting. One of the ideas behind the concept is to teach kids not to interact in a discriminatory way with each other, that it would be wrong and unfair, of course, to exclude Benjamin from your game of tag because he's black. Socializing kids against this sort of behavior is a totally reasonable, laudable thing to do. But it's clear, at least from these two studies involving a diverse sample of students, that the concept has bled well beyond useful boundaries. Many of the kids apparently thought it would be rude or downright racist to even point out that half the people in the group of photos were racially distinct from the other half. Something about how we teach kids about race seems to have flown off the rails.
