NurtureShock
Page 6
I kept being surprised. As a parent, I dealt with these moments explicitly, telling my son it was wrong to choose anyone as his friend, or his “favorite,” on the basis of their skin color or even their hairstyle. We pointed out how certain friends wouldn’t be in our lives if we picked friends for their color. He got the message, and over time he not only accepted but embraced this lesson. Now he talks openly about equality and the wrongfulness of discrimination.
Not knowing then what I do now, I had a hard time understanding my son’s initial impulses. I’d always thought racism was taught. If a child grows up in a non-racist world, why was he spontaneously showing race-based preferences? When did the environment that we were so proud of no longer become the message he listened to?
The Diverse Environment Theory is the core principle behind school desegregation today. Like most people, I assumed that after thirty years of school desegregation, it would have a long track record of scientific research proving that the Diverse Environment Theory works. Then Ashley and I began talking to the scholars who’ve compiled that very research.
For instance, Dr. Gary Orfield runs the Civil Rights Project, a think tank that was long based at Harvard but has moved to UCLA. In the summer of 2007, Orfield and a dozen top scholars wrote an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court supporting school desegregation in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington. After completing the 86-page document, Orfield e-mailed it to all the social scientists on his mailing list, and he received 553 signatures of support. No fancy law firms put their stamp on it. Orfield was very proud that the brief was the work of scientists, not lawyers, thereby preserving its integrity and impartiality. “It was the authentic voice of social science,” he recalled.
Privately, though, Orfield felt some frustration—even anger. He admitted the science available to make their case “wasn’t what we really wanted.” Despite having at their disposal at least a thousand research studies on desegregation’s effects, “I was surprised none were longitudinal. It really has a substantial effect, but it has to be done the right way.” Just throwing kids of different races into a school together isn’t the right way, because they can self-segregate within the school. Orfield lamented the lack of funding to train teachers. Looking at the science available to make their case, Orfield recalled, “It depressed me that we’ve invested so little in finding the benefits of integration.”
This ambiguity is visible in the text of the amicus brief. Scientists don’t like to overstate their case. So the benefits of desegregation are qualified with words like “may lead” and “can improve.” “Mere school integration is not a panacea,” the brief warns.
UT’s Bigler was one of the scholars who contributed to the brief, and she was heavily involved in the process of its creation. Her estimation of what they found is more candid than Orfield’s. “In the end, I was disappointed with the amount of evidence social psychology could muster,” she said. “Going to integrated schools gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”
Calling attention to this can feel taboo. Bigler is an adamant proponent of desegregation in schools, on moral grounds. “It’s an enormous step backward to increase social segregation,” she commented. But it’s important for parents to know that merely sending your child to a diverse school is no guarantee they’ll have better racial attitudes than children at homogenous schools.
Race appears to be especially complex, compared to other objects of bias and discrimination. Dr. Thomas Pettigrew of the University of California at Santa Cruz analyzed over 500 research studies, all of which were examples of how exposure to others can potentially reduce bias. The studies that were most successful weren’t about racial bias—rather, they were about bias toward the disabled, the elderly, and gays. Studies in other countries show success—such as a reduction in bias among Jews and Palestinians, or whites and blacks in South Africa. When it comes to race in America, the studies show only consistent, modest benefit among college-aged students. In high schools and elementary schools, it’s a different story.
Recently, the Civil Rights Project studied high school juniors in six school districts around the country. One of those was Louisville, which appears to be a place where desegregation has had the intended benefits. Surveys of high school juniors there show that over 80% of students (of all races) feel their school experience has helped them work with and get along with members of other races and ethnic groups. Over 85% feel their school’s diversity has prepared them to work in a diverse job setting.
But other districts didn’t look so great. Lynn, Massachusetts, which is ten miles northeast of Boston, is generally regarded as another model of diversity and successful school desegregation. When its students were polled if they’d like to live in a diverse neighborhood when they grow up, about 70% of the nonwhite high school juniors said they wanted to. But only 35% of whites wanted to.
Dr. Walter Stephan, a professor emeritus at New Mexico State University, made it his life’s work to survey students’ racial attitudes after their first year of desegregation. He found that in 16% of the desegregated schools examined, the attitudes of whites toward African Americans became more favorable. In 36% of the schools, there was no difference. In 48% of the schools, white students’ attitudes toward blacks became worse. Stephan is no segregationist—he signed the amicus brief, and he is one of the most respected scholars in the field.
The unfortunate twist of diverse schools is that they don’t necessarily lead to more cross-race friendships. Often it’s the opposite.
Duke University’s Dr. James Moody—an expert on how adolescents form and maintain social networks—analyzed data on over 90,000 teenagers at 112 different schools from every region of the country. The students had been asked to name their five best male friends and their five best female friends. Moody matched the ethnicity of the student with the race of each of her named friends, then Moody compared the number of each student’s cross-racial friendships with the school’s overall diversity.
Moody found that the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school, and thus the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes down.
As a result, junior high and high school children in diverse schools experience two completely-contrasting social cues on a daily basis. The first cue is inspiring—that many students have a friend of another race. The second cue is tragic—that far more kids just like to hang with their own. It’s this second dynamic that becomes more and more visible as overall school diversity goes up. As a child circulates through school, she sees more groups that her race disqualifies her from, more tables in the lunchroom she can’t sit at, and more implicit lines that are taboo to cross. This is unmissable even if she, personally, has friends of other races.
It’s true that, for every extracurricular one kid has in common with a child of another race, the likelihood that they will be friends increases. But what’s stunning about Moody’s analysis is that he’s taken that into account: Moody included statistical controls for activities, sports, academic tracking, and other school-structural conditions that tend to desegregate (or segregate) students within the school. And the rule still holds true: more diversity translates into more division between students.
Having done its own analysis of teen friendships, a team from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, confirmed Moody’s assessment. “More diverse schools have, overall, more potential interracial contact and hence more interracial dyads of ‘potential’ friends,” these researchers explained—but this opportunity was being squandered: “The probability of interracial dyads being friends decreases in more diverse schools.”
Those increased opportunities to interact are also, effectively, increased opportunities to reject each other. And that is what’s happening.
“There has been a new resegregation among youth in primary and secondary schools and on college campuses across the country,” wrote Dr
. Brendesha Tynes of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Tynes concluded, “Even in multiracial schools, once young people leave the classroom very little interrracial discussion takes place because a desire to associate with one’s own ethnic group often discourages interaction between groups.”
All told, the odds of a white high-schooler in America having a best friend of another race is only 8%. Those odds barely improve for the second-best friend, or the third best, or the fifth. For blacks, the odds aren’t much better: 85% of black kids’ best friends are also black. Cross-race friends also tend to share a single activity, rather than multiple activities; as a result, these friendships are more likely to be lost over time, as children transition from middle school to high school.
It is tempting to believe that because their generation is so diverse, today’s children grow up knowing how to get along with people of every race. But numerous studies suggest that this is more of a fantasy than a fact.
I can’t help but wonder—would the track record of desegregation be so mixed if parents reinforced it, rather than remaining silent?
Over the course of our research, we about race when they’re very young? What jumped out at Phyllis Katz, in her study of 200 black and white children, was that parents are very comfortable talking to their children about gender, and they work very hard to counterprogram against boy-girl stereotypes. That ought to be our model for talking about race. The same way we remind our daughters, “Mommies can be doctors just like daddies,” we ought to be telling all children that doctors can be any skin color. It’s not complicated what to say. It’s only a matter of how often we reinforce it.
Shushing children when they make an improper remark is an instinctive reflex, but often the wrong move. Prone to categorization, children’s brains can’t help but attempt to generalize rules from the examples they see. It’s the worst kind of embarrassment when a child blurts out, “Only brown people can have breakfast at school,” or “You can’t play basketball, you’re white, so you have to play baseball.” But shushing them only sends the message that this topic is unspeakable, which makes race more loaded, and more intimidating.
Young children draw conclusions that may make parents cringe, even if they’ve seen a few counterexamples. Children are not passive absorbers of knowledge; rather, they are active constructors of concepts. Bigler has seen many examples where children distort their recollections of facts to fit the categories they’ve already formed in their minds. The brain’s need for categories to fit perfectly is even stronger at age seven than at age five, so a second grader might make more distortions than a kindergartner to defend his categories. To a parent, it can seem as if the child is getting worse at understanding a diverse world, not better.
To be effective, researchers have found, conversations about race have to be explicit, in unmistakeable terms that children understand. A friend of mine 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 toward blacks than those who got the neutered version. Explicitness works.
“It also made them feel some guilt,” Bigler added. “It knocked down their glorified view of white people.” They couldn’t justify in-group superiority.
Bigler is very cautious about taking the conclusion of her Jackie Robinson study too far. She notes the bios were explicit, but about historical discrimination. “If we’d had them read stories of contemporary discrimination from today’s newspapers, it’s quite possible it would have made the whites defensive, and only made the blacks angry at whites.”
Another scholar has something close to an answer on that. Dr. April Harris-Britt, a clinical psychologist and professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studies how minority parents help their children develop a racial identity from a young age. All minority parents at some point tell their children that discrimination is out there, but they shouldn’t let it stop them. However, these conversations are not triggered by their children bringing it up. Rather, the parent often suffers a discriminatory incident, and it pushes him to decide, “It’s time I prepared my child for this.”
Is it good for them? Harris-Britt found that some preparation for bias was beneficial to children, and that it was necessary—94% of African American eighth graders reported to Harris-Britt that they’d felt discriminated against in the prior three months. But if children heard these preparation-for-bias warnings often (rather than just occasionally), they were significantly less likely to connect their successes to effort, and much more likely to blame their failures on their teachers—whom they saw as biased against them.
Harris-Britt warns that frequent predictions of future discrimination ironically become as destructive as experiences of actual discrimination: “If you overfocus on those types of events, you give the children the message that the world is going to be hostile—you’re just not valued and that’s just the way the world is.”
Preparation-for-bias is not, however, the only way minorities talk to their children about race. The other broad category of conversation, in Harris-Britt’s analysis, is ethnic pride. From a very young age, minority children are coached to be proud of their ethnic history. She found that this was exceedingly good for children’s self-confidence; in one study, black children who’d heard messages of ethnic pride were more engaged in school and more likely to attribute their success to their effort and ability.
That leads to the question that everyone wonders but rarely dares to ask. If “black pride” is good for African American children, where does that leave white children? It’s horrifying to imagine kids being “proud to be white.” Yet many scholars argue that’s exactly what children’s brains are already computing. Just as minority children are aware that they belong to an ethnic group with less status and wealth, most white children naturally decipher that they belong to the race that has more power, wealth, and control in society; this provides security, if not confidence. So a pride message would not just be abhorrent—it’d be redundant.
When talking to teens, it’s helpful to understand how their tendency to form groups and cliques is partly a consequence of American culture. In America, we encourage individuality. Children freely and openly develop strong preferences—defining their self-identity by the things they like and dislike. They learn to see differences. Though singular identity is the long-term goal, in high school this identity-quest is satisfied by forming and joining distinctive subgroups. So, in an ironic twist, the more a culture emphasizes individualism, the more the high school years will be marked by subgroupism. Japan, for instance, values social harmony over individualism, and children are discouraged from asserting personal preferences. Thus, less groupism is observed in their high schools.
The security that comes from belonging to a group, especially for teens, is palpable. Traits that mark this membership are—whether we like it or not—central to this developmental period. University of Michigan researchers did a study that shows just how powerful this need to belong is, and how much it can affect a teen.
The researchers brought 100 Detroit black high school students in for one-on-one interviews. They asked each teen to rate himself on how light or dark he considered his skin tone to be. Then the scholars asked about the teens’ confidence levels in social circles and school. From th
e high schools, the researchers obtained the teens’ grade point averages.
Particularly for the boys, those who rated themselves as dark-skinned blacks had the highest GPAs. They also had the highest ratings for social acceptance and academic confidence. The boys with lighter skin tones were less secure socially and academically.
The researchers subsequently replicated these results with students who “looked Latino.”
The researchers concluded that doing well in school could get a minority teen labeled as “acting white.” Teens who were visibly sure of membership within the minority community were protected from this insult and thus more willing to act outside the group norm. But the light-skinned blacks and the Anglo-appearing Hispanics—their status within the minority felt more precarious. So they acted more in keeping with their image of the minority identity—even if it was a negative stereotype—in order to solidify their status within the group.
Over the course of our research, we heard many stories of how people—from parents to teachers—were struggling to talk about race with their children. For some, the conversations came up after a child had made an embarrassing comment in public. A number had the issue thrust on them, because of an interracial marriage or an international adoption. Still others were just introducing children into a diverse environment, wondering when and if the timing was right.
But the story that most affected us came from a small town in rural Ohio. Two first-grade teachers, Joy Bowman and Angela Johnson, had agreed to let a professor from Ohio State University, Dr. Jeane Copenhaver-Johnson, observe their classrooms for the year. Of the 33 children, about two-thirds identified themselves as “white” or even “hillbilly,” while the others were black or of mixed-race descent.