Do children not know of racism? Is it really something that has to be taught? Or do we automatically think in relation to how others are more or less like us?
Racial Bias
Racism as we adults know it might not be present in babies and may be a developed prejudice later, but it seems racial bias is a natural predilection to the familiarity of our own race that we grow up being exposed to. Others appear different and less favorable to our biased favoritism of those who look like our parents or family.
Familiarization
Even before we experience the presence of other races, we become familiarized with our own. The family is the familiar, and the familiar is comfortable to us. Other people who we don't personally know but are of the same race will still be generally familiar. The unknown is feared and chaotic. The unfamiliarity of other races can be such a contrast to what we know that we have an aversion compared to our own race. This forms a racial bias.
New Studies
Two recent studies -- one on how positive music is associated with faces of their own-race and negative music with other-races, and the other study on attentiveness to learning from own-race adults rather than other-races -- have come out that show this tendency for racial bias is in young children, instead of the popular view that racially motivated preferences like racism develop only in later preschool years. Children under the age of 6 months old have yet to develop any racial bias.
Dr. Kang Lee is an author in both studies and suggests we can mitigate or prevent the development of race-based bias through the exposure of other-races in early infancy. Which makes sense to me. Increasing interaction with others of a different race will promote the "circle of identification" or inclusion of others, i.e. who we include in our circle of valuation.
The study about positive music association had 3 to 9 month olds hear a music clip followed by watching a video of a female adult with a neutral facial expression. Babies did one of four types of tests: happy music with own-race face, sad music with own-race face, happy music with other-race face, or sad music with other-race. Six to 9 month olds looked longer at faces of their own-race when happy music was played beforehand, while looking longer at other-race faces when sad music was played.
The second study indicated who the infants trusted more. In conditions of uncertainty, infants seem to be biases to learn from those of their own-race. This was demonstrated by a series of videos of a woman who looked at one of four corners of a screen. Afterwards, an animal image would appear in a corner. If the woman's gaze was reliably looking where an animal was to appear, that was indicating certainty of where the animal was going to be. If she did not look at the right place, that was an unreliable stare that indicates uncertainty. Infants followed the gaze of the own-race woman more than other-races, even the gazes were unreliable.
Circle of Identification and Valuation
Developing a bias towards our own race is not simply a result of hating another group from indoctrination or because one has had a negative experience with an individual from that group that is projected to all. We don't need to even meet any other races to already favor our own.
In some of my work I have explained how we identify and value those closest to us, and then we move outward to include identifications of others as part of who we are. First we have our family that we will favor over others. That can expand to friends we identify with in our community. We can then identify with more people and care about what happens in our town. Then with our race, nation and even all of humanity.
The more we interact with others, the more we associate with them and identify aspects of ourselves with them. We can grow our valuation, care and compassion for others. This is a growing "circle of identification and valuation". But the first one we identify and value with is our family.
We tend to value our family that we do know more than other families we don't know (the unknown), just as we can value our nation more than other nations, and our race more than other races. Many people identify with their nation in a war and hate the other, not on reason and rationality, but on emotion and prejudice. This is just how things develop unconsciously, automatically, involuntarily, without our conscious, willful and critical self-examined analysis and evaluation of ourselves. Racial bias, like any bias, can be understood and worked through, first by being aware of it.
Identity and Favoritism
Explicitly biasing children to dislike other races is what we consider racism that greatly impacts the lives of others, where mistreatment of others often results as we see our own race as superior while other races deserve less than we do. These studies indicate that we also develop an implicit bias towards other races that can be also impact everyday life. Through exposure, interaction and identification with others less like us, we can recognize how much they are like us as well.
Understanding our own identity and how we relate to others can keep us from discriminating and mistreating others or providing selective favoritism towards those we prefer because they are more like us. I will point of that racial bias is not the only thing that gets in the way of fair and honest evaluations of others. As I mention above in the "circle of identification" model I have come to understand, we can favor and treat our family with more preference and better treatment than other families.
We can give our friends better options in business, employment, politics and others aspects of social interaction. It can keep going, where we give more favorable treatment to those of our race, of our nation, etc. Treating some with more favoritism and benefits than others, is something that happens intra-racially and extra-racially. Racial bias is just one part of it. We have a natural affinity to what is similar, familiar and like us in varying degrees, from our race, to our nations, and the sports teams in between.
All of this ties into our identity. The quest to "know thyself" is what led me to understand these things years ago, without any psyche studies. In trying to understand why we do what we do and to identify what keeps us from being more moral, I looked at how human reality currently functioned. Analyze reality and see what unfolds.
We can honestly evaluate people on their own behavior, character and merits. And we can also engage in personal preferential treatment that has us favor some over others because of how we feel about them, because of how much we value them in our identification with them, due to having interacted with them or those we identify with. This is how the world currently works in large part. Nepotism, hiring a friend or a friend of a friend. It's all about our personal network of connections it seems. Connections can get you a job, while aptitude or competency won't cut it. Isn't that something we should be conscious of and moving away from as a species? Can we put aside our personal inclinations and evaluate people on their own actions and merits?
Thank you for your time and attention! I appreciate the knowledge reaching more people. Take care. Peace.
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References:
- Infants show racial bias toward members of own ethnicity, against those of others
- Naiqi G. Xiao, Rachel Wu, Paul C. Quinn, Shaoying Liu, Kristen S. Tummeltshammer, Natasha Z. Kirkham, Liezhong Ge, Olivier Pascalis, Kang Lee. Infants Rely More on Gaze Cues From Own-Race Than Other-Race Adults for Learning Under Uncertainty. Child Development, 2017; DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12798
- Naiqi G. Xiao, Paul C. Quinn, Shaoying Liu, Liezhong Ge, Olivier Pascalis, Kang Lee. Older but not younger infants associate own-race faces with happy music and other-race faces with sad music. Developmental Science, 2017; DOI: 10.1111/desc.12537