Simply put, they can use race to stereotype at roughly the same age they learn to speak.
There's a pervasive myth that children are these pure, blank slates who cannot develop racial prejudices unless they are explicitly taught to do so. They're color-blind, many will say, and we shouldn't talk to them about race because they're too young, too confused, and too innocent. If a young child does talk about race or expresses any form of bias, many adults quickly change the subject.
Although it's true that babies may be born as blank slates, decades worth of psychological research has discovered that, developmentally, race is one of the earliest emerging social categories. It's one of the first things an infant can discern. And they just keep learning from there. The belief that children only see race if they are explicitly taught to do so is just untrue, and the popular approach to shield young kids from meaningful conversations about race is doing them — and society at large — a grave disservice. Here's why.At birth, babies do not seem to detect race. According to a 2005 study published in, they look equally at faces of all races and demonstrate no spontaneous preference for any ethnic group. However,.
Researchers Phyllis Katz and Jennifer Kofkin, the ones behind that 1997 longitudinal study that followed 200 kids, made another interesting discovery among the toddler set. They found that all of the children expressed an"in-group bias" at the age of 30 months. When asked to choose a potential playmate from among photos of unfamiliar white and Black boys and girls,
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