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SEVEN MYTHS OF RACE AND THE YOUNG CHILD

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld

Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race / Volume 9 / Issue 01 / March 2012, pp 17 - 39 DOI: 10.1017/S1742058X12000033, Published online: 07 June 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1742058X12000033

How to cite this article: Lawrence A. Hirschfeld (2012). SEVEN MYTHS OF RACE AND THE YOUNG CHILD. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race,9, pp 17-39 doi:10.1017/S1742058X12000033

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SEVEN MYTHS OF RACE AND THE YOUNG CHILD

Lawrence A. Hirschfeld Departments of and , New School for Social Research

Abstract Racism reproduces through children. Racial bias is acquired early, and like many early- acquired predilections it is tenaciously resistant to counterevidence. Much of the institu- tional struggle against racism focuses on children, working to change their attitudes and judgments by addressing what children supposedly have come to know and believe about race. Yet much of what lay folk and educators alike imagine about children’s knowledge of race and how they have come to acquire it is inaccurate. This essay is concerned to identify these inaccuracies, present evidence that challenges them, and briefly consider why they— like racialist thinking itself—are so tenaciously held and resistant to counterevidence.

Keywords: Racial Awareness, Racial Prejudice, Children, Parents, Conventional Wisdom

INTRODUCTION

My goal in this essay is to identify a handful of stubbornly inaccurate visions of how race and the child’s mind make contact with each other. I’ve called these “myths of race and the child” to underscore their erroneous content, but also to call attention to their narrative quality. Myths fabricate through stories. These particular myths aren’t simply wrong, they narrate a misconception that is politically self-serving: by misstating how race occupies the mind of the child, they also misstate how race occupies the society that child inhabits and the moral responsibilities that this occu- pation entails. These myths coalesce into what is sometimes called a “folk theory,” a knowledge structure jointly shaped by our native intuitions about the world and the social and cultural environments in which they play out. Folk theories constitute much of common sense, representing convictions that have become widely shared and rela- tively stable in a community. Importantly, they invite little reflection. They are “common” both in the sense of mutual and in the sense of so readily grasped that believers are little impelled to seek supporting evidence, much less the opinions of

Du Bois Review, 9:1 (2012) 17–39. ©2012W.E.B.DuBoisInstituteforAfricanandAfricanAmericanResearch1742-058X012 $15.00 doi:10.10170S1742058X12000033

17 Lawrence A. Hirschfeld supporting expertise. This is, of course, the rub: much turns on the appeal of common sense, particularly against counter claims by experts ~or even against the claim that expertise may apply!. For most of human common sense about children—particularly how they acquire knowledge and how best to insure that they acquire the right knowledge— has not been entrusted to the erudition of credentialed experts. This is curious inasmuch as theories of how children acquire knowledge and how best to insure that they acquire the right knowledge has manifestly varied