Discourses of “Race” in Early Childhood: From Cognition to Power

Abstract

As those two quotes illustrate, the question of young children’s “racial” identities and what young children know about “race” has a long history. Park’s statement is from his 1928 paper, “The Basis of Race Prejudice.” Park was an U.S. academic who was writing at a time when there was considerable theoretical and research activity about racial prejudice in the United States (e.g., Bogardus, 1925; Frederick, 1927; Reinhardt, 1928). However, this work primarily focused on studying racial prejudice in adults and college students (e.g., Young, 1927). Park’s paper broke this pattern by focusing on the development of prejudice and racial identities in young children. Eighty years later, we are still researching and theorizing about “race” and young children—asking what children know, when they know it, and how they come to know it. The intervening eighty years have seen the production of hundreds of studies about the “racing” of young children; and most of it has fundamentally challenged Park’s contention that young children are innocent of “race.” (We use the term “racing” of young children to capture the complex and active individual and institutional sociocultural and political processes that form young children’s feelings, desires, understandings, and enactments of “race” in their daily lives.)

Race consciousness, is … as far as observation goes, an acquired trait, quite as much as the taste for olives or the mania for collecting stamps. Children do not have it. They take the world of human beings in which they find themselves as part of the order of nature and respond to a black or yellow face as readily as they do to a white, depending upon the character and intimacy of the association. (Park, 1928, p. 16. Emphasis added)

One of the most depressing aspects of prejudice is the early age at which it rears its head. (Hewstone, 1988, p. vii)