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Racialization in Public and Private: Memories of First Racial Experiences
Abstract
Research suggests retention of childhood memories into adulthood requires such memories to hold a certain amount of importance. Therefore, initial racial memories likely play a role in one’s racialization process, or formulation of an understanding of race. This study uses data from 49 in-depth interviews with white undergraduate students on memories of their first experiences of race. Data generally fell into the categories of private and public racialization. Private racialization included accounts of events that took place at home, primarily consisting of racist joking, derogatory comments, and family storytelling. Public racialization consisted of events that took place outside the home, most commonly at school. Data also revealed interactions between private and public realms, where accommodations were made in private to control, minimize or restrict interracial contact in public.
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The contact hypothesis — the idea that contact between members of different races fosters positive racial attitudes — has
performed indifferently in research conducted over the past four decades, leading to a recommendation that the hypothesis
be discarded and that attention turn to other sources of positive and negative racial attitudes. However, most of this research
is now badly dated and focuses solely on the racial attitudes of whites. We present a new test of the contact hypothesis,
drawing on a national survey of blacks and whites conducted in 1989. Analysis reveals that in several instances interracial
contact is associated with more positive racial attitudes, especially among whites, and that some effects are appreciable.
We examine processes that govern the selection of cross-race and same-race friends among high school students. Relying on social psychological theories of interpersonal attraction, we predict that individual- and school-level factors that affect the bases of attraction will influence the friendship choices. We test hypotheses using data from the sophomore and senior cohorts of the High School and Beyond Survey. Its large sample, national representativeness, and detailed information permit a deeper examination of the determinants of adolescent friendship formation than has been previously possible. Students are only one-sixth as likely to choose a cross-race than a same-race peer as a friend, and controls for school and individual variables account for only a third of this differential. While personal characteristics of individual students and pairs of students have the strongest effects on friendship choices, organizational characteristics of the school, such as tracking, are also important.
Survey-based research on Whites' racial attitudes in the USA has characterized their views as either `tolerant' or `ambivalent'. We argue that surveys on racial attitudes have systematically underestimated the extent of prejudice in the White population. The legal and normative changes created by the civil rights movement of the 1960s brought a new racial ideology (`color blind racism'), with new topics and a new form. These matters were examined by collecting survey and interview data from college students in three universities. The main findings were that White respondents appear to be more prejudiced in the interviews than in the survey, use a new racetalk to avoid appearing `racist', and that the themes and arguments that they mobilize are congruent with what other analysts have labeled as `laissez faire' or `competitive' racism.
Goldberg examines the role of race in contemporary liberal modernity. Given that personal and social identity are simultaneously fashioned together in terms of the dominant conceptual order, identity is mediated by the prevailing discursive practices and the values within them. Race enters as a central invention of modernity as an identity category that is both individual and gives the semblance of social cohesion. Despite the impression that race can produce social identity, it actually creates the conditions for exclusion to take place. Modernity views racism in relation to personal prejudices rather than overarching, institutional phenomena. This becomes the primary paradox for liberal modernity: it attempts to abstract identity to obscure the impact of race, but as it does it must enforce exclusionary identity categories.
This study explores how preadolescents engaged in different interactional approaches to whiteness in racially distinct summer camps. Kids in the predominantly white and predominantly black contexts created peer cultures that differed in the following ways: (1) how they marked and defined whiteness, (2) how they made subject positions toward whiteness problematic, and (3) how they maintained different racial hegemonies. Mere numerical majority/minority relations, as well as differences in racial hegemony, caused kids to vary the meanings of whiteness, especially as the value of maintaining color-blind and color-aware orientations fluctuated. The findings suggest that the racial composition of a context may be key to encouraging recognition that white racial subjectivities are as subject to multiple interpretations, expressions, and embodiment as are racial subjectivities of color.
Asians have settled in every country in the Western Hemisphere; some are recent arrivals, other descendents of immigrants who arrived centuries ago. Bringing together essays by thirteen scholars from the humanities and social sciences, Displacements and Diasporas explores this genuinely transnational Asian American experience-one that crosses the Pacific and traverses the Americas from Canada to Brazil, from New York to the Caribbean. With an emphasis on anthropological and historical contexts, the essays show how the experiences of Asians across the Americas have been shaped by the social dynamics and politics of settlement locations as much as by transnational connections and the economic forces of globalization. Contributors bring new insights to the unique situations of Asian communities previously overlooked by scholars, such as Vietnamese Canadians and the Lao living in Rhode Island. Other topics include Chinese laborers and merchants in Latin America and the Caribbean, Japanese immigrants and their descendants in Brazil, Afro-Amerasians in America, and the politics of second-generation Indian American youth culture. Together the essays provide a valuable comparative portrait of Asians across the Americas. Engaging issues of diaspora, transnational social practice and community building, gender, identity, institutionalized racism, and deterritoriality, this volume presents fresh perspectives on displacement, opening the topic up to a wider, more interdisciplinary terrain of inquiry and teaching.
Could your kids be learning a fourth R at school: reading, writing, 'rithmatic, and race? Race in the Schoolyard takes us to a place most of us seldom get to see in action-our children's classrooms-and reveals the lessons about race that are communicated there. Amanda E. Lewis spent a year observing classes at three elementary schools, two multiracial urban and one white suburban. While race of course is not officially taught like multiplication and punctuation, she finds that it nonetheless insinuates itself into everyday life in schools. Lewis explains how the curriculum, both expressed and hidden, conveys many racial lessons. While teachers and other school community members verbally deny the salience of race, she illustrates how it does influence the way they understand the world, interact with each other, and teach children. This eye-opening text is important reading for educators, parents, and scholars alike.
This study examines adolescents' plans for family formation (marriage and parenthood) and the congruence between their plans and their mothers' expectations and behaviors within these spheres. Using log-linear and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models to analyze data from the National Survey of Children (N = 724), this study addresses mechanisms of family socialization (e.g., modeling and defining influence) informed by social learning and symbolic interactionist theories. It also reveals whether and how these mechanisms vary according to gender. Results reveal that family factors best predict children's plans, although peer groups also may be important. In addition, defining influence is stronger than modeling influence.
In this article, Frances Maher and Mary Kay Thompson Tetreault revisit data presented in their book, The Feminist Classroom. In the book, they located their analysis in a traditionally feminist position of marginality, where they saw themselves allied with women of color in resisting a patriarchal academy. Subsequent discussions with colleagues and the proliferation of literature on Whiteness led them to realize that their own Whiteness, and the effects of Whiteness itself, remained uninterrogated in their original work. In this reanalysis of data from their book, they examine how assumptions of Whiteness shape the construction of knowledge, as it is produced and resisted in the classroom. Drawing on classroom and interview data, they investigate how students' constructions of gender, class, ethnicity, and race are informed by unacknowledged assumptions of Whiteness.
Preface. 1. Introduction: Racial Subjects. 2. Modernity, Race and Morality. 3. Racialized Discourse. 4. The Masks of Race. 5. Racist Exclusions. 6. Racisms and Rationalities. 7. Racial Knowledge. 8. Polluting the Body Politic: Race and Urban Location. 9. Taking Race Pragmatically. Notes. Bibliography. Index.
Inferences from the race relations literature suggest two competing sets of hypotheses concerning the effect of interregional
migration on racial attitudes. From normative theory we hypothesize that the effect of migration is symmetrical—such that
migration to and from the South influence attitudes equally—and that acculturation to local attitudes is equally incomplete
among South-non-South and non-South-South migrants. From the assumption that southern race norms are stronger and more important
than those elsewhere, we hypothesize that the effect of migration and the completeness of acculturation will be greater among
non- South-South than South-non-South migrants. Using data from a national sample of 2,232 white respondents, we find support
for the first set of hypotheses. Our evidence suggests that there is now no difference between the strength and importance
of southern and nonsouthern race norms, and that interregional migration may partially explain the convergence of regions
in racial attitudes as well as the recent nationwide slowing of liberalization of racial attitudes.
We examine the racial and ethnic concepts and related actions of very young children in a preschool setting. Breaking with much of the conventional literature on the cognitive development of preschool children, we argue that young children engage in interaction involving clear and often sophisticated understandings of racial and ethnic concepts and meanings. We discuss: (1) how racial and ethnic concepts are used to exclude or include others; (2) how racial or ethnic concepts are used to define oneself and others; (3) how power and control link to racial and ethnic understandings; and (4) how adults misperceive the racial and ethnic language and activities of children.
A study of the expressed preferences of four different ethnic groups in the Los Angeles metropolitan area shows strong desires for own-race combinations in the ethnicity of neighborhoods that individuals say they would choose when seeking a new residence. The results also show that Anglos are not the only group to practice "avoidance" of other racial/ethnic neighborhoods, although avoidance behavior by Anglos is the strongest. Because the issues of racial composition are socially sensitive, additional tests examined the relationship of preferences to behavior. Although many behaviors generally follow expressed preferences, members of households who expressed "no preference" also were found to largely choose own race neighborhoods. The results of this study suggest that the expressed preference for own race/own ethnicity, in combination with short-distance local moves, is likely to maintain present patterns of separation in U.S. metropolitan areas.
This paper reviews evidence pertaining to the Common Ingroup Identity Model for reducing intergroup bias. This model proposes that intergroup bias and conflict can be reduced by factors that transform members cognitive representations of the memberships from two groups to one more inclusive social entity. Theoretically, a common ingroup identity extends or redirects the cognitive and motivational processes that produce positive feelings toward ingroup members to former outgroup members. It is proposed that the prerequisite features specified by the contact Hypothesis (Allport, 1954; Cook, 1985), such as equal status between the memberships, cooperative interdependence, opportunity for self-revealing interactions and egalitarian norms, successfully reduce bias, in part, because they help transform members' perceptions of the memberships from “Us” and “Them” to a more inclusive “We”. Evidence from a laboratory experiment, two survey studies involving students attending a multi-ethnic high school and executives who have experienced a corporate merger, and a field experiment involving fans attending a college football game are summarized. In general, across these diverse settings, greater perceptions of a superordinate identity predicted lower levels of intergroup bias toward original outgroup members. In particular, this presentation of our research discusses the promise of exploring the role of a dual identity, in which both sub-group and superordinate group identities exist simultaneously, and how contextual features of the situational context may moderate the relation between the strength of a dual identity and intergroup attitudes.
For too long, the histories, experiences, cultures, and languages of students of color have been devalued, misinterpreted, or omitted within formal educational settings. In this article, the author uses critical race theory (CRT) and Latina/Latino critical theory (LatCrit) to demonstrate how critical raced-gendered epistemologies recognize students of color as holders and creators of knowledge. In doing so, she discusses how CRT and LatCrit provide an appropriate lens for qualitative research in the field of education. She then compares and contrasts the experiences of Chicana/Chicano students through a Eurocentric and a critical raced-gendered epistemological perspective and demonstrates that each perspective holds vastly different views of what counts as knowledge, specifically regarding language, culture, and commitment to communities. She then offers implications of critical raced-gendered epistemologies for both research and practice and concludes by discussing some of the critiques of the use of these epistemologies in educational research.
While much research that explores the role of race in education focuses on children of color, this article explores an aspect of the predominately White teaching force that educates them. This article explores findings from a qualitative study that posed questions about the ways in which White pre‐service teachers’ life‐experiences influenced understandings of race and difference, and how these pre‐service teachers negotiated the challenges a critical multicultural education course offered those beliefs. In keeping with the tenet of critical race theory that racism is an inherent and normalized aspect of American society, the author found that through previous life‐experiences, the participants gained hegemonic understandings about race and difference. Participants responded to challenges to these understandings by relying on a set of ‘tools of Whiteness’ designed to protect and maintain dominant and stereotypical understandings of race – tools that were emotional, ideological, and performative. This phenomenon is typically referred to as resistance in the literature on White teachers and multicultural education. The author contends, however, that these tools are not simply a passive resistance to but much more of an active protection of the incoming hegemonic stories and White supremacy and therefore require analysis to better understand when and how these tools are strategically used. Understanding how these tools of Whiteness protect dominant and stereotypical understandings of race can advise teacher education programs how to better organize to transform the ideologies of White teachers.
This research focuses on how children negotiate gender boundaries in middle childhood play. Over a nine-week period, children were observed creating, defining, and altering gender codes in a summer day camp. When girls and boys disregarded pre-described boundaries, they entered an area we refer to as the gender transgression zone. This area of activity, where boys and girls conduct heterosocial relations in hopes of either maintaining or expanding gender boundaries in child culture, is where gender transgression takes place. The study revealed that high-status boys used hegemonic masculinity to regulate both girls' and boys' boundaries by reserving the authority to sanction all gender transgressions. While race and class were salient for girls' homosocial organization and behavior, within this age group they did not appear to influence the boys' status system.
In this article, we consider recent research on three questions about people's memories for their early childhood: whether childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, whether implicit memories survive when explicit memories do not, and why early episodic memories are sketchy. The research leads us to form three conclusions. First, we argue that childhood amnesia is a real phenomenon, as long as the term is defined clearly. Specifically, people are able to recall parts of their lives from the period between ages 2 and 5 years, but they recall less from that period than from other periods. Second, we conclude that implicit memories from early childhood may be evident even when explicit memories are not, a finding that suggests early experience may affect behavior in ways that people do not consciously recognize. Third, we argue that although young children are well known to be wonderfully efficient learners of semantic information, they have difficulty in either encoding or retrieving the interlinked aspects of events that lend them their autobiographical character. Although more evidence is needed, the relative lack of episodic memories of early childhood may be linked to maturation of prefrontal cortex.
Devised 2 types of text schemas, an impersonal (IMP) and an interpersonal (INT) script, both based on everyday actions (i.e., seeing a show), and tested Ss' recall performance of each text immediately and after 8 mo. It was expected that recall would be high for both IMP and INT texts as they contained information that matched schemata. Data indicate that recall was high for both texts, that the INT script facilitated the encoding and storage of schema matching information, and that it had a selective function as it relegated information relating to the embedding IMP script into the background. (Slovak & Russian abstracts) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Describes and critiques 3 theories of modern racism: J. Kovel's (1970) psychoanalytic theory, D. O. Sear's (1988) social psychology theory, and D. Wellman's (1977) sociological theory. Based on agreements among these theories, an outline of modern American racism is advanced. The theory characterizes modern racism at the attitude level by (1) rejection of gross stereotypes and blatant discrimination, (2) opposition to racial change for ostensibly nonracial reasons, (3) group-based self-interest and subjective threat, (4) individualistic conceptions of opportunity in America, (5) normative compliance without complete internalization, and (6) indirect micro-aggressions and avoidance. A parallel variant of modern racism in Western Europe is discussed. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This article addresses how preadolescents produce and perform race through an ethnographic study of 8- to 11-year-old students in four fourth grade classrooms in the southeastern United States. Although Asian, Latino, and white students tended to avoid explicit talk of race, many white students constructed black students as disruptive “troublemakers.” Black students were more likely to openly discuss race and racism and used race talk to silence or isolate certain students. [race, identity, media, elementary school, multicultural education]
This chapter examines color-blind campuses that perpetuate White transparency and racially cognizant environments that reveal and challenge notions of color blindness. Recommendations are offered to help White students respond to the realities of Whiteness and move beyond color-blind racism.
This study explores how preadolescents engaged in different interactional approaches to whiteness in racially distinct summer camps. Kids in the predominantly white and predominantly black contexts created peer cultures that differed in the following ways: (1) how they marked and defined whiteness, (2) how they made subject positions toward whiteness problematic, and (3) how they maintained different racial hegemonies. Mere numerical majority/minority relations, as well as differences in racial hegemony, caused kids to vary the meanings of whiteness, especially as the value of maintaining color-blind and color-aware orientations fluctuated. The findings suggest that the racial composition of a context may be key to encouraging recognition that white racial subjectivities are as subject to multiple interpretations, expressions, and embodiment as are racial subjectivities of color.
This study examines adolescents' plans for family formation (marriage and parenthood) and the congruence between their plans and their mothers' expectations and behaviors within these spheres. Using log-linear and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models to analyze data from the National Survey of Children (N= 724), this study addresses mechanisms of family socialization (e.g., modeling and defining influence) informed by social learning and symbolic interactionist theories. It also reveals whether and how these mechanisms vary according to gender. Results reveal that family factors best predict children's plans, although peer groups also may be important. In addition, defining influence is stronger than modeling influence.
This manuscript provides a critical and comprehensive review of research on race socialization within Black families. Race socialization is defined as specific verbal and non-verbal messages transmitted to younger generations for the development of values, attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs regarding the meaning and significance of race and racial stratification, intergroup and intragroup interactions, and personal and group identity. Reviewed are published articles that address either analytical or theoretical approaches to understanding Black families’ race socialization practices. First, theoretical perspectives of the race socialization process are reviewed. Second, this review defines race socialization in Black families. It then describes modes of message transmittal. Next, it focuses on three domains of research on race socialization: (a) prevalence, (b) content, and (c) race socialization as a predictor of child and adult outcomes. It concludes by outlining important challenges and issues in the literature to encourage the development of future research.