Letters to the Editor
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Mine came from my father
My father made a concerted effort to instill his prejudices in his children. My mother did not. So I turned out like my father. (I got better.)
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Summaries and other shortcuts
It's dangerous to "review" research from what other people say the research is saying, even people as "clever" as the Freakonomics crowd.
The title of the paper was "White children's alignment to the perceived racial attitudes of the parents: Closer to the mother than the father" -- which is just about as far from "study concludes racism comes from mom" as you can get and still be talking about the same thing.
From the study:
...we found that children's attitudes were strongly correlated with the perceived expectations and attitudes of the mothers but not the fathers...
Again, specifically NOT "mom made me a hater", and the more about this paper I find, the less Lloyd's Broadsheet article seems like good coverage of the issues.
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My favorite "it comes from mum" research is the old famous "Benny & Penny" study. A baby is dressed in blue, called Benny, and given to random women to look after for half an hour in a children's play room. The same baby is dressed in pink, called Penny, and given to other random women to look after for half an hour in the same room.
With Benny, women played physical games, often involving toys.
With Penny, women played verbal games, often holding the child more.
But of course it's the same baby, who underneath the clothes, is "really" one sex or the other.
Mama made me a [insert traditional sex role here]? Only if you wanted a headline and didn't care about what the study was really suggesting.
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one of those anxiously progressive places in San Francisco where the parents of white kids would love nothing more than for their child to have a playdate with a non-white schoolmate
That's a strangely worded sentence. You seem to be disparaging white parents for valuing diversity and in a way that suggests you are different and better.
Are you saying that you're a white parent but you're some how better than the other white parents? Or are you saying you're not a white parent? Or perhaps you are saying you don't perceive any desire to help your children value diversity?
Regardless, if this study had come out the other way, that is, it was dad's fault, would you have been as skeptical?
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Are Women Immune from Racism?
Let me assure you, and I know whereof I speak, the most racist people I know are recent immigrants. These are people, after all, usually from pretty monocultural monoethnic monolinguistic societies, and being exposed to the cultural mayhem that is almost any downtown North American city is a pretty steep shock. A pretty common reaction is rejection, and women tend to be pretty big on circling the wagons, when the family is apparently threatened.
And yes, ugly racism is passed along by moms as well as dads, and frankly, it somehow feels uglier when women do it. But do it they do. We have plenty of little Koreans being told to never ever associate with Chinese, by their moms, and plenty of Russian tots told to despise Ukranians, by their moms. Their dads do it too, but at more of a distance, it doesn't have quite the same impact, at least not at the pre-school level. That comes later.
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@shannonr: "and the more about this paper I find, the less Lloyd's Broadsheet article seems like good coverage of the issues."
Welcome to Broadsheet, you seem to be new here.
Broadsheet is to gender science as the Discovery Institute is to evolutionary science.
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My mother tried but it didn't take
She always used to yell "Why do you have to play that [n-word] music?"
Miles Davis and Marvin Gaye won that contest. I mean there was no contest, even, not in my mind.
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Women and racism
Maybe, but I doubt it. My sister is a racist but she didn't get it from our mother, nor from our father. Our parents were not racists and neither are any of my other three brothers. Where did my sister get it? From the man she married, his family and her racist friends.
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I think 4 or 5 is too early to tell anything useful
I think cultural and religious forces come into play as the child's brain develops the capacity to do more than just look to mom and dad for signals.
I mean look at the sixties -- people didn't solve all the race problems then but you did see a younger generation whose ideas about race differed very starkly from those of their parents.
I don't think that could have been foreseen by examining the racial attitudes of the kids when they were still too young to listen to Jimi Hendrix.
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Anon 8:54
You say the article seems to be disparaging diversity by saying, " the parents of white kids would love nothing more than for their child to have a playdate with a non-white schoolmate"
But, by focusing on skin color, parents are teaching their kids that it matters -- a lot. Most small kids won't figure that out without help. So the non-white child becomes a trophy to prove that the diversity-seeking parents are truly non-racist. It's nicer to seek out a friendship due to skin color than to reject it, but it's still a long way from an integrated society where the person matters, not the shade of his or her skin.
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My Barbie doll made me a racist{
What nonsense.
Maybe what we mistake as racism among adults is actually a not unjustified disgust towards some aspects of African-American culture.
I work in the health field. Many of my friends and co-workers are immigrants from west Africa (Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, for example.) They're black; obviously they have no problems with darker skin tones. But what they don't like is the promiscuity, the vulgarity, the self-defeating attitudes and activities of current black American culture. One nurse feels so strongly about isolating her two daughters from this that she is educating them in a boarding school in Ghana even though the separation tears her up. Is she crazy? I remember reading a letter or article by a black activist during the recent Duke "rape" mess that suggested black strippers were the new goddesses of black Americans. What's wrong with this picture?
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Yes Commissioner
I am turning in my yellow running dog lackey mother for espousing counter revolutionary opinions against the Dear Leader.
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Projective Identification
I think it would be more useful to view the pre-school classroom and pre-schoolers beliefs about 'the other or others' from a systemic socio-analytic perspective as expressions of anxiety, projective identification and valence both w/in the group and as individuals. I am not a psychologist, but it seems to me less simplistic and really more interesting than "my mother made me do it". I was struck especially by the mention of mixed race children that identified with or preferred to play with blonde, more white children (I may be conflating two different posts here). Isn't that an expression of projected anxieties and ambivalences, maybe picked up from mom and dad's anxieties and ambivalence (not the same as racism per se) , or observations by the child or children of others' ambivalence toward mom, dad or child?