'al-

lan

en-

lCk CHAPTER 3
tal-

:er- Children's Developing Conceptions

of Race
LAWRENCE A HIRSCHFELD

N E OF the most important and most daunting tasks for the young child is

O developing the capacity to interpret and to explain the behavior of others,

Humans inhabit a world that is thoroughly social and thoroughly cultural;
any particular action can admit to very different kinds of explanations. Johnnie may
reach into the cookie jar because he is hungry and knows that cookies are in the
cookie jar; or he may do it because he has an oppositional personality and his mother
just told him not to touch the cookie jar; or he may reach into the jar by accident, the
cookie jar being placed where the candy jar used to be; or he may reach into the jar
because all the other kids have reached in.
These explanations all have a common thread: explaining Johnnie's actions is
grounded in attributing to Johnnie a particular state of mind: belief, hunger, predilec-
tions to believe or feel (i.e., personality). Given this, it isn't surprising that the human
child's capacity to "mentalize," to interpret and to explain behavior specifically in
terms of unseen mental states, is early emerging and robust By 9 months, infants
interpret an action preformed by a human hand as intentional, but not the same
action performed by a mechanical arm (Woodward, 1998), Twelve but not 9-month-
old infants, when imitating a goal-directed action performed by a model, do not
simply reenact (emulate) the behavior they observe, but infer the most "rational"
strategy to achieve the model's unseen goal (Gergely, Szilvia, Orsolya, 2003; see also
Meltzoff & Brooks, 2001). Fourteen month olds distinguish actions that are inten-
tional and ones that are accidental, and tend to imitate only the former (Carpenter,
Akhtar, & Tomasello, 1998). Further support for the view that mentalizing is a special-
purpose cognitive structure comes from neuroimaging studies that have identified
a specific brain system underpinning it (Frith & Frith, 2003; Saxe, Carey & Kanwisher,
2004) and differential impairment in mentalizing in individuals with autism
(Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith, 1985),
But humans also possess the capacity to use the sort of person an individual is to
interpret and explain her actions, Humans inhabit social worlds that are both

37
38 HANDBOOK OF RACE, RACISM, AND THE DEVELOPING CHILD

complex and cultural; they use the ability to recognize the sorts of people there are
to understand the meaning of others' behavior in negotiating these complexities.
When Johnnie tries to understand an action, he can-and does-exploit expecta-
tions he has about adults, women, teachers, Blacks, or skateboard aficionados.
Johnnie may expect, for example, that women are more likely than men to be secre-
taries without appealing to the motives--the mental states-that may underlie a
choice of occupation.
As with mentalizing, there is considerable evidence that even infants are capable
of drawing distinctions between individuals that become basis of social category
identity: For example, infants distinguish between people by their age (Brooks &
Lewis, 1976), gender (Miller, 1983), the language they speak (Mehleret al., 1988), and
even their race (Kelly, Quinn, & Slater, 2005). This is not to suggest that innate dispo-
sitions directly deliver judgments about gender, language, age, or race. To go
"on-line" all require some-although in some cases staggeringly slight-experience
with the wider social world. The finding that 3- but not 'l-month-old infants discrimi-
nate their own (i.e., most commonly encountered) race from other races (i.e., less
commonly encountered) does not mean that young infants know their own race or
even have a category race. What they display is the ability to distinguish between
individuals using information that older children and adults employ in diagnosing
the social category of race.
Not all social categories are created equal. Some provide the basis for more power-
ful explanations than others. For example, an individual's gender is typically thought
to explain behavior in more situations than, say, her occupation. Arguably the "most
unequal" social category-in the sense that it trumps more social category identities
in more situations-is race (Taylor & Fiske, 1978; d. Kurzban, Tooby, & Cosmides,
2001). Of course, race is also highly salient politically and economically. Knowing a
person's race goes a long way toward accurately predicting whether he or she is
likely to suffer inadequate medical care, poor schools, being incarcerated, or having
greater likelihood of prostate or breast cancer, or higher prices for almost everything
from eggs to a mortgage, and so on. (Feagin & Hernan, 1998).
The standard view outside psychology-that is, among historians, sociologists,
anthropologists, and the other interpretive research traditions--is that the hyperpsy-
chological salience of race derives from its political and economic importance
(Smedley, 1999). However, within psychology, an impressive literature in social psy-
chology has underscored the myriad cognitive processes that support race's political
and economic importance (see, e.g., Hamilton & Trolier, 1986; Hilton and Von Hippel,
1996; Sidanius & Pratto, 1999). Particularly relevant is research demonstrating the
extent to which nonconscious, automatic processes are involved (Devine 1989;
Banaji & Greemvald, 1994). Imaging studies reveal that the perception of and rea-
soning about race and racial stereotypes appear to involve unique patterns of neural
activation (Phelps et al. 2000; Hart et al. 2000; Richeson et al, 2003; Wheeler & Fiske
2005; Eberhardt 2005).
Curiously, developmental research has less prominence in the elaboration of theo-
retical models of race. This is not to say that race has not been an important topic of
developmental research. Rather, it is to observe two trends in that work: First, rela-
tively less research has explored the development of racial categorization among
children, with much greater emphasis on the development of racial attitudes. Sec-
ond, conventional wisdom, until recently, has been that racial categorization is a
bottom-up process involving little more than the ability to categorize like things
 Children's Developing Conceptions of Race 39

there are together on the basis of surface level similarities. This claim aside, it is clear that
plexities. developmentally race is one of the earliest emerging social categories. Leaving aside
expecta- 3-month-olds' discrimination of faces by race, by 2 to 3 years of age, toddlers have
ionados. the ready capacity to use racial categories to reason about others and their behavior.
be secre- Most relevant research focused on young children's ability to stereotype racially.
.iderlie a Since the Clarks' landmark doll studies (Clark & Clark, 1950), many studies have
shown that by 3 years of age, children effortlessly sort people into racial categories
~ capable and use membership in these categories to interpret behaviors in accord with the
category (typically the most strident) adult stereotypes (Aboud, 1988; Cross 1991; Katz, 1983).
lrooks & (There are significant changes between 3 and 5 years of age. Three-year-olds
188), and generally attribute positive properties to members of the majority race, whereas
te dispo- 5-year-olds not only attribute positive properties to majority race, but also negative
~. To go properties to minority races.)
perience Several explanations have been proposed for these patterns (emerging awareness
:::liscrimi- of race, on one hand, and racial stereotyping/prejudice, on the other). As observed
(i.e., less above, the young child's beliefs about racial identity-as opposed to racial atti-
n race or tudes-have been long seen as tethered to surface level properties, a view consistent
between with the long held view that young children's thinking is concrete in orientation
ignosing (Piaget, 1928). One well-researched example of this is young children's inability to
grasp the notion of racial (or gender) constancy, namely, the understanding that
e power- a person's race does not change. Young children have similarly been described as
thought unable to grasp that race (and gender) are functions of a person's biological constitu-
ne "most tion/heritage; the knowledge, for example, that a person's race is fixed at birth. Stud-
dentities ies lent support to this view. In one, 5-year-old kindergarteners and third-graders
osmides, (approximately 8 years old) were asked what would happen if a familiar child were
lowing a made up to look as if he had changed race (e.g., if a White child was made to look
or she is like an Inuit child). Kindergartners, but not third-graders, reasoned that the child's
.r having race had changed (Aboud, 1988). A second study, by Semaj (1980), using a similar
erything task, found that 4-year-olds expected that a Black child made up to look White had
become White, suggesting that they were both unable to grasp biological identity
lologists, constancy and unable to grasp that basic biological properties in the context of racial
yperpsy- judgments are involuntary. These results are consistent with the view that young
portance children do not believe that race is embodied or a function of biological or corporeal
.cial psy- nature. Curiously, in nonracial contexts preschoolers do grasp that internal bodily
political functions, such as digestion, are involuntary (Hatano & Inagaki, 1994).
1 Hippel. If this is an accurate account, it raises an important question about the relation-
iting the ship between children's beliefs about human categories and their expectations about
ne 1989; nonhuman living things, phenomena that at first blush are similar to race in many
and rea- respects. Consider a parallel notion, namely, gender constancy. Although previous
)f neural research using manipulations like those used by Aboud and Semaj found a similar
. & Fiske inability to grasp constancy, more recent studies-using a switched-at-birth para-
digm-demonstrate that 4-year-olds have an adult-like grasp of gender constancy
l of thea (Gelman & Taylor, 2000). These findings have been interpreted as revealing that even
. topic of preschoolers believe that gender is not simply about outward appearances, but
rst. rela- rather about an expectation of an embodied but hidden physical basis to gender.
1 among Bern (1989) provided further support for an embodied interpretation of gender in a
des. Sec- study that found that preschoolers, who grasped gender constancy, as assessed on
tion is a traditional measures, also expected that genitalia constitute the defining attributes of
.e things male and female .
40 HANDBOOK OF RACE, RACISM, AND THE DEVELOPING CHILD

Other studies reveal that preschoolers also grasp species constancv for
nonhuman living kinds, expecting that a creature's species and its inherent nature
are constant and more informative of that nature than surface-level similarities
(Gelman, 1988; Gelman & Coley, 1990). Gelman and Wellman (1991) found that
species-typical properties are conserved even when a creature is raised among
members of a species whose species-typical properties are quite different. Children
also grasp that although a creature might change radically in appearance during
development (e.g., tadpole to frog or caterpillar to moth), it remains the same kind
of creature.
Recent studies of young children's beliefs reveal a similar, embodied notion of
race. In one study, I (1996) found that young children are able to grasp racial con-
stancy when the task is framed in a familiar context. The study tested an alternative
explanation of Aboud's and Semaj's finding, proposing that the pattern of reason-
ing they observed could be attributable less to children's reasoning strategies than
to confusion about task because the changes proposed were both implausibly
abrupt and difficult to integrate with the child's awareness that biological change
tends to involve gradual changes (see Rosengren, Gelman, Kalish, & McCormick,
1991). To test this proposal, I asked preschoolers whether racial and other embod-
ied properties could change in the context of familiar transformations of the body
that occur over the life span and between generations. Specifically, when asked
whether a property would remain unchanged as a person grew up-hair and skin
color versus clothing style and color-even 3-year-olds judged that racial proper-
ties were more constant than sartorial ones. Furthermore, when asked to choose
which embodied properties would remain unchanged over the life span-hair and
skin color versus body build-4-year-olds judged that racial properties were more
constant than body build. The same pattern of judgments was obtained when chil-
dren were asked which properties would be inherited (i.e., if a heavyset parent was
Black, children reasoned that his child would more likely be thin and Black than
heavyset and White).
In another study, using a switched-at-birth task, 3- to 5-year-olds reasoned that a
person's race is fixed at birth (Hirschfeld, 1996). Participants were asked whether
a child would develop racial properties of her birth parents or those of her adopted
parents. Four- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, overwhelming predicted that the
child would racially match her birth parents. Other researchers have documented
much the same theory-like reasoning about race in populations outside of North
America or Northern Europe: Gimenez & Harris (2002) among Spanish preschoolers,
Astuti et al. (2004) in their work with 6-year-olds in Madagascar (when the category
contrast involved differences that North Americans would see as racial), and
Mahalingham (1999) in a study of South Asian preadolescents.
Young children's thinking reveals adult-like understanding of race in other
respects as well. Ambady et al. (2001) found that children as young as 5 years of age
are susceptible to stereotype threat. (A highly abstract version of racial prejudice in
which a person's performance on standardized tasks is diminished simply by remind-
ing them of ambient stereotypes; thus, when primed that macks struggle learning
mathematics, Black participants perform less well than matched, but unprimed Black
participants.). In Ambadv et al.'s study, kindergarten and early elementary school
children reasoned in accord with wide-spread but, for the voung child, typically
unstated stereotypes. Thus, they predicted that an Asian student would be more
likely to do well in math than a Caucasian student (and that a boy was more likely
 r
l
•
Children's Developing Conceptions of Race 41

for than a girl to do well in math), Indeed, in spite of conventional wisdom that preschool
lure children are color blind and innocent of racial prejudice, persuasive evidence shows
ties otherwise (Aboud 1988). In part, this reflects an absence of blatant prejudiced behav-
that ior among preschoolers, in contrast to their school-age counterparts. But it also
ong reflects the subtlety of young children's use of racial identity as a technology of inclu-
lren sion and exclusion, much as most adults are able to moderate behavior to avoid
ring unambiguous displays of prejudice.
cind Van Ausdale and Feagin's (2001) ethnography of a preschool provides striking
evidence. In their ethnography they document young children's subtle use of racial
n of identity in regulating inclusion and exclusion-again, despite adults around them
[on- denying that they do so. In the first week of the study, Van Ausdale witnessed the fol-
rtive lowing interaction:
son-
than Francisco, a very small Latino boy. , , is playing with a small group of children, He
;ibly suddenly starts a fight. Francisco pushes Cheng-Li (5, Asian) over and topples the Asian
mge boy's Lego tower... , Francisco. , , declares [to a White girl watching] "1 don't like him,
.iick. He looks funny. But 1 like you" (pp. 175)
bod-
iodv Van Ausdale and Feagin's account continues. Cheng-Li begins to cry and the
sked teacher approaches. She admonishes the boys not to fight, but to work out their dif-
skin ferences, which they make no effort to do. As the teacher moves away she remarks to
lper- Van Ausdale. "Francisco is in a bad temper today but usually is not like that." Van
oose Ausdale later realized, however, that Francisco did act like this often. What was
'and remarkable was the teacher's inability or unwillingness to realize it.
.nore
chi l-
ESSENTIALISM, RACE, AND THE YOUNG CHILD
:was
than A hallmark of the North American adult's notion of race is commitment to under-
lying racial essences (Allport, 1954). While the idea that human races (whatever
hat a they might actually represent) have essences, like the parallel idea that nonhuman
ether living kinds have essences, has long been rejected by scientists. However, the folk
ipted belief that racial groups (or species, for that matter) have essences is widespread,
it the and the topic of considerable research. Folk reasoning about group essences falls
snted under a more general cognitive predilection for psychological essentialism, first
-Jorth theorized by Medin and Ortony (1989). It is the belief that each member of a cate-
olers, gory (or group in the case of race) is endowed with a category-group-specific
~gory essence that governs the category member's development and behavior (Gelman
and 2003; Gelman & Hirschfeld 1999). Essentialist reasoning is found in folk beliefs
about many social categories, but especially those, like race and gender, that apply
other in many different situations. In addition to race, gender, age, kinship, language
)f age spoken, ethnicity (to the extent it is distinct from race), and caste are virtually
ice in always, to the degree that current research permits generalization, essentialized
nind- (Prentice & Miller 2006; Haslam, Rothchild, & Ernst, 2000; Mahalingham, 1999;
rning McIntosh 2002; Hirschfeld, 1996).
Black Influential scholarship in the interpretive disciplines argues that essentialism has
chool historically proved to be an important modality through which domination is
.icallv achieved (see, Said, 1978; Stoler, 1995; Fields, 1990). The cognitive correlate of that
more claim, in its skeletal form, is that folk have a conceptual disposition to inexorably link
likely beliefs about outward racial appearance to claims about inner character. Arguably
42 HANDBOOK OF RACE, RACISM, AND THE DEVELOPING CHILD

this is the most pernicious aspect of racial thinking and its exploitation of essentialist
reasoning. Specifically, there is within the widely held folk theory of race a conceptu-
ally willingness to believe that

• human biological variation clusters into natural groupings, largely marked by

differences in outward appearances such as skin color, facial form, hair color
and texture, etc.;
• each racial group has a unique underlying essence that governs the race-specific
development of the group's members (on the surface, at least, similar to the folk
belief that the development of each nonhuman species is governed by a distinct
species-specific underlying essence);
• this underlying essence governs the development of outward appearance and
inward qualities.

Bear in mind that this model is meant to characterize a folk theory of race, not (at
least among contemporary scientists) a scientific one.
It should be apparent that this essentialist reasoning about race among adult folk
also characterizes young children's reasoning about race. Children may not be able to
articulate this, but their expectations about race-particularly its continuity over the
life span and across generations, and the manner in which it becomes an indelible part
of an individual-accord closely with adult beliefs about essentialism and race. These
findings together are consistent not only with children's adult-like reasoning about
race, they suggest that the young child may playa special role in sustaining racial
thinking. Rather than simply rehearsing adult racial beliefs, young children may be
crucial to the way racial beliefs become a fixed part of adult cultural repertoire.

THE CHICKEN AND EGG OF RACIAL THINKING

What role do pedagogical models play in the acquisition of group-based reasoning?
Folk wisdom holds that local (daily experience-near) models are especially impor-
tant: "The acorn does not fall far from the tree," or "As the twig is bent, so grows the
tree." On this view, group-based reasoning arises through a process of social learn-
ing, such that children are exposed to stereotypes, particularly those expressed by
important adult models like parents and teachers, the result of which is that children
come to hold them (e.g., see Powlishta. Sen, Serbin, Poulin-Dubois. & Eichstedt.
2001). The child is thus seen as a largely passive observer; and what counts in pre-
dicting what beliefs that child acquires is the degree of exposure to the most relevant
and readily-available input.
As intuitive as this may seem, for many cultural domains (Maccobv 2000; Harris
1998), and for racial attitudes in particular, this is not the case. Several studies have
demonstrated that children's racial and ethnic biases are not reliablv associated with
the beliefs and attitudes of parents or peers (Bigler 2004; Aboud & Doyle, 1996; Aboud
2003). Parents and teachers, in this case as in others, wildly overestimate their influ-
ence in shaping children's beliefs.
On reflection, this should not be as surprising at is sounds at first blush: In matters
such as race, children need to develop culturally normative understandings, and
accordingly need to recognize that input that reflects the community's beliefs
and practices. Relying on sources that are too local-say, a particular family environ-
ment or a particular teacher's image of how one should speak--risks relying on input
 r
Children's Developing Conceptions of Race 43

tialist that may not accord with community norms. The issue can be recast as one of
:eptu- sampling. The child needs to identify reliable sources of information; hence she needs
to avoid sampling too narrowly. In the case of the very young child, whose range of
encounters is limited, it often means attending to-privileging--less frequently
ed by encountered sources of information over more frequently encountered ones.
color To illustrate, consider the way that a young child develops (or doesn't develop)
an accent. In the typical case, it seems straightforward; the child mimics-uses as
recific a model-the accent of her parents or other important care-givers. When the local
le folk model, however, is not the best source--that is, young children of nonnative
istinct speakers-giving too much weight to a local source would produce an inappropriate
accent (from the perspective of the broader language community). In fact, there is no
e and evidence that young children of nonnative speakers speak with their parents' accents.
Rather, they develop normative speech patterns (Hirschfeld, 1996; Harris, 1998).
Presumably. this occurs by discounting input from local sources in favor of less
tot (at local-and less frequently encountered-s-input.
Relevant to this discussion is whether a sampling bias affects the acquisition of
It folk reasoning about groups and their members. A study I conducted speaks, though
ible to indirectly, to the point. That study examined the processes by which children come to
er the endorse a culture-specific strategy for attributing racial identity in North America; a
e part system of inference called the one-drop of blood rule (Hirschfeld, 1996). According to
These the rule, if a person has any traceable Black ancestry he is classified Black. To explore
about children's knowledge of the rule, Black and White second- and fifth-graders were
racial shown pictures of mixed race couples and then asked to judge the appearance of
lay be their offspring from three drawings, one depicting a Black child, a second depicting
a White child, and a third depicting a child with intermediate features (made by mor-
phing the Black and White drawings). By early adolescence White children reasoned
in accord with the one-drop rule, judging that the child would look Black. Black ado-
lescents, in contrast, predicted that the couple's child would be mixed.
ming? One interpretation of these results is that children's judgments are shaped by their
mpor- local, family environment: the relevant difference in local environments in this case
,ysthe being race. A second interpretation is that the children's judgments are shaped by the
learn- broader community; that is, the judgments reflect a biased attention to community-
ed by wide standards. The initial analysis did not allow us to distinguish between the two
ildren interpretations; White subjects were drawn from a predominantly White community
istedt, and the Black subjects were drawn from a community with a large concentration of
n pre- Blacks. By doing a reanalysis, which focused on White subjects living in the commu-
levant nity with a large minority population, we were able to disentangle the two interpre-
tations. Unlike their counterparts in the majority community, White participants
-larris living in the mixed race communitv judged, as had Black children from the sante
; have community, that the mixed race couple's child would look mixed racially. In short,
i with predicting how children would respond was more accurately assessed by looking to
"baud how the wider cultural environment shapes racial beliefs rather than looking to the
influ- more local one.

tatters
A SPECIAL-PURPOSE COGNITIVE ABILITY FOR
0, and
RACIAL THINKING?
oeliefs
viron- A convergence of research over the past two decades in psychology, philosophy, lin-
input guistics and anthropology has challenged a widely accepted view of the human
44 HANDBOOK OF RACE, RACISM, AND THE DEVELOPING CHILD
r
mind as a general-purpose reasoning device that is brought to bear on any cognitive
task, whatever its specific context (Fodor, 1983; Hirschfeld & Gelman, 1994). Instead,
many researchers have concluded that many cognitive abilities are specialized to
handle specific types of information. In short, much of human cognition is domain-
specific, dedicated to a specific range of tasks, and a specific kind of input. One of the
earliest statements of this view-and almost certainly the most influential-was
Chomsky's (1965) claims about the nature and scope of a dedicated language acqui-
sition device. Chomsky's insight, sometimes lost in subsequent scholarship, pointed
not only to a special-purpose competence, but a special-purpose competence for
acquiring knowledge. In many domains, it is not so much that the mind's abilities are
domain-specific, but that the competencies that guide and shape acquisition of
knowledge in a particular domain are domain-specific.
Modular or domain-specific competencies have been described for a number of
domains, including folk biology (the conceptual organization and reasoning about
nonhuman living organisms; Carey, 1985); naive physics (the conceptual organiza-
tion and reasoning about the movements of not-self-propelling-objects; Spelke, 1990);
folk psychology (or Theory of Mind, ToM, the capacity for mentalizing discussed
earlier in the chapter; Leslie, 1994); naive mathematics (sensitivity to number and
computational knowledge with mathematical content. In contrast, a relatively mod-
est literature concerns the possibility that knowledge of human groups is organized
around a special-purpose competence (Hirschfeld, 1989; Jackendoff, 1992). This
reluctance is curious given the degree to which humans use, attend to, and talk about
others in terms of group membership, and particularly how potent group member-
ship is in the access to and allocation of important resources.
I propose that the evidence reviewed above, and the supporting conclusion that
the child learns about race to a significant degree on her own, is consistent with a
special-purpose acquisition competence that guides the detection of group member-
ships and shapes children's use as a basis for social inference. Elsewhere I have called
this cognitive competence folk or naive sociology (Hirschfeld, 1996). A special-
purpose acquisition competence can also be thought of as a preorganization for
particular kinds of knowledge. On the face of, it makes little sense to propose that
racial thinking is preorganized; race is, after all, a relatively recent social invention,
dating anywhere, depending on the historian, between the early Christian period to
overseas exploration in the 15th century.
My proposal is not that there is a special-purpose competence for acquiring knowl-
edge of race, but there is a competence for the acquisition of knowledge of human
groupings. Within that rubric is a subset of groupings, of which race is one instance:
groups whose membership is thought to be based in an unseen essence, governed by
folk biological principles such as growth and inheritance, and highly attention-
demanding. Other members of this set would include gender, age grades, (some
types of) ethnicity, and caste. This subset of human groupings also share characteris-
tic features with other domains of knowledge subserved by special-purpose abilities:
great inductive potential (i.e., supports inference over widely varying situations and
conditions), and precocious and robust development (including relevant sensitivities
even in infantsj-i-all of which combine in a distinct pattern of independence in devel-
opment. Unlike some other special-purpose abilities, the development of many of
these domains is contingent on cultural variation. All special-purpose competencies
require that relevant input be present: No one learns a language in the absence of lin-
guistic input, naive mathematical development varies depending on the kind of
 Children's Developing Conceptions of Race 45

itive mathematical knowledge in the surrounding environment; although for some that
tead. input appears to be vanishingly small (e.g. naive physics; Spelke, Phillips, &
-d to Woodward,1995),
1ain- Consider in turn some aspects of the folk sociology of essentialized groups that
Ifthe are triggered by very limited exposure to relevant input and those aspects that are
-was more deeply contingent on specific cultural environments,
=qUl- Certainly a basic dimension of essentialized groupings is the very young child's
nted curiosity about the nature and scope of the repertoire of salient groupings. As just
E for observed, these are manifold in any given cultural environment. To appreciate the
'S are scope and depth of this curiosity, consider two studies. In the first (Hirschfeld, 1993),
m of 3- to 5-year-old French preschoolers were provided information about relevant
groupings in French culture, specifically race (North African, sub-Saharan African,
er of East Asian, and northern European), gender, and occupation (postal worker, police-
bout man, and shop owner). Participants were presented this information in one of two
niza- modalities: either a verbal narrative or a pictorial one. One finding is pertinent here:
990); Participants of all ages were able to recall more information about the groups men-
issed tioned in the narrative in the verbal condition. If, as many have claimed, young chil-
and dren's knowledge of race derives from experience with people who look different,
nod- why are these children more sensitive to-find more relevant to ear I y representations-
iized verbal input? I suggest that given the complexity of the cultural environment it is
This more important developmentally to first identify which groups there are than deter-
bout mine what the perceptual cues of membership might be.
.iber- A second study, Elizabeth Bartmess, Sarah White, Uta Frith, and I (2007) examined
the extent of autistic children's knowledge of racial and gender stereotypes and how
that they might use them in predicting the behavior of others. At first blush, autistic chil-
ith a dren would not seem the ideal population in which to explore social stereotypes.
.iber- They typically are impaired in their ability to mentalize, evincing great difficulty in
alled using attributions of mental states as a basis for explaining the behavior of others.
~cial­ Furthermore, the deep social decrements characteristic of autistic children would
:'lfor presumably make it difficult to learn common social stereotypes, if such learning
. that depends on everyday experience. A group of autistic 7-year-olds with impairment to
ition, their ability to mentalize were each told a brief story and then presented a series of
od to picture pairs, each pair contrasting either in the targets' gender or race. In the gender
stories, they were told that one of the targets conformed to a gender stereotype (e.g.,
iowl- likes to play with dolls) and then asked to choose which child was the story about
[man (e.g.. a boy or a girl). Race items were similar. Participants' responses were coded for
ance: whether they were stereotype consistent or not. Strikingly, the autistic children rea-
-d by soned overwhelmingly in accord with common stereotypes: 80 percent of the time
.tion- the autistic children were stereotype consistent in their judgments about gender, and
some 60 percent of the time in their judgments about race (both reliably above chance).
teris- This pattern of response is indistinguishable from normally developing controls
ities: matched in verbal mental age. In short, children with significant impairment in their
,and ability to interpret the behavior of others with respect to mental states were virtually
,'ities unimpaired in their ability to interpret the behavior of others in terms ot the groups
evel- of which thev were members.
1Y of How did these autistic children acquire this knowledge? Stereotypes are units of
ncies cultural knowledge, and vary considerably by place and historical epoch. Impor-
,f lin- tantly, they tvpically are not based on actual experience, but rely on transmission of
id of verbally or nonverbally coded information regarding the kinds and nature of groups
46 HANDBOOK OF RACE, RACISM, AND THE DEVELOPING CHILD
r
in the cultural environment they inhabit. Domain-general accounts of the acquisition
of cultural knowledge are premised on the assumption that such knowledge is the
product of persisting, and often consciously guided, engagement with the flow of
normal social life. Autistic children whose social engagement is virtually absent must
acquire their social knowledge outside this flow and should on this account be disad-
vantaged in developing normal cultural competence. Our findings fall into place
when we assume that the acquisition of stereotypic knowledge relies on a dedicated
set of cognitive processes with their own developmental trajectory, distinct from
those in mentalizing. Moreover, these processes must be remarkably robust if they
work in early childhood, when social experience is limited, and in autism, when
social experience is abnormal.
What of those aspects of folk sociology that do vary across populations) Even if a
largely autonomous competence governs the acquisition of knowledge of group-
ings, the kinds of groups in different cultural environment are not triviallv different.
Accordingly we would expect that talk about them would also vary. How does the
young child's robust curiosity express itself in very different contexts. Put another
way: How do we move from an early sensitivity to-strikingly evocative in infancy,
but not the same as later-emerging systems of categorization-its cultural elabora-
tion? In the case of race, in particular, and folk sociology, more generally,
"culturalization" occurs in part because the competence's input conditions are less
constrained than those of other cognitive competencies. To illustrate, compare the
processing of input relevant to language processing to input relevant to racial
judgments.
Relevant input to the language acquisition device is recognized by what Fodor
(1983) has called a perceptual module. Speech, at a low level of processing, is chan-
neled to higher level processors by virtue of a perceptual filter that discriminates
between speech and other sounds, and the constituent elements of speech-that is,
phonemes and syllables-are recognized by low-level processors that leave little
room, as it were, for processing error. The input conditions for self-propelled objects
are similarly sensitive and in operation almost from birth (Premack, 1991). Relevant
input to a naive competence for physics-and by extension for numerical processing-
is robustly provided by low-level recognition capacities for whole objects, also in
operation virtually from birth (Spelke, 1990). Recent work suggests that music
processing may also exploit the dedicated perceptual filter associated with language
(Levitin & Menon, 2003).
By contrast, input to a folk sociology capacity is determined by whatever (in an
individual's bodily appearance, behavior, language, or the reaction of others to them)
provides evidence of an individual's group memberships. Raw information may
provide input to any number of cognitive processes, ranging from a dedicated face
recognition device that discriminates among facial gestalts, to abilities that discrimi-
nate between skin and hair color or between body types. It is not surprising that
there is cultural exploitation of the dedicated face recognition device because, obvi-
ously, it affords close attention to and excellent memory for faces. Thus, human
culture often manipulates faces as a technique for identifying members of different
groups: make-up, masks, scarification, veils, and so on, exploit a robust ability that
evolved from an abilitv to discriminate between individuals to a wav to identify mem-
o • •

bers of different groups. Long before humans had significant contact with humans
who they did not racially resemble, they had contact with humans 'whose manipu-
lated appearance they did not resemble.
 Children's Developing Conceptions of Race 47

ition But humans also use (and frequently manipulate the sources of) information about
; the skin color, hair color and texture, and body types as a way to identify and sort indi-
wof viduals into groups. Processing this sort of information is not grounded in a dedi-
nust cated device, hence input conditions for these processes are less constrained than
sad- processes which are grounded in a dedicated device. As a result, a module for folk
ilace sociology affords more possibilities, in terms of type of input, than other modules
ated and, accordingly, more possibilities for cultural exploitation. This in turn means that
from the ways groups are formed and their members identified admit considerable cul-
they tural variation. Although it is the case that cultural exploitation of special-purposes
,hen competencies is not unique to folk sociology, it does seem to find its most elaborated
form there. Humans spend a great deal of time attending to their appearance not
:1 if a only to render themselves attractive to potential mates (as evolutionary psychology
oup- suggests), but to mark themselves as members of specific grouping, as kinds of peo-
rent. ple (Sperber & Hirschfeld, 2006).
s the
ither
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR THE TROUBLESOME AND
mcy,
TROUBLING PROBLEM OF RACE?
lOra-
rally, Race, as observed earlier, is inexorably linked to systems of differential access to and
~ less allocation of important resources in North America (and elsewhere). The converse
::' the is also the case: Systems of differential access to and allocation of important resources
acial are inexorably linked to systems of racial classification and reasoning. Put another
way, race is both a category of power and a category of the mind, a state of affairs
odor that implicates race in any discussion of power and power in any discussion of race.
.han- I don't think many would find this claim controversial. A more controversial claim,
:1ates that I've developed elsewhere (Hirschfeld, 1997), is that
at is,
little 1. Race, as this chapter argued, is a particular sort of concept by virtue of the way
ljects it is acquired.
.vant
ng- Race, as has further been argued, is a conceptual achievement that the child, in
so in significant measure, accomplishes on his or her own. We can accordingly recast (1):
ausic
uage 2. Race is a potent category of power because it is effortlessly learned, and hence
easily shared and stabilized over time.
in an
hem) In other words, the cognitive susceptibility that governs the acquisition of racial
may thinking-namely, folk sociology-provides an easily exploitable cognitive prepar-
! face edness to find race (in cultural environments in which race is part of the ambient
rimi- system of belief or its counterparts in systems where it is not, e.g., caste in South
; that Asia) and to invest it with great inductive potential. In a sense children don't come to
obvi- racial thinking because their elders think racially; children come to racial thinking
iman because of thinking racially is subserved by a cognitive susceptibility that makes race
erent the sort of idea that is readily learned and stabilized in the culture of their elders.
r that How, if at all, does this account advance our social goal of changing, or at least
nern- taming, the most troubling and troublesome character of much of racial thinking? I
mans put forward the following proposal: Our culture overwhelmingly underestimates
nipu- the influence that children exert on the processes by which racial thinking is acquired,
and it overwhelmingly overestimates the influence adults, particularly local adults,
48 HANDBOOK OF RACE, RACISM, AND THE DEVELOPING CHILD

exert on the acquisition of racial thinking. Together, these confusions about the
acquisition process mislead us into creating programs aimed at affecting the troubled
and troublesome aspects of race that will almost certainly fail.
Overestimating the role that local adults play in shaping children's racial thinking
takes many forms, but all share confidence in the idea that very young children are
preracial in their thinking, that the preschool years is a period of racial innocence.
Although it is not difficult to see why parents would want this to be the case,
nonetheless it is not. Still, much effort seeking to change children's racial beliefs pre-
supposes this age of innocence; in essence, much antiracist interventions are less
intervention against racism and more interventions seeking to recapture a (nonexist-
ent) preracial innocence. The troubling and troublesome aspects of racial thinking
are treated as if they How from exposure to regrettably biased information, in the
absence of which the child would remain color-blind.
Consider familiar multiculturalism from this perspective. An admittedly simpli-
fied description includes the following assumptions:

• Race (and ethnicity, religion, culture, etc.) are aspects of each individual that
should be celebrated, not disparaged;
• in fact, all people are fundamentally alike, and race (and ethnicity, religion, cul-
ture, etc.) are more or less skin deep .
• Teaching children these "facts" will hopefully return a stage of preracial
thinking.

The burden of the research reviewed above supports precisely the opposite view:
Even very young children believe that race is neither superficial nor culturally cele-
brated. By the age of 3 they hold an adult-like folk theoretical view-believing that
race is fixed-at-birth and governed by biological processes like growth and inherit-
ance-and adult-like prejudices-believing that race determines whether or not one
is honest, smart, or clean.
These are not convictions that they acquire through accidental exposure to the
wrong information. Children's robust prepared curiosity about the social world and
deeply-grounded willingness (and capability) to essentialize social groups playa
central, arguably predominant, role in their developing knowledge. This is not to
suggest that children invent race out of whole cloth, that somehow they would invent
it if it weren't there. Nor are they innately racist. The acquisition process is governed
by an endogenous competency that parses the cultural environment for relevant
input that meets specific conditions and attributes to the group entities recognized
for a domain-specific range of properties. Not all cultures are racialized. In some
cultures the attention-demanding essentialized group is caste, in others based on
age-grades, and, as far as we know, everywhere gendered and ageist (i.e., every-
where adults exercise authority over children in virtue of the natural immaturity of
the latter, even accepting that what a child is varies considerably across cultures and
historical era).

• Teaching children these "facts" is appropriate to their stage of cognitive and

emotional maturity; teaching them about structural inequity is not.

The first three items in the description of multicultural interventions are familiar
enough to most readers, the fourth may be less so. Multiculturalism (to perhaps
 Children's Developing Conceptions of Race 49

iout the unfairly use this term to refer to this constellation of actions and their motivations)
:roubled often does appeal to the child's sense of fairness, or more accurately, their sense of
unfairness. Prejudice hurts people, and hurting people is not good. But as Herbert
thinking Kohl (1995) has deftly shown, under the multicultural assumption means one
dren are individual hurting another individual. Prejudice on this view is not about structural
.iocence. inequities that characterize relations between groups, but unfairness between indi-
he case, viduals, half of whom are easy to demonize, half of whom are easy to lionize. Racism
iefs pre- is imagined as overt acts with direct consequences, not the enduring, hidden, and
are less everyday acts that sustain inequity.
ionexist- Kohl illustrates this by examining middle-school texts relating the Rosa Parks
thinking story (note it is the Rosa Parks story, not the story of the Montgomery bus boycott).
'1, in the He found that these texts displayed systematic omission and distortions, supposedly
to cast the episode in (cognitive and emotional) age-appropriate terms. The accounts
r simpli- typically lionize Parks as a tired seamstress too tired after a day of laboring to give up her
seat. They do not lionize Parks for being a long-time activist in the civil rights moment,
nor for participating in a carefully planned political action, designed, organized,
lual that and carried out by the Black community. The take-away image of Parks and the
Montgomery boycott in most textbooks is one of an individual, acting alone and out
.ion, cul- of fatigue, a Black community. acting impulsively rather than politically. It is decid-
edly not the image of a member of an active and thoughtful political movement of
Jreracial Blacks, acting by design and motive. Indeed, the textbook accounts ironically convey
and reinforce more prejudice than they potentially reduce.
If the goal is to change children's racial beliefs, then employing a strategy that
ite view: largely makes no contact with children's prior expectations is unlikely to succeed.
Illy cele- The nature of these expectations itself suggests an alterative strategy. At risk of
ring that oversimplifying, the widely implemented, multicultural approach (sometimes unflat-
inherit- teringly called multicultural tourism) presumes that young children, given their cog-
. not one nitive and emotional immaturity, are unable to appreciate the complexities of adult
representations of race. As we've seen, this is not the case. Even 3-year-olds'grasp of
'e to the race is markedly adult-like. This is not to suggest that preschoolers possess an adult,
orld and as opposed to adult-like, understanding. Still, as I've argued on the basis of consider-
s playa able experimental evidence, there is little to support for the claim that they are unable
is not to to grasp of the nature of the adult image of race, both in its conceptual and biased
d invent dimensions. Since the Clarks' doll studies, it is evident that children display racial
overned bias. Similarly, studies documenting young children's grasp of the biological dimen-
relevant sion of race reveal surprising adult-like reasoning about race.
:ognized Given children's knowledge, it is plausible that if presented with appropriate--
In some not dumbed down-descriptions of the nature and scope of structural racial inequity,
lased on particularly its grounding in familiar quotidian acts and everyday experience, chil-
-r every- dren will appreciate the group nature of racial prejudice. Given the way young
turityof children, in the context of peer culture, frequently enact inclusion and exclusion as
ures and group processes (Van Ausdale & Feagin, 2001; IIirschfeld. 2002), there is little reason
to suppose that they would be unable to use their own familiar relations to under-
stand those of others.
tive and Understanding and empathy are only a small part of the process of attitude, let
alone behavioral change. Like adults, children need to challenge their own beliefs to
master the consequences of them; and like adults they need to change neither their
familiar attitudes nor their essentialist construal of race in order to change their own behav-
perhaps ior. A crucial part of the process behavior change turns on motivation. It is now
50 HANDBOOK OF RACE, RACISM, AND THE DEVELOPING CHILD
r
widely acknowledged that individuals who score as having low levels of prejudice
on standard measures of racial bias, are in fact nonconsciously biased (Banaji &
Greenwald, 1994; Devine, 1989). This is not surprising given the extent to which our
society is saturated with racial (and other) prejudice. What makes someone low prej-
udiced is the motivation to cognitively inhibit bias from shaping behavior. Frequently
the motivation is a sense of fairness. Happily, children's sense of fairness-a robust
sense of morality based on the notion of harm (Turiel, 2002)-is acute, widely shared,
and powerfully motivating.

CONCLUSION
Few ideas are as easy to learn and as difficult to forget as race. Few aspects of our
social world are as attention-demanding and difficult to ignore as race. Few beliefs
are as systematically distorted and distorting as race. Few ideas are as mundane and
as powerful as race.
This chapter has sought to account for race's paradoxical nature by grounding it,
in turn, in the paradoxical nature of children's developing understanding of the con-
cept. I have stressed the adult-like grasp of race very young children possess, per-
haps to the extent of losing sight of the fact that these are indeed very young children.
They are not small adults; their understandings are grounded in the everyday expe-
rience of preschoolers. This is evident if we consider one paradox that hasn't yet been
discussed here: Although young children will, if asked in experimental contexts,
make choices that are unequivocally prejudiced, parents' and teachers' report that in
their everyday friendships these same children are colorblind. This is not entirely
wishful thinking. Until recently, when very close ethnographic studies revealed bias
in preschool children's peer culture, there has been little research to suggest that in
their everyday experience young children are innocent of race.
How to explain this seeming paradox? I suggest that it is precisely the conver-
gence of children's adult-like but immature thinking about race that accounts for it.
Young children, I've argued, are more concerned, and more curious, in their early
representations to discover the repertoire of relevant social groupings in their envi-
ronment. In this they seem to treat social categories much as they treat other umbrella
concepts, such as living things or colors; they pursue a process of top-down learning
(Mandler, 1992; Carey, 1978). As a result, young children-even if they have acquired
and endorsed detailed knowledge of bias-have only vague knowledge of the prop-
erties that are diagnostic of particular racial categories. That is to say, they know that
there are X, Y, and Z kinds of people in the environment, but they do not know what
it is about a person that identifies him or her as a member of any of these groups.
That knowledge typically only emerges in the late preschool years. Younger chil-
dren's category of race is literally only partially fleshed out. Racial bias isn't reflected
in young children's friendships not because they are innocent of race, but because
they simply are not very good at recognizing the particular individuals who are
members of specific racial categories.
Although this pattern of reasoning might be of technical interest to developmen-
talists, it isn't obvious that it should be of great interest to others. Yet the under
appreciation of this top-down structure of learning among those who have taken to
ameliorating children's racial thinking almost certainly undermines their efforts. The
widely held presumption that learning about race is bottom-up and tethered to
superficial appearances not only misrepresents how that learning occurs, it sets us in
 .,,
r

Children's Developing Conceptions of Race 51

idice
the wrong direction when trying to affect its consequences. Changing race relations
lji& through attention to the child's racial thinking should be directed at appropriate
lour
goals-turning the child's attention to the consequences and intrinsic unfairness that
prej- his unreflective understanding of race entails.
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