I think I’ll pass on parenting tips from Slate.
Via Slate:
Last summer, my family moved from Brooklyn to a small town in the Hudson Valley. We love our new life, but one thing about the community is not so great: It’s predominantly white. What will it mean in the long run if my white children don’t see and befriend people who come from different racial backgrounds? And are there steps I can take to instill racial sensitivity and acceptance in my kids despite the fact that they’re growing up in an ethnic bubble?
To find out, I dug into research on the causes of racial bias and talked to developmental and social psychologists, race-relations researchers, and Africologists. The good news is that the answer seems to be yes—there are things I can do to keep my kids from harboring racial prejudice. Namely, I can talk to them about race. […]
Why does this happen? Kids actively try to understand and construct rules about their environment. As they do, they engage in what is called transductive or essentialist reasoning, which means that they simultaneously categorize people and objects according to multiple dimensions—so they might believe, wrongly, that people who have the same skin color have similar abilities or intelligence. They also notice class-race patterns—for instance that white people tend to hold privileged jobs or positions (or play them on television). One study found that by age 7, black children rated jobs held by blacks as lower in status than jobs held by whites. In other words, as Winkler wrote in a 2009 paper, “children pick up on the ways in which whiteness is normalized and privileged in U.S. society.”
Beverly Tatum, a race-relations scholar and the president of Spelman College in Atlanta, has referred to this pervasive cultural message as a “smog in the air,” noting that “we don’t breathe it because we like it. We don’t breathe it because we think it’s good for us. We breathe it because it’s the only air that’s available.” Ultimately, kids may infer that the patterns they see in privilege and status are caused by inherent differences between groups. In other words, they may start to think that whites have more privilege because they are inherently, somehow, smarter or better. […]
So, for any parent, talking about race with your kids is incredibly important. Even more essential, though, is making sure that your kids get to know children of other races. “Friendships are a major mechanism for promoting acceptance and reducing prejudice,” Rivas-Drake explains. Kids should “have direct contact with people from different groups—to learn about them without relying on stereotypes.” That said, simply sending your kid to a diverse school may not do the job. One study reported that in highly diverse schools, students self-segregate more by race than they do in moderately diverse schools, and the likelihood of cross-racial friendships goes down. But the study also reported that when diverse schools ensure that their extracurricular activities are racially mixed, interracial friendships become more common.