NurtureShock Experts Say We Must Talk Turkey To Our Kids About Race
Mon, September 7, 2009 Talk about race is already a “loaded” subject, and now I’m really confused, reading Newsweek’s in-depth article Even Babies Discriminate: A NurtureShock Excerpt.
I’ve been through the piece twice, and also to authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s NurtureShock website.
Now, before posting, I reread the piece again, and the comments are closed in less than a week. Closed even for reading. What’s up with that Newsweek?
Answer: intervention on the subject of race, using ‘soft’ research studies to demonstrate why we must take action and an assumption that we can make a difference by intercepting instinctive human thought processes around groups (red shirt groups vs blue shirt groups) before kids draw the “wrong” conclusions about race or formulate psychological differences that make it challenging for them to have a “best friend” of a different skin color.
At times the authors state the obvious. Kids self-select. Years ago, I brought a young interracial girl a box of puppets to sew. I liked the kit because it had four different shades of cloth from brown to pale beige, with two midtones in between.
Rather than just make one for herself, she decided to make puppets for all of us. I got the lightest one and my little friend the next lightest.
J was torn between the two darker cloths but decided that the brown one was for her brother and while the fourth one was a bit lighter than her mother, it did all rationalize because her brother was darker skin than her mother, who was darker than she was. And we could all agree that I had the lightest skin of all.
Reading this article, it seems that I did a “bad, bad thing” giving her these color choices without sit down discussion. I thought in giving her the range of choice, she could do whatever she wished. I wasn’t trying to give her one choice that “matched” her skin color.
I admit that when I visited her next and saw that she had decided to make the whole family into puppets and assign it to each of us via skin color, I took note.
A key source of research in Nurtureshock is the work of Birgitte Vittrup. In 2006, Vittrup recruited 100 Caucasian families with at least one child from the thousand families registered with The Children’s Research Lab at the University of Texas.
Before getting to the objective of her research, which focused on the ability of multicultural storyline videos to change children’s racial attitudes, Vittrup administered a test, with provocative (my word) questions for young white kids:
How many White people are nice?
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)
How many Black people are nice?
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)
On a volatile subject where perhaps it would be great to just get the facts on the table first, I read: “More disturbing, Vittrup also asked all the kids a very blunt question: “Do your parents like black people?” Fourteen percent said outright, “No, my parents don’t like black people”; 38 percent of the kids answered, “I don’t know.” In this supposed race-free vacuum being created by parents, kids were left to improvise their own conclusions—many of which would be abhorrent to their parents.
No doubt here about the journalistic neutrality of the two writers Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, which is the problem with the whole article. We have so little real science and more commenting and opinion than one finds on YouTube.
I’ve done a great deal of research and reading on the MBTI — Myers-Briggs personality test, which is the word of Allah in about 83 of the 100 Fortune 100 companies in America. I’ve been tested three times and I’m consistently an ENFP — a small minority group 3-5% of the population, the most creative, global-thinking, embracing novel ideas kind of person.
Mine is the most out-of-the-box personality type of all. Vast majorities of personality types are far more conservative than my own and they represent large segments of the population. The reason that MBTI has such a following is that, based on Jungian psychological principles that I also endorse, MBTI is very consistent over a lifetime.
Being an ENFP, perhaps there is a good reason why I’ve always felt open to relationships with diverse people. The authors cite the fact that only a small percent of school kids, even if attending fully-integrated schools, have a best friend of a different skin color.
Perhaps personality and brain structure has something to do with that fact — not only parental failure.
Just to be the devil’s advocate for a moment, why is it “disturbing” that 38 percent of white kids answered “I don’t know” to the question “Do your parents like black people?”
I would hope that my children would answer yes, because they saw me having fun with my black friends, but it seems that the researchers are drawing some huge conclusions about parental behavior from this question.
Why not a question: “Do your parents have black friends?” If the answer is “no” and parents don’t discuss race relations at home, perhaps the kids genuinely don’t know the answer to the question “Do your parents like black people?”
I don’t know if the authors — both highly credentialed professionals— propose that they will write the dialogue we’re supposed to tell our kids about race. If I push back on their assumptions — as I already have — am I now racist?
To me this article is really slanted into a very proscribed approach to discussing race in America. It assumes that there is a window of opportunity where we can all give our kids the “race” talk, and save the country and millions of people a whole lot of agony and aggravation over racial differences.
The authors suggest that we can rewire children’s brains, talking to them about race the way we speak of gender.
Have we established that young boys and girls think they are equal? The same? i doubt it. The parallel is talking to girls about being equal is black families talking to their children, saying “you can do it.”
Parents haven’t learned to discuss how babies are made with their kids after all these years, so we may be asking too much of them regarding race. Also, are black parents expected to discuss race with their kids, telling them how nice black kids really are? And what’s that script?
The author cites a drop-out rate among parents in the research, which is normal in every survey of this kind. Parents pushed back on Vittrup’s detailed approach to discussing race. Based on the little I’ve read, I’m not sure I want Birgitte Vittrup educating my kids about race, with her videos. I myself might have dropped out of the program, based on their content.
The inference is that parents dropped out because … well, you know … because in their hearts, they were … hmmm. Very Kafkaesque.
I’ll say no more because this book is getting very good reviews. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but for someone who has spent her life committed to improved race relations in America (see Michelle-Style.com), I am lost in this writing, and I am highly skeptical of the methodology, based on the Newsweek cover story segment Even Babies Discriminate: A NurtureShock Excerpt.
Talk about social engineering. And now the comments are closed and gone in less than a week at Newsweek. They were pretty heated the other day.
Maybe the adults must come together around race, and then the kids will feel differently — to an extent.
Personally, I believe some of this issues are only worked out with maturity and an ecumenical level of exposure to life and discourse. I’m not sure that sitdowns with two-year-olds is the answer, but I would love to be wrong.
My pushback on the book is purely scientific and concernng intellectual rigor. I’m totally committed to good race relations in America.
Anne
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