Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 32

The early studies by the Clarks were substantiated over and over by subsequent studies. They showed consistently that children were aware of race and that racism impacted negatively on Black children’s self-esteem. These findings contradicted a commonsense view that children were too young to understand race or to understand when they were being discriminated against on the basis of race. In 1952 Mary Goodman published her research on race awareness in young children. She used psychological tests together with observation, school records and interviews with parents of a sample, balanced for race and gender, of 103 children at nursery schools to research the extent of race awareness amongst young children. She found that very young children are aware of race but that they are not necessarily antagonistic towards people of other races. Her study replicated the findings of the Clarks that a large majority of the African American children (74 per cent) showed a preference for the company of white children; only 8 per cent of white children showed a preference for the company of African American children. She also found that mothers found it difficult to explain race to their children and tried to put it off until they thought the children might be able to understand it; this was truer of African American mothers than of white mothers. She referred to children’s ‘precocious raciality’ against parents’ conviction that their children were unaware of race. Although the cumulative evidence that young children have some understanding of race is pretty convincing, we still have no empirical evidence about this for children younger than 3 years old (Katz 1976).