Читать книгу Childhood in a Global Perspective - Karen Wells - Страница 33

When the Clarks devised their doll studies their interest was in the impact of racism on the self-esteem and racial identification of Black students. Their work set the stage for much of the subsequent thinking in social psychology on the impact of racism on Black children’s psyches. The other major strand in social psychology on race and racism in childhood draws on Henri Tajfel’s (1981) concept of social identity and intergroup relations. Tajfel’s theory is a general theory that postulates that all human societies establish group identities and that prejudice operates to maintain the boundaries of the in-group against the out-group. The basis on which this sorting into groups happens can be entirely random. The most famous test of this is the experiment in which a school teacher on the day after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated divided her all-white class of school children into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and treated one group as superior to the other on an arbitrary basis.¹ Like Clark’s doll test, Jane Elliot’s classroom experiment also showed that children who are treated as if they are expected to do well tend to do well and children who are expected to do badly tend to do badly.

Frances Aboud (1988) argues that children start to recognize the existence of racially based social or group identities at about the age of 3 years and that between the ages of 4 and 8 years children align themselves with a racial group based on perceived similarities between themselves and the group. Katz (1987) claims that young children have a tendency to overgeneralize and an inability to manage contradictory information and that ‘their greater receptivity to global and affect-laden statements may make them particularly prone to prejudicial thinking’ (Katz 1987: 95, see also Wells 2018).