Children can distinguish race from 6 months old. Although, this doesn’t mean that racist toddlers are waddling around swearing at racial minorities. Unconscious bias may form from a very young age but what turns this into racism?
At 6 months old, children start categorising positive and negative based on their inbuilt understanding of the beauty hierarchy. This is called transductive reasoning and occurs because young children cannot process multiple dimensions. If parents, guardians or TV shows react in a perceived negative way towards people of a certain appearance, young children will categorise this with face shapes and colours. From continuous learning they will be able to build a hierarchy. In a person that has an extreme unconscious bias against black people, when they were younger, they would have categorised people with darker skin as negative and therefore at the bottom of the beauty and trust hierarchy.
Children also use classification reasoning, noticing patterns of large groups of people rather than anomalies. If a child is exposed to seeing only black people on a bus every day, and never uses the bus themselves, they can form a segregational categorisation, leading to the foundations of racial discrimination.
Often young children taught by parents, rightly so, to attempt to steer away from racism may experience white guilt. This causes overcompensation by finding ‘positive stereotypes’ of the opposite race. A child might consider black people to be athletic. Although this is a positive stereotype, it devalues the skill, if true, and reinforces that there is a biological difference between two races which is incredibly harmful. Furthermore, positive stereotypes may bring about opposite assumptions such as somebody athletic may be considered less intelligent, forming a negative bias from a positive one.
With certain cases this can turn into double blind bias: If a child has formed such biases and sees a person from the opposite race not conforming to the positive stereotypes given, they may consider them to be lazy, not hard working and unintelligent, increasing the harm of the positive bias.
These categorisations all cause microaggressions, and when sparked into a belief or amplified by a major life event can transform into severe racism. So maybe our 6 months old are not so innocent after all….
Written by Lilly Horvath-Makkos
Media by Ben Hyland
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