Early-Mid Childhood Racial Discrimination

Firstly, racial discrimination at early-mid childhood is caused by socio-cultural factors. Culture is a “dynamic system of rules, explicit and implicit, established by groups to ensure their survival, involving attitudes, beliefs, norms, and behaviors” (Matsumoto, 2007) which means that culture can have an affect on a person’s beliefs and how a person behaves to acquire group identity and ensure that the group survives. Discriminating against outsiders (outgroup) is a way of helping one’s own group (ingroup) compete and survive more effectively. A study which supports cultural effect as being the cause of racial discrimination at early-mid childhood is the Clark doll experiment, conducted by Mamie Clark and Kenneth Clark in 1939. In the study,

What children think and feel are significantly influenced by the people surrounding them. Therefore, if they observe that most people do not associate with the members of certain groups in school. It will make them think that it is supposed to be this way. Even though they may not be directly learning racial discrimination from their parents they are exposed to a lot of other environments and sources throughout their day-to-day life. They could pick it from school friends, from television, or even from their teachers (McLeod, 2011). Thus, children can easily learn to racially discriminate by observing other people and compare their skin color against a different skin color. The study conducted by Kang and MIchael Inzlicht support this theory. The aim of this study was to investigate how children would feel about an outgroup if the adult’s statement did not match their experiences. The participants for this study were 148 children who were in first, third and fifth grade. They were told that they were going to play a game in which they would be on the red team or blue team. All of them were put into the red team first. The children were given three red cups and three blue cups. They were asked to put 10 stickers or candies in each cup that would be given to kids who owned each cup. Some

Lowery in 2004. The study was conducted to investigate the relationship between racial discrimination by parents and attitude of their children to racial discrimination as measured by the implicit association test (IAT). IAT measures the strength of associations between concepts of different types of people such as black people, white people and concepts of “good” and “bad”. Methodology include the speed of judgement and association of “good” or “bad” with a picture or a word. The IAT can measure how racist a person is (Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji, 1995). The procedure of the IAT requires participants to complete two tasks and for each task they have to categorise words or pictures by using two keystroke. The first task asks participants to correctly identity the race of a person in a picture and correctly identify words as being under the category of “good” or “bad”. The second task asks participants to classify a photo or stimulus using a combined set of terms. Therefore, a keystroke might be used for European-American faces and “good” words or African-American faces and “good” words. Based on the data from these two tasks, one can determine how the category combinations affect speed of performance. The assumption of this study is that children who highly identify with their parents should develop