Free NurtureShock by Po Bronson, Ashley Merryman Page A

or the fifth. For blacks, the odds aren’t much better: 85% of black
     kids’ best friends are also black. Cross-race friends also tend to share a single activity, rather than multiple activities;
     as a result, these friendships are more likely to be lost over time, as children transition from middle school to high school.
    It is tempting to believe that because their generation is so diverse, today’s children grow up knowing how to get along with
     people of every race. But numerous studies suggest that this is more of a fantasy than a fact.
    I can’t help but wonder—would the track record of desegregation be so mixed if parents reinforced it, rather than remaining
     silent?

    Over the course of our research, we about race when they’re very young? What jumped out at Phyllis Katz, in her study of 200
     black and white children, was that parents are very comfortable talking to their children about gender, and they work very
     hard to counterprogram against boy-girl stereotypes. That ought to be our model for talking about race. The same way we remind
     our daughters, “Mommies can be doctors just like daddies,” we ought to be telling all children that doctors can be any skin
     color. It’s not complicated
what to say.
It’s only a matter of how often we reinforce it.
    Shushing children when they make an improper remark is an instinctive reflex, but often the wrong move. Prone to categorization,
     children’s brains can’t help but attempt to generalize rules from the examples they see. It’s the worst kind of embarrassment
     when a child blurts out, “Only brown people can have breakfast at school,” or “You can’t play basketball, you’re white, so
     you have to play baseball.” But shushing them only sends the message that this topic is unspeakable, which makes race more
     loaded, and more intimidating.
    Young children draw conclusions that may make parents cringe, even if they’ve seen a few counterexamples. Children are not
     passive absorbers of knowledge; rather, they are active constructors of concepts. Bigler has seen many examples where children
     distort their recollections of facts to fit the categories they’ve already formed in their minds. The brain’s need for categories
     to fit perfectly is even stronger at age seven than at age five, so a second grader might make more distortions than a kindergartner
     to defend his categories. To a parent, it can seem as if the child is getting worse at understanding a diverse world, not
     better.
    To be effective, researchers have found, conversations about race have to be explicit, in unmistakeable terms that children
     understand. A friend of mine repeatedly told her five-year-old son, “Remember, everybody’s equal.” She thought she was getting
     the message across. Finally, after seven months of this, her boy asked, “Mommy, what’s ‘equal’ mean?”
    Bigler ran a study where children read brief historical biographies of famous African Americans. For instance, in a biography
     of Jackie Robinson, they read that he was the first African American in the major leagues. But only half heard about how he’d
     previously been relegated to the Negro leagues, and how he suffered taunts from white fans. Those facts—in five brief sentences—were
     omitted in the version given to the other half of the children.
    After the two-week history class, the children were surveyed on their racial attitudes. White children who got the full story
     about historical discrimination had significantly better attitudes toward blacks than those who got the neutered version.
     Explicitness works.
    “It also made them feel some guilt,” Bigler added. “It knocked down their glorified view of white people.” They couldn’t justify
     in-group superiority.
    Bigler is very cautious about taking the conclusion of her Jackie Robinson study too far. She notes the bios were explicit,
     but about
historical
discrimination. “If we’d had them read stories of