NEW YORK TIMES COLUMN: …Racial bias also begins astonishingly early: Even infants often show a preference for their own racial group. In one study, 3-month-old white infants were shown photos of faces of white adults and black adults; they preferred the faces of whites. For 3-month-old black infants living in Africa, it was the reverse…
Scholars suggest that in evolutionary times we became hard-wired to make instantaneous judgments about whether someone is in our “in group” or not — because that could be lifesaving. A child who didn’t prefer his or her own group might have been at risk of being clubbed to death…
White American kids disproportionately judged that the people who were smiling were white and that those who were frowning were Asian. When the experiment was conducted in Taiwan with exactly the same photos, Taiwanese children thought that the faces when smiling were Asian, when frowning were white… (more)
EDITOR: This is why we have always referred to ourselves as “racist in recovery.” We cannot eradicate prejudices formed in our earliest years. But we do have the power to recognize these tendencies and consciously correct them. We laugh at ourselves all the time for our instantaneous prejudicial reactions, on this and other matters.
