3 Ways to Stop Racism: Diversity Exposure, Bias Intervention, Cross-Race Friendships | Lori Markson

As I mentioned, I’m at Washington University, which is in St. Louis. It’s actually quite a beautiful city. I moved there from Oakland, California—that was the place I had lived before that. And moving there—having only lived on both sides of the country and never in the middle, and I guess moving in particular to this city—really opened my eyes to some of the systemic racism that was apparent in the city. It’s a great place, and it also has a big divide.

In fact, locally—and I’m not sure if this goes on outside the city as well—it’s often referred to as the divided city, and there’s even a line that demarcates where that divide takes place. I live one block from that line, and I was seeing, regularly, all kinds of things happen that were really eye-opening to me. I think that the country’s eyes got opened even wider after Ferguson and many other events that continue to happen around the country.

But as a developmental psychologist, I really took a lot of this to heart because I was thinking about my kids and the kids that I was seeing in my lab, and those kids that weren’t coming into my lab and that I know lived across that line. And what should we and could we potentially be doing, both for the kids but also looking at kids with some hope for the future?

Now what we do know, sadly, in children is that there already are implicit biases that you can pick up and observe in kids at five to six years of age. This is one example of a study that my colleague Melanie Killen did. She is at University of Maryland, so close to Baltimore, and what she found is that different children will interpret these scenes very differently.

And what she discovered in this particular study is that black kids actually are much more optimistic about race than white kids. Already by first grade, which is the kids she tested in this study, the white kids were having much more negative or pessimistic kinds of interpretations than the black children, who were trying to have much more positive interpretations. An interpretation that’s positive, for example, would be like, “Oh, it looks like he fell off the swing, and the other kid was waiting to see if he needed help.”

A not-so-positive interpretation would be something like, “I think he pushed him off the swing so that he could use it.” So what we were thinking about is how might we go ahead and take action and be looking at the kids? What could we do earlier? Are we already seeing that these biases are developing already in the preschool years? What might we be doing? Are there ways that we can step in and intervene on this?

So we know that babies notice differences between people of all kinds, whether people speak different languages, have different color skin, or act differently. We also know that by three years of age, children are already noticing power and status differences, and that by five or six years of age, as I said, we’re already seeing implicit biases about these.

What is happening in the preschool years? We wanted to ask a few questions. I’m only going to show you two things that we’ve been looking at in this. Now our participants, our kids that are in these studies, are at preschools all over the city of St. Louis. I’m going to report today data that’s coming from kids that are in racially homogenous schools, so they’re schools that are mostly all black kids and black teachers or mostly all white kids and white teachers.

But we’re also testing at a number of mixed schools that are in the city. Most of the kids in homogenous schools also come from pretty homogenous neighborhoods of both races. And we put them in these two tasks: accuracy task, which is just having somebody name those three objects and either saying them accurately—it’s a cup, it’s a ball, and it’s a book—or naming them wrong, inaccurately—it’s a pencil, it’s a fork, and it’s a shoe.

And what we see in lots and lots of studies previously, by many colleagues of mine and myself, is that children prefer the person who is accurate, and they also prefer to learn from that person. So what we wanted to ask them here is—all we did was change out the race of one of these speakers and ask them which one of these people would you like to have as your teacher? And we did that in the accuracy task.

So one of these was always accurate, and one wasn’t. Then we also put them into a simple teacher preference task. We didn’t give them any background information. We just asked which of these would you like to have as your teacher. And these were always different people. I think I may have put the same faces up, but they’re always different.

And what we found in these racially homogenous schools is that both white and black children wanted an accurate person to teach them stuff and to be their teacher. So it didn’t matter: black, white, they wanted the accurate person. That’s who they wanted to be their teacher. However, when we simply asked them, “Which one of these people do you prefer to be your teacher?” both races of kids preferred the white teacher.

I’ll leave that there for a minute just to sink in. These are three- to six-year-old kids. Now we also put them in a marshmallow task, which has long been used to look at how kids delay gratification that has all kinds of successful outcomes. But we wanted to look at something else. More recently, some findings have suggested that you might get different effects in this marshmallow test depending on how much you trust that the speaker is going to come back.

So we wanted to use this as sort of a measure of trust in the speaker. And what we did is present kids—again, black or white kids—and the only difference between them was whether they got a black experimenter or a white experimenter to do the marshmallow task with them. And this is all they are. They’re sat down at a table in a room, you're given a big enticing marshmallow, and they’re told, “Just wait. I’m going to be back, and if you don’t eat that before I get back, I’m going to actually give you another marshmallow, so you’ll have two. Bye!” And they leave the room.