
How to Raise Racist Kids - alexandros
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2010/02/how-to-raise-racist-kids/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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DenisM
_Only 8% of white American high-schoolers have a best friend of another race.
(For blacks, it’s about 15%.)_

Uhm, yeah and? If 99 out of a 100 people are white and 1 is black, which
percentage of white people will have a black best friend, assuming random
assignment of friends? 1%! And the black guy will have 100% of his friends of
different race.

 _The more diverse a school is, the less likely it is that kids will form
cross-race friendships._

Did they control for income level? Because low income coincides with violence
and gang formation. Your child income level will not change if you talk to
them about race before 3rd grade.

What looks like racism is likely just (poor understanding of) statistics.

~~~
elblanco
> The more diverse a school is, the less likely it is that kids will form
> cross-race friendships.

That doesn't make any sense to me at all except in cases where "diverse" means
"has a large population of one other racial group than white". I grew up in a
tremendously diverse area of the country, the local university is one of the
top5 most diverse schools in the country. Almost none of my friends were of my
race, and almost none of their friends were their race either. I would expect
than in a classroom of 30 kids, 15-20 countries or nationalities could be
easily represented. My little gang of school friends represented nearly every
continent on the planet, one kid was from Japan, one kid was mixed
Japanese/American, one kid was African (from Ghana if I remember), two
brothers were Cypriot, another friend was Mexican and another one was
Salvadorian. Most of the kids on my school bus didn't even speak each other's
native tongue.

Diverse means "diverse" not "bi-polar". It's really easy to separate into
like-racial social groups when you have two large groups of different races
vs. lots of small groups of many races.

~~~
jakarta
It makes sense to me. I went to both a high school and a college where there
were sizable minority groups.

To be clear, I ended up making friends with a diverse group. But I would often
get strange looks for not sitting with other members of my own race (asian) in
my classes.

What I noticed was that, if the minority populations are large enough, there
is no incentive to really inner mingle among races.

At my college, you would see fraternities where there were clear race lines,
so there would be a white fraternity, an asian fraternity, hispanic, etc.

Conversely, there is a university in a nearby city where the minority groups
are much smaller so minorities don't have the luxury of clustering together
into separate groups. So I saw more people with more cross-race relationships.

~~~
CWuestefeld
My fraternity was predominantly white, but not by design. It just worked out
that way.

I recall we once pledged a guy named Jose, a very cool guy who happened to be
Hispanic. We were really happy to have him. But the local fraternity that
specialized in Hispanics continually harassed him until he couldn't see any
solution but to drop out of our pledge class.

------
CWuestefeld
Perhaps the problem is pretending that everyone is the same. The kids aren't
stupid, they can see this isn't true, and they're bound to fill that vacuum
with whatever else they can pick up.

I'd think that the better strategy would be to embrace the difference.
Recognize that races and cultures really do have different qualities. But
because the mixture is so complex, and the world that we apply those qualities
within is also so chaotic, that it's quite impossible to say that, in the
final reckoning, any one is superior to another.

[Edit: dropped "up" at end of 1st paragraph]

~~~
mattmcknight
What different qualities do "races" have?

~~~
CWuestefeld
One of my favorite examples here is that a good portion of African-descended
people have a resistance to malaria, which is certainly relevant to ones life
in tropical climes. And on the other hand, those same people are susceptible
to sickle-cell anemia.

The ability to digest lactose comes from a genetic mutation that's been traced
down to northern Europe; most other people don't handle dairy well (sorry,
don't have a handy reference). This may not be a big deal, except to the
person having diarrhea because his friend assumed that everyone's digestion
works the same.

Differing climate and lifestyles has led to physical characteristics differing
in lung capacity, amount and distribution of musculature, etc.

[Edit: my characterization below of Chomsky's position is backwards, he
_opposed_ this idea]

Noam Chomsky posited that, much like computer languages, the language that a
person speaks influences the way he thinks, and more recent research tends to
support this. As a result, some people are better equipped mentally for
different tasks. For example, there's a group in New Zealand that has no
"relative direction" words like "left" and "right"; instead, all of their
directional communications are in absolutes ("North", "West", etc.). Somehow
they are far better than others at maintaining a sense of direction, so for
any task that requires such a sense, these may be the best candidates.

It's probably not mere chance nor prejudice that some groups are better or
worse represented in professional sports. For whatever reason, there's a
preponderance of Africans and paucity of Asians in American football. I find
it hard to believe that football coaches are being racist when there are such
huge amounts of money on the line.

People really aren't all the same. We have differences, and in many cases
those differences are shared within demographic groups. Why do we want to
pretend that this isn't true, rather than reveling in special opportunities
that it affords all of us?

Addendum: I realized that I partly answered based on culture (language) rather
than race, as you asked. This points to a bigger question: what is race? Are
the peoples of southern Europe separate from the northeners? Archaologists
generally believe that American Indians are descended from Asians crossing the
Bering Straits; should we view these as the same race, or separate? I'm not
trying to be provocative, I really don't know how to define this.

~~~
mattmcknight
I sort of tackled the "what is race" question in another comment. [1] I kinda
agree with you on culture is important, but I find that generalizations there
fall flat, as subcultures within a culture tend to contradict each other. In
all cases, the fundamental fallacy of bias comes from using attributes
associated with some group to make decisions about an individual, who may or
may not share those attributes. Our brains attempt to create heuristics for
us, we have to actively work to supplant them with logic.

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1129487>

~~~
CWuestefeld
I'll now proceed to go off on a tangent from something that's already just
barely topical for HN...

 _Our brains attempt to create heuristics for us, we have to actively work to
supplant them with logic._

I generally agree with this. The benefits of civilization make most of these
heuristics unnecessary, and more of a liability. But I wish that people
advocating this would see its application in further areas.

In his _The Fatal Conceit_ , Hayek talks about how our evolution within small
tribes gave us the instinct to be compassionate with others, but that in
today's wide world, that instinct just can't scale far enough. This is another
area where we need to reject the emotional reactions that are pre-programmed
into our brains, and think more rationally about whether what the little voice
says really makes sense.

------
dmlorenzetti
Anybody interested by this, I strongly recommend reading Bronson's
"NutureShock," the book on which this article draws.

The book is not a polemic about race. Rather, it examines a lot of interesting
research regarding how children learn. Other chapters cover how to use praise
effectively, the uses and abuses of intelligence tests, and how kids learn to
lie.

By the way, here's Bronson's own synopsis of this work:
<http://www.newsweek.com/id/214989/output/print>

------
tokenadult
"Here are a few depressing facts:

"The more diverse a school is, the less likely it is that kids will form
cross-race friendships."

That ought to prompt some reconsideration of social policy. The studies would
refer mostly to compulsory attendance public schools, and maybe the first
thing to do is to change school financing mechanisms so that more schools are
open to all comers on a voluntary enrollment basis. This works for my son's
online "school," which is both racially diverse and full of students who have
friends from other races. (But it sets my teeth on edge to refer to people as
belonging to one race or another, as my own family is multiracial, so every
one of us surely has various friends of a "different" race whoever our friends
are.)

Link to FAQs and discussion about how race plays out as an admission factor in
United States colleges:

[http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-
admissions/85867...](http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-
admissions/858679-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-7-a.html)

~~~
mattmcknight
I was about to post that the "fact" is at least an oversimplification. At the
edge cases, it is logically false. A school where everyone is the same, there
can be no cross-race friendships, and in a class where everyone is different,
there can only be cross-race friendships.

Of course, the deeper lesson here is that race itself is a concept invented by
racists. Race does not exist, except in the mind of the racists and those upon
whom they exercise their beliefs. If you don't believe that, ask yourself
whether you call people Asian, as if the huge proportion of people from the
most populous continent on Earth share some fundamental attributes based on
the geographic location of their ancestors that are worth distinguishing. Ask
yourself if there is some proportion of ancestry that you use to distinguish
one race from another- it's a very racist exercise to do this.

There's no simple category that defines the race of my own children. Everyone
is miscellaneous.

~~~
tokenadult
_A school where everyone is the same, there can be no cross-race friendships_

I appreciate your reply. I did a forehead smack on myself when I realized I
had missed the obvious exception to your edge case the first two times I read
your reply. A school pupil can form friendships OUTSIDE OF SCHOOL,
irrespective of where the pupil goes to school. And that happens. Sometimes it
is easier to form friendships outside of school than inside school. (I lived
in one place just more than one year, spanning parts of two school years, in
my youth, and the best friends I had there were neighbors or friends from my
Scout troop. I liked some of my classmates quite well, but I made friends more
rapidly and more deeply in non-school settings. And this, by the way, is why I
emphasized "voluntary enrollment" above, because young people make friends
better in voluntary rather than compulsory activities, and is also why I was
unafraid to homeschool my children. My children have always had friends--and
friends from many "races" at that--but they have never attended school (except
university-based classes for my oldest during his last few years of secondary
education).

 _Race does not exist, except in the mind of the racists and those upon whom
they exercise their beliefs._

Fully agreed with you here. When I see those annoying forms that ask my
"race," I write in "human." I prefer the designation "human," but I can live
with the designation "postracial" if need be.

------
sailormoon
_It turns out that a lot of our assumptions about raising our kids to
appreciate diversity are entirely wrong_

Our assumptions, which have no evidential basis but we adopted anyway on pure
faith because they sound nice and make us feel good about ourselves, are
wrong? Say it ain't so!

~~~
pavel_lishin
Yeah, and did you know that ignoring an issue will totally save it?

~~~
orblivion
Well, to be fair, the ultimate goal is for everybody to ignore it, right? That
is pretty much the definition of the end of racism. Stands to reason that
ignoring it in front of your kids could teach them the same, but perhaps a
more active approach turns out to be better.

~~~
CWuestefeld
That may be the goal of some. But as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I
think that's wrong.

The fact is that we're all different, and pretending otherwise doesn't help
anything.

The problem is when we assume that differences in a few attributes makes us
_better or worse_ than others, or more or less deserving of [respect,
entitlements, etc.].

We're all different. There are so many variables that interplay in so many
ways, and they are realized in such chaotic circumstances that it's impossible
to assess superiority (except maybe in the most pathological cases).

