The Ways Children Grow-up to Become Prejudiced Adults
by Lorraine Ledger
The important thing to remember about how people become prejudiced is that it takes time—lots of time—throughout childhood, adolescence and into adulthood. It must be learned. In the early years of childhood development, the process is especially complex because of the variety of factors at play. This complexity, however, could be viewed as an opportunity for a fresh start in promoting systemic change.
Psychosocial Development
When we focus on solutions—and not only on the problems caused by bigotry, it’s clear that the complex cognitive and socialization processes of early childhood development offer numerous opportunities for interventions that may avert the development of prejudices, especially in those under the age of 10 because they have yet to form behavioral habits around them.
Everyone who’s ever tried to break a bad habit knows that it’s easier to never acquire the habit in the first place. If we truly want to affect social and cultural change and break the bonds of systemic racism in America, our best hope is childhood intervention. We should enlist non-familial influencers such as teachers, coaches, pastoral leaders and peers, and establish uniform practices that help shape each child’s development away from racial and cultural prejudice before it even starts.
Teaching self-awareness about personal biases is a good place to begin. Anti-bias training and self-awareness empowers children to make conscious decisions about who they want to become, and how their ideal differs or aligns with what they’re taught at home and in their close-group environments. Curriculum and pedagogy that’s centered on Social-Emotional Learning and empathy is a current helpful trend in this direction. A constructivist methodology lends itself nicely to this kind of psychosocial developmental learning, particularly where role-modeling and peer scaffolding is used to guide and modify obstructive behavior.
Classroom K-12 teachers know how important social learning is to child development. Through facilitated exploration, discovery, experimentation, and accurate information, even young children are able to construct their own opinions and choose to act on what they believe. If children are shown the truth about human diversity, they are likely to choose the facts over speculation and reject unproductive or negative emotions that often lead to violent or obstructive behavior in adulthood.
Research Findings
One of the pioneer scholars of racial prejudice and a founding figure in personality psychology is Harvard-educated psychology professor Gordon Willard Allport (1897-1967). In his landmark 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice, Allport was among the first to assert that familiarity and interaction between people of different races and cultures leads to greater acceptance and understanding, rather than hostility and tension as purported by some of his colleagues. Hard to believe this was a revolutionary idea, but in 1950’s America it was. He advocated for inclusion and diversity at a time when many were fighting to keep people apart.
Another Harvard scholar who later wrote and spoke extensively on this subject was social psychologist Thomas Pettigrew. Pettigrew’s research and writing, beginning at Harvard and later while he taught at UC Santa Cruz in California, focused on the hostility of white Americans toward blacks in the US South. A quick search of the internet will find dozens of monographs, research papers, and lectures by Pettigrew and many others supporting Allport’s original claims.
Allport identified two basic ways children learn prejudice:
- By adopting the prejudice of their parents, family members and from their immediate cultural environment
- Or, by being reared in such a way that they acquire suspicions, fears, anxiety, and hatreds that, sooner or later, focus on specific minority groups
Analysis
According to these researchers, the process of becoming prejudice begins when the child first grasps the basic concept that some children are different from himself. Exploring and testing the world is a natural part of childhood curiosity, and this discovery of differences is actually a normal and beneficial step in human growth. From such explorations we learn, for instance, that we really like ice cream—especially chocolate. No wait—vanilla, in a waffle cone! Pie? But when we find out a friend prefers banana split sundaes, we have to stop and reevaluate our opinions—or not.
Many parents know how stubbornly a child may cling to early preferences, or even go overboard with experimentation and interest in every encountered novelty. These are the ups and downs of child development. Such daily “ah ha” moments of discovery and differentiation are normal. It is how the brain works to organize and interpret the world. What matters most is how caregivers respond to children, and these responses may have long lasting effects—about more than just ice cream preferences.
Everyone has preferences, likes and dislikes. But people develop prejudices when they form opinions by baselessly judging something they like as good and something they don’t like as bad. For instance, an adult who refuses to acknowledge a fact as true because he does not like it is demonstrating prejudice; if he attempts to discredit the person reporting the fact by saying that person is a liar, even when witnesses verify it, he is demonstrating his prejudice against the fact or the person reporting the fact. Such behavior is also called discrimination. Opinions or judgments formed without basis or adequate knowledge are prejudices. Exercising personal prejudices in a way that favors or benefits one person while harming or excluding another is discrimination. Most free societies, like the United States, have passed laws making many forms of discrimination illegal.
Stages in Acquiring Prejudice
Children get their first hint of what prejudice really means from language—from certain powerful words loaded with emotional impact. These words may vary from region to region depending on the ethnic composition of a particular area. For instance, in the southern US people might be hatefully called “cracker” or “redneck”. When this kind of name-calling language is directed at them, children may feel frightened and their fragile self-esteem is wounded. When they witness it directed at others, they may feel either empathy with the target or empowered to join in the behavior. A child’s response is complicated and subject to many factors, including psychosocial development, context, self-concept, or the behavior of role models and peers.
Once a child has learned about differences and learned that language can be used to amplify the emotional impact of bigoted ideas, the next learning stage is characterized by the child’s rejection of people in groups targeted by their role model or family’s prejudices. This stage usually occurs between ages seven and eleven. Allport and other researchers found that, in this stage, the child tends to exaggerate the stance, seeing everything as absolute. If black people are the hated category, for instance, the child will blindly condemn all blacks, viewing any black person as having no good qualities, no redeeming features, judged absolutely bad.
The prejudiced child at this stage has mastered the proper bigoted language, even if she still hasn’t quite given up a fair and democratic style of behavior toward members of the hated population, especially when that group may include friends and classmates. This stage peaks around the fifth grade. She has yet to make the full and conscious intellectual leap to acceptance of the acquired bigotry as part of her own personal identity. It takes the child a few more years to learn how to modify all this thinking into a solid rationale she will employ to defend her prejudices in adulthood.
Having successfully learned prejudices in childhood, individuals in adolescence and beyond will habitually (and often knowingly) employ a repertoire of rationalizations and corresponding behaviors to support them. As the adolescent moves into adulthood, he will continue to fine-tune this repertoire until it has become part of his personality and identity. In short, it takes the entire period of childhood and adolescence to master prejudice.
Once the child enters the teen years and adolescence, his cognitive development has entered a stage where ideas become actions, and bigotry is becoming a conditioned behavior—a habit. In early childhood and pre-adolescence, people take-in data about the world and practice conforming to what has been modeled to them. In adolescence and adulthood, people filter through their prior understandings and choose their thoughts and their behaviors. Teenagers behave, they act.
Systemic Racism
So, if it takes time to learn to be prejudiced, it logically follows that trying to unlearn a prejudice will also take lots of time. Undoing institutional systems of interlocking prejudices, bigotry, and racism—if that’s your goal—will take even longer, but it can be done.
There has been a lot of talk about systemic racism over the past few years. Racism is a strong prejudice based on race. But what is systemic racism and how does it happen? What is meant by systemic?
Systemic refers to permanent biases built into the whole social system, including everything from codified laws to behavioral norms. It is the social and governmental “big picture” that’s made-up of all the “little pictures” from people’s lives. This system is formed through a complex process, just like individual development is a process.
The social process goes something like this: As each child becomes an adult, they bring their learned prejudices into adult society out of habit. Then everyone’s habits join together to become one big system of interlocking biases and bigotry, both social and institutional, that quickly become codified in law and mores. These biases become established over time, deliberately or de facto, and are found in every institution, group, tradition, and legal framework within mainstream, majority, society.
A discussion of the system of racism, then, is a discussion of the manifold ways in which people’s lives are affected by the rules of the majority society, mostly unspoken rules that favor one group of people over another based on race or ethnic identity, and reflects the collective belief that the majority culture is innately superior and should in all things be given preference.
In America, as in many societies around the world, the majority culture controls the mechanisms for establishing standards and laws, thus perpetuating the imbalance of power that favors the majority culture. A racist system is actually the result of a great deal of human effort—intentional or not. The United States is a fairly young country—still in adolescence, in a manner of speaking—but American society already reflects hundreds of years of majority culture making all the rules.
Sadly, alongside its many virtuous accomplishments, the United States has shamefully established a great many laws and traditions that handicap minority groups and oppress millions of people everyday. But change is difficult, partly because many majority people do not recognize the negative impact of the hidden biases and unfair rules they help sustain. Mainstream culture has only recently woken up to the urgent need for these harmful things to be weeded out, and only because of public outcry about how systemic racism harms real living human beings—including themselves. This blindspot to the need for systemic change and the majority’s lack of self-awareness is an obstacle to advancement that would otherwise lead to a more just, peaceful and productive society.
Implications and Conclusions
In much the same way individual prejudices take time to develop, building bias into a system does too. We, each of us, do our part to make it happen. Some people seem to enjoy the process of building it—going so far as drawing up the blueprints and bankrolling the results—but most people are just ignorant cogs in the machinery that keeps it going, by merely failing to stop it. We go along. We do what we’re “told”, maintain the status quo in support of the majority cultural standards or laws. We resist change.
In a democracy like the United States, though, each member is held personally responsible—so that silence, and lack of action, amounts to complicity in the problem. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, establish these laws. . . Harboring the belief that personal preferences and unconscious biases are “harmless” and “no big deal” prevents unity.
Perhaps an irony, but true nonetheless, we need laws to inhibit prejudice and discrimination precisely because this is a free society. Everyone should have a voice, a vote, a place at the table. Whether were add laws or remove laws to accomplish this fairness, change requires concerted action.
Recent pushes for anti-racism initiatives are important to ensure every member of society is accountable for their part in helping or harming. It’s not enough to be non-racist, systemic change requires everyone to be actively anti-racist instead. One simple way to undo the past is by training a whole new population—our children—to not make the same mistakes. A just, fair, peaceful and unified society could be right around the corner if we really wanted it. Change doesn’t just happen. We have to make it happen.
References
Allport, G.W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Boston: Addison-Wesley.
Cherry, Frances (2008). Pettigrew, Thomas F.. In Darity, William A. (ed.). International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Macmillan Social Science Library. 6 (second ed.). Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan.
Special Report (1982). The Ku Klux Klan: A History of Racism and Violence. Klanwatch. Montgomery, Alabama.
Pettigrew, Thomas F. (June 15, 2015). Biographical information and bibliography of Thomas F. Pettigrew. Social Psychology Network. Wesleyan University. Retrieved January 15, 2021.
Phinney J.S. (2003). Ethnic identity and acculturation. In: Chun K, Organista P, Marin G, editors. Acculturation: Advances in theory, measurement, and applied research. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 63–81.
Phinney J.S. (2006). Ethnic identity exploration in emerging adulthood. In: Arnett JJ, Tanner JL, editors. Emerging adults in America: Coming of age in the 21st century. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 117–134.
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