More Confident and More Polarized: A Longitudinal Analysis of White Kids on Racism

• In Event: 3151 - Children, Youth, and Inequality

Abstract

This paper explores how white youth interpret and produce ideas about racism in the United States from middle childhood (ages 10-13) to adolescence (ages 14-17). In Wave 1, interviews and ethnographic observations were conducted with 36 child participants. Ethnographic data identified three “racial contexts of childhood,” or three distinctive social environments intentionally designed by parents and informed by parents’ own racial ideological positions. Wave 2 data were collected 4 years later and included interviews with a subset of initial youth participants from each racial context. Findings show that youth became more confident and committed to their views as they got older and that their views on racism became more polarized from one another. Moving away from traditional theories of child development or deterministic socialization, I draw on the sociology of race and the sociology of children and youth to develop a theoretical understanding into the causal mechanisms involved in how young whites produce racial ideologies. This work illustrates the power of childhood as a period in which people interpretively produce ideological positions that they appear to maintain and become even more committed to as they age.

Author

• Margaret A. Hagerman, Mississippi State University