White Parent-child Conversations about Racial Disparities in Police Brutality

• In Event: Collective Approaches Mitigating the Racialized Public Health Concerns of Policing among Adolescents

Abstract

Police brutality against Black Americans is unfortunately common in the US, as evidenced by well-known cases from Rodney King to George Floyd to countless others. Although these events have a powerful impact on Black Americans (Eichstaedt et al., 2021), less is known about how White Americans respond, which is critical given White Americans often hold positions of power that could enable them to enact change. In particular, White families could socialize their children on topics of race and racial inequality to enact such change (Perry et al., 2021; Scott et al., 2020), but research suggests that White families typically do not have such conversations, even in the wake of events like the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent protests for racial justice (Sullivan et al., 2021). This lack of conversation could leave White children unprepared to understand the root causes of police brutality and the importance of advocating for social change. The present research examines how White parents talk about such causes when prompted, and how those conversations affect White children.

Our primary goals were to observe and understand the messages transmitted in parent-child conversations about police brutality, and to measure the impact of those conversations on children’s beliefs about the causes of racial disparities in police brutality and their desire to enact change. To achieve these goals, we recruited 86 monoracial White parents and their monoracial White elementary-school aged children (ages 7-13 years; target n = 96 with data collection ongoing), contacted via a lab database that included parents from across the US. We brought each parent-child dyad onto Zoom and read them a short storybook in which a child protagonist observed a Black Lives Matter protest and heard a protester cite police brutality against Black people as the reason for the protest. The storybook then prompted the parent and child to have a conversation about racial disparities in police brutality, which lasted anywhere from 30 seconds to 20 minutes and were recorded and qualitatively coded for themes such as whether and how parents attempted to explain the disparity. We are interested in how these themes relate to children’s own beliefs and behaviors surrounding police brutality. Thus, following the conversation, children were asked 1) why they think the racial disparity in police brutality exists (open-ended), 2) to evaluate different explanations for police brutality (e.g., that it exists because of bad police officers), 3) if they think police reform should apply to some or all police officers, and 4) if they would be willing to join a protest against police brutality. We expect children whose parents explained racial disparities in police brutality via structural terms to come up with more structural explanations for the disparity, to evaluate structural explanations more positively, and to support reforming all police officers. In addition, we expect those children to be more willing to participate in protests themselves, indicating a greater desire to enact change. Data collection is expected to be completed by mid-September, and data analysis is expected to be completed by mid-December.

Authors

• John Nicky Sullivan, Stanford University
  Presenting Author

• Steven Othello Roberts, Stanford University