Children’s Skin Tone and Ethnicity Salience: its Effects in the Ethnically Homogenous and Whiteness Prevalent Chinese Context

• In Event: Ethnicity Salience and Ethnic-Racial Socialization in Different Social Contexts

Abstract

Children in the United States tend to avoid talking about skin tone and/or ethnicity during social interactions, which reflects their desires to follow prevailing social norms and to appear unbiased. However, in an ethnically homogenous society such as China, would children also avoid mentioning skin tone and ethnicity? Considering that Westernized beauty standards prevail in Asian cultures, Chinese children might display high levels of skin tone and ethnicity salience. In addition, Chinese children’s skin tone and ethnicity salience might relate to their attitudes towards different ethnicity and/or skin-tone groups. To test these hypotheses, this study assessed Chinese children’s skin tone and ethnicity salience and their attitudes toward three groups, namely light-skinned East Asian, tan-skinned East Asian, and White people.

Chinese children (7-11 years old, N = 155) who were born in urban areas of China played a set of online tasks to measure their skin tone and ethnicity salience as well as their attitudes toward the three groups. Children were presented with six gender-matched children on photographs: two girls or boys depending on participating children’s gender of each group, and were asked to group the six children based on similarity of appearance. Subsequently, children specified grouping reasons that why they considered certain children look alike. To measure Chinese children’s attitudes toward the three groups, they completed a social preference task in which they were presented with 12 pictures: two boys and two girls of each group. Children were asked 5 questions representing preference or rejection (e.g., “ Who would you like to sit (or not sit) next to in class?”). In addition, children completed an attribution task, in which they were asked to assign five positive descriptors (e.g., friendly) and five negative descriptors (e.g., mean) to any number of six children on photographs.

Overall, descriptive statistics showed that 64% of Chinese children in our samples demonstrated skin tone and ethnicity salience according to their categorization performance. In addition, 79% mentioned ethnic characteristics related reasons. The findings revealed that Chinese children demonstrated greater positive attitudes towards light-skinned East Asian people than both tan-skinned East Asian and White people (see Figure 1). However, contrast to our hypothesis, Chinese children showed more positive attitudes towards tan-skinned East Asian than White people. Furthermore, the results indicated that Chinese children’s skin tone and ethnicity salience did not play a role in their positive or negative attitudes towards the three groups.

In conclusion, most of Chinese children in our samples demonstrated ethnicity salience, and skin tone was the most noticeable ethnic related characterizes for these children. Chinese children demonstrated different attitudes towards light-skinned East Asian people, tan-skinned East Asian and White people. However, Chinese children’s skin tone and ethnicity salience did not impact their attitudes toward the three groups. The study suggested that in the ethnically homogenous social context where Whiteness ideology prevails, children might not tend to avoid talking about skin tone or ethnicity, which might be, however, unrelated to their bias or prejudice.

Authors

• Dan Gao, Universiteit Leiden
  Presenting Author

• Mitch van Geel, Leiden University

• Junsheng Liu, East China Normal University

• Judi Mesman, Leiden University