Ethnicity Salience and Ethnic-Racial Socialization in Different Social Contexts

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Color-consciousness ideology has been proved conductive to reduce intergroup prejudice among U.S. based findings. Parents and peers are significant socializing influences in children’s development of prejudice and bias. Therefore, in the first paper we designed an intervention to facilitate color conscious parent-children conversations as well as examined how parents’ messages impacted children’s implicit racial attitudes. In addition to parental ethnic-racial socialization, peers act as complex socializing agents in interracial contexts, so that in the second paper we examined whether children’s predictions of third-party interracial inclusion decisions would be differentially influenced by parents or peers.

Although U.S.-based findings in terms of ethnicity salience and ethnic-racial socialization are valuable, these findings are not directly generalizable to other societies due to the different historical contexts and cultural values. In the Netherlands, anti-Black racism toward the Afro-Dutch group is related with the history of colonialism and slavery in Surinam. Thus, we included the third paper focusing on how Black mothers in the Netherlands socialize their children regarding ethnicity-related issues. In addition, for the ethnically homogenous Chinese society, where Westernized beauty standards have been prevailed, Chinese children might demonstrate skin tone and/or ethnicity salience with different motivations, contrary to the findings that White children tend to avoid talking about skin tone and/or ethnicity in the effort to avoid appearing bias where diversity and inclusion are highly valued. Therefore, we included the fourth paper investigating Chinese children’s skin tone and ethnicity salience and its relations to their attitudes towards different ethnic and/or skin-tone groups.

Sub Unit

• Race, Ethnicity, Culture, Context

Chairs

• Dan Gao, Universiteit Leiden

• Daudi van Veen, Universiteit Utrecht

Individual Presentations

• The Impact of White American Parents’ Racial Socialization Methods on Children’s Attitude Change - Presenting Author: Deborah Wu; Sylvia Perry, Northwestern University

• Peer and Parental Sources of Influence Regarding Interracial and Same-Race Peer Encounters - Presenting Author: Amanda Rose Burkholder, Furman University; Jacquelyn Glidden, University of Maryland - College Park; Kathryn M. Yee, University of Maryland - College Park; Shelby Cooley; Melanie A. Killen, University of Maryland - College Park

• Raising Black Children in the Netherlands: A Mixed-Methods Study on Ethnic-Racial Socialization and Children's Ethnic-Racial Affirmation in the Netherlands - Presenting Author: Daudi van Veen, Universiteit Utrecht; Rosanneke A. G. Emmen, Universiteit Leiden; Judi Mesman, Leiden University

• Children’s Skin Tone and Ethnicity Salience: its Effects in the Ethnically Homogenous and Whiteness Prevalent Chinese Context - Presenting Author: Dan Gao, Universiteit Leiden; Mitch van Geel, Leiden University; Junsheng Liu, East China Normal University; Judi Mesman, Leiden University