Mixed Up: Analogy and American Children’s Concepts about Racial Inheritance

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Abstract

America has a long history of racial subjugation and systemic inequality that benefits White people. This inequality has been justified by the presumption that White people are mentally or morally superior to other racial groups and pass these superior traits down from White parent to White child. In light of this presumption, American society has long grappled with the status of biracial children born of one White parent and one parent of color. These individuals are commonly categorized as members of the non-white parent’s racial group alone (Davis, 1991). This method of racial categorization has served to reinforce the racial status quo in America, but it also specifies a biological model for how traits ascribed to racial groups might be passed from parents to child. This model has long been articulated through the analogy of mixing fluids (e.g., “one-drop rule” and racial mixing). Notably, American adults make similar asymmetric categorizations for mixtures of potent fluids as they do for racial inheritance (Noyes & Keil, 2018).

Using a novel task, we investigated how American children (N=354, 4 to 10 y.o.) reason about biological inheritance in the context of race. Prior work highlights middle childhood as a time when American children begin to endorse notions of racial essentialism and asymmetrically categorize White-Black biracial children as Black (e.g., Pauker et al, 2016; Roberts & Gelman, 2015). To encourage our participants to reason about the biological process of trait transmission, rather than apply a learned social definition, we eschewed an explicit racial categorization task. Instead, we asked participants to predict the skin color of a baby based on the dissimilar skin colors of the parents, to then speculate on whether each of several different skin colors were possible, and then to explain why or why not. To characterize adult performance, we also ran college undergraduates (N=106) on the same task.

A large proportion of participating college students gave either fluids-based (38%) or genetic (29%) explanations for their answers about skin color inheritance. Monoracial White undergraduates were more likely to employ fluids-based explanations than biracial or non-white students (X2=5.39, p=0.02). They also predicted darker skin colors for the biracial baby than their biracial and non-white peers (t=2.25, p=0.03).

Among children, we observed a dramatic increase in the use of fluids-based explanations for skin color inheritance with age, from 0% among 4-year-old participants to 49% among 10-year-olds (r=0.407, p<0.0005). In contrast, use of genetic terms increased little across this age range (0% among 4-year-olds to 7% among 10-year-olds). Unlike in undergraduates, White and non-white children did not significantly differ in their use of fluids-based terms or the skin color they predicted for the biracial baby.

Taken together, these results suggest that American children modify their conceptual understanding of racial inheritance throughout middle childhood and even beyond. In particular, children tend to adopt a longstanding fluid-mixing analogy for racial inheritance between the ages of 6 and 10 years old.

Authors

• Rebecca Schwarzlose, Washington University in St. Louis
  Presenting Author

• Lori Markson, Washington University in St. Louis
  Non-Presenting Author