Teaching Kids to Be Color Blind Is No Help

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An interesting new study in Social Psychology and Personality Science sheds some light on how color-blindness may affect minority kids. The authors, Kristin Pauker of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Evan P. Apfelbaum of MIT, and Brian Spitzer of NYU, start by explaining that there’s good reason to think minority kids don’t benefit from a color-blind approach: A body of research has shown that “race is central to their identities, a source of psychological well-being, and a lens through which others perceive them.”

Ignoring race, then, may well have a negative impact on those for whom it’s most salient. And yet these kids, like most American kids, are steeped in a milieu of color-blindness–many are taught at a young age that it’s wrong to point out or focus on racial differences. Pauker and her colleagues wanted to learn more about this, so they recruited a group of 111 9-to-12-year-olds from “urban public elementary schools that serve low-income and middle-class families near San Francisco.”

The kids were asked to play a game that’s basically “Guess Who?” Photos of 40 individuals were laid out in front of them, one of them the “correct” answer, and the children were tasked with picking the right one by asking as few questions as possible.

Pauker and her colleagues set things up so that asking whether the person was black or white or whether they were male or female could instantly eliminate half the photos. The researchers tracked the participants’ performance, videotaped the games as they progressed and, after the game was over, asked and recorded the kids’ responses to two important questions: “(W)hether they noticed that white and black people were displayed in the photos . . . (and) why they did or did not use race as a question.”

This study was something of a sequel to a similar one Apfelbaum and Pauker, along with other researchers, published in Developmental Psychology back in 2008. The authors found that the younger children in that sample, drawn entirely from middle- and upper-middle-class white kids in suburban Boston, actually outperformed their older peers at the question-guessing task, simply because the older (and therefore more tactful) ones were afraid to ask about race.

It would be reasonable to think that black and Latino kids wouldn’t be so wary about asking about race, that they’d be more likely to do so than the white kids in this new study. But that’s not what the authors found. Rather, while almost all the kids, regardless of race, reported having noticed the racial differences among the photos, only 40 percent of them used those differences to help them perform well in the game–and that number didn’t vary much by race.

Among the kids who didn’t ask about race during the game, 58 percent of them said that doing so would be “inappropriate, rude, (or) offensive,” while a full 23 percent said it would be outright racist or prejudiced. “We were surprised to find that racial minority children also avoided race to the same extent (as the white kids) and espoused reasons such as trying not to appear prejudiced,” Pauker said in an email.

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