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Based, no doubt, on probing interviews with the 6-month-olds.
RS: "So the article itself just says that perception of skin colour is inborn, but the accusations in this thread are saying that the article/study says that racism is inborn."
Bronson and Merryman in Newsweek: "How many White people are nice?
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)
How many Black people are nice?
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)"
and:
"They wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But Vittrup's first test of the kids revealed they weren't colorblind at all. Asked how many white people are mean, these children commonly answered, "Almost none." Asked how many blacks are mean, many answered, "Some," or "A lot." Even kids who attended diverse schools answered the questions this way.""
Erik Redburn,
If someone is racist, it means that she notices race. However, the reverse is not true. If someone notices race, it does not mean that she is racist. (A implies B, but B does not imply A.)
BA humbug.
Is that another phallusy?
RS: "If someone is racist, it means that she notices race. However, the reverse is not true. If someone notices race, it does not mean that she is racist. (A implies B, but B does not imply A.)"
I know, I know, but the study purports to measure how young children (or young white Texans) see another race compared to their own, in terms of them being naughty or nice, regardless we are to presume of their "liberal" Austin upbringing or the authors' own efforts. Therefore...
Those questions are part of the Racial Attitude Measure, which was to be used to see if the intervention (multicultural videos only/multicultural videos + race talk/race talk only) changed the white children's racial attitudes. I assume that the Racial Attitude Measure was to be administered before and after the intervention, to measure changes among the three intervention groups.
However, the point is that the intervention failed because the white parents couldn't talk about race to their white children, which Vittrup did not expect. Obviously the white parents, unlike parents of colour, believed that people can and should be racially "color blind". Yet even at the beginning of the study, after the first Racial Attitude Measure but before the intervention, the white children already showed racist attitudes. This means that when white parents do not talk about race to their children, it is ineffective as a strategy for ensuring that their white children do not develop racist attitudes.
What exactly is your criticism?
That's what I'd like to know,
The only legitimate criticism I've seen so far is that the cover story does not fit the data. However, that's a criticism of Newsweek editorial board, not of the actual researchers.
I see a lot of complaints that are irrelevant to the subject at hand, like "racism comes from our social structures and not from ordinary people".
Until valid points are made, I'll have to assume they're just threatened by the mathematics and the statistics.
BTW: The reason they use the word nice is because 5 year olds have a limited vocabulary. Nuance is not really available.
Restructured, are you suggesting that the main argument of this article is that children notice skin colour? I don't think you do, but I'm having trouble figuring out what you do think the article is trying to say. Vittrup's main point seems to be that children categorize according to visible signifiers, and that this tendancy, paired with another natural tendancy to privilege one's own characteristics, leads, if unchecked, naturally, to racism ("Children naturally try to categorize everything, and the attribute they rely on is that which is the most clearly visible"). Newsweek calls this hypothesis 'the roots of racism' with its sensationalist subtitle (less sensational than its headline 'Even Babies Discriminate' and its Cover header "Is Your Baby Racist?"
Why is this interesting to us? Because it allows us and our soceity to deflect interrogation of our own casual racist assumptions and ethics onto 'children'. Surely we should talk to children about race, but I'm not sure we needed this study to prove that. Why isn't the Newsweek cover a picture of an adult, with a headline asking "Are you racist?" My comments in this thread have not been directed at the researcher who did this study, but to why this study is interesting to a mainstream magazine. I don't really dispute what the researcher 'discovered'--that our racist society invades and colonizes a child's psyche very, very early and with deadly efficiency--but for some reason, both Vittrup and Newsweek decoupled this 'discovery' from the racist context in which we live and breath (and research and write journalism). As a result, we get a 'cure' that does not indict the main protagonists of racist society--the hegemonic capitalist, white supremacist patriarchy (to paraphrase bell hooks).
I also find it interesting that the idea of 'visibility' remains completely uninterrogated. There is no biological reason why we should privilege the visibile over any other sense (I distinctly remember as a child judging children by how they smelled, for example). But we do live in a radically spectacular culture where the image has superceded the real. I guess that's just a happy accident, and we're all doomed to categorize and rate people by their skin colour for as long as this project calls humanity still has breath in its lungs.
You didn't hear me point out that 4 out of 14 "background" questions that Vittrup asked related to religion!!?? And fully 2 of the 4 were about "Sunday school"?
You didn't notice this multiple-choice question which I quoted above:
... where Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Ba'hai, aboriginal beliefs, etc. are subsumed under "OTHER"!!?? And "Agnostic or Atheist" are listed as "religious affiliation", and together?
You didn't notice that she was too much in a hurry to apply some simple controls!? Like, showing kids photos of bald people and people with lots of hair; or bearded and clean-shaven; or front shots vs. profile; or male and female; or any other contrast you may like to choose; and see what conclusions could be drawn by those comparisons??
I thought the Newsweek article was far more honest and useful than the pseudo-scientific studies it described, because it made explicit what their assumptions and conclusions were really all about.
Are you joking?
1) Media, is purely visual and auditory. That means kids books, tv and computers. And unless you're using blu-ray, which tese 5 year olds are not, then the visual is a lot more sophisticated than the auditory. Anyhow your theoretical framework (you refer to culture) leads to a prediction... 25 years from now we should be discriminating more on sound than on image, because that's where the media is going.
2) Human beings are visual creatures. The visual cortex and vision in general is one of the largest regions of the brain. We're extremely good at finding the centers of objects, at recognizing colour, recognizing shapes, et cetera.
3) Usually, you can't smell people from far away, and you're less likely to touch and taste them. Vision works for large distances, and is instantaneous.
Why was this thread not closed?
Not a bad question, Cueball. I notice that Maysie has been conspicuously absent from this thread, despite its incendiary title. I guess it has something to do with reading the label on a bottle, and discarding it when it says 'HIGHLY ACIDIC AND PROBABLY POISONOUS'.
Aw c'mon, guys, there's still a lot to discuss here.
I saw a study of where they showed foetuses photos of Hassidic Jewish men and then of Catholic priests while the pregnant mother slept, and measured her REM and respiratory responses. There were some fascinating conclusions about the Crucifixion and Resurrection stories. The study authors had more letters after their names than I've seen in quite a while. I believe they were from the Institute of Really Important Research at the University of Nevada (Las Vegas campus).
I've misplaced the hyperlink, but give me a few minutes...
I've really missed you Catchfire.
My tag says "moderator" not "masochistic wacko" although sometimes the two are interchangeable.
Returning to the lurk bench.
Yes, that, and that white parents raise their white children to be "color blind", which does not work in reducing their racism.
It leads naturally to in-group bias, which would be one contributing factor to systemic racism, given that white people are the majority and have institutional power.
The person who designs the covers of Newsweek is not the same as the writers who write Newsweek articles. The "roots of racism" angle was probably not something that Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman started off with, but it was added afterwards by the designer to make the Newsweek issue more attractive.
75 percent of white parents never or almost never talk about race to their children. Most white liberals believe that they "don't see race" and that MLK wanted people to be racially "color blind". Of course we needed this study to prove that, because most white people are going to dismiss people of colour's views unless they are backed up with empirical evidence.
Because it was about parenting.
No, not really. There is a lot of research going on concerning race perception, and they do not have to mention and explain every single study that was ever conducted about race in order to write about a few studies.
Yet the "cure" is that white people can no longer ignore race, and have to deal with it head on just like people of colour do everyday.
Humans' most advanced perceptual system is vision. Dogs can tell the sex and age of other dogs by smell, but humans generally do this through vision.
"Categorization" is completely different from "rating".
Oh dear.
The criticisms expressed have been, I think, fairly clear. If not, all i can really say is "re-read." Many of these criticisms see context, rather than being simply confined to what is seen as "legitimate" from a viewpiont that privileges Science alone as valid. (And makes space, in this case, for a study that frames itself as social science.)
The implication of the text before us, to those who can see readership (Restructure has made this point - the readership is assumed white) is to shift blame for racism from society to nature. That's my reading and the reading of many others out there in internetland, judging by a glance at some other commentary.
That criticism may not be "legiminate" or "valid" in your eyes. Oh well. This isn't the Posivistic Behavioural Science forum. All I can do, myself, is repeat the text starting from sentence two, or the generous advice to parents of colour on how to get their kid to conform for success in racist society. The lessons for white parents and the flaws in the "colour-blind" crap are so obvious and so often stated by others that it hardly needs a duo flogging their parenting book to enlighten.
I don't see much more point to this, personally, but will end with a continued belief that the OP does not start from the first principles of the forum, which I believe was discussing race and racism from an antiracist viewpoint.
--
"One law for the lion and the ox is oppression" - Blake
Yes, exactly. And what is pernicious about it is that it is the dominant discourse throughout the United States. Not just Texas, not just North Carolina, not just poor neighbourhoods, not just faculty clubs. Everywhere. It does not belong here.
That's why I was resorting to childish humour and sarcasm, but alas, they're carrying on.
I have a question. Is it that any scientific study that finds empirical evidence that a specific group acts a certain way implies, to you, that the behaviour is innate?
Good question. That said, just as racism found scientific explanation for itself within the science of eugenics and biology in the past, today it can be found happily nesting in dark corners of some sociological and anthropological quackery. New suit. Same ideas dressed up as comparative cultural anthropology. In other words do we set the limit of racism to only include the assertion that certain behaviours are biologically "innate"?
What about "the clash of civilization" and the view that Islamic "culture" is inherently inferior to Judeao-Christian culture?
For me, anything that is untrue about a race or culture counts as racist or ethnocentric. For me, racist or ethnocentric ideas are subsets of the set of false ideas.
However, I asked Ze that question not because I think that only claims about innateness can be racist. I asked Ze that question, because at that moment, I realized that this argument about what some scientific study implies is very similar to a few arguments I've had in the past with some leftists. I usually get angry because I perceive the other party to have problems with reading comprehension and non sequiturs, and the other party just points back to the text as if it is obvious that the study was suggesting something nefarious (when it is not in the text). I find myself perceiving the other party as scientifically illiterate, but I don't fully understand what the other party is thinking about me.
Since this is the third or fourth time I've come across this impasse, and since I am beginning to see why the general public does not change its behaviour in light of important scientific findings, I want to understand and fix the breakdown in communication.
For example, is it true that most people assume that published scientific findings are meant to be taken by the public as discoveries of universal laws of nature?
How many "scientific studies" get the cover of newsweek, and what is the nature of their content, and what kinds of things do they contain that might yield certain kinds of well known responses based in well warn common knowledge prejudices? Is the issue the study here, or is its positioning in the media more relevant to the discussion at hand?
For example, here the response has been to post a thread in the anti-racism forum asking if "your baby is racist", based entirely on the appearance of a scientific study in a prominent magazine that "proves" babies can descriminate between colours -- babies "descriminate" "naturally", in other words; descrimination based on colour is therefore "natural".
They can indeed "see", as you pointed out.
My question would be does the study show that babies evaluate the colour distinction on the same level that they notice someone has a big nose as opposed to a smaller one?
I don't know, as I am not of the demographic that reads Newsweek. I am, however, of the demographic that reads science news articles every day.
It seems like when a particular study is covered by the mainstream media, suddenly an "intent" is projected on to the researchers, which would not have been there if it didn't become mainstream. When it is unknown to the public, the study is understood to be something that is read by other researchers or people who are familiar with the field. When it becomes mainstream (because some journalist wrote about it), the study is understood (by the general public) as something the researchers decided to do because they wanted to influence public opinion. (The latter is an incorrect assumption.)
How is this an example of a study's positioning in the media, or relevant to that issue?
I don't agree that the study shifts blame of racism from nurture to nature.
The variable in how "racist" the 5-year olds were was found to be how the parents discuss race.
It doesn't get much more behaviorist than that.
B.F Skinner would probably approve ...
SCC saw this study in a prominent news magazine, his response was to post a thread in the "anti-racism forum" asking if babies are "racist". So the response was immediatly to post a thread topic asking how this study relates to "racism". He did not start a thread saying: "new study proves babies can see," in the "humanities and science" forum. That is all the data I have to evaluate here.
Any background on how many garden variety "scientific studies" make it to the cover of newsweek?
That's not necessarily a realistic expectation.
These studies are extremely expensive, each participant can be awarded several hundred dollars a pop (I imagine they're following these kids for years, so more). If you want good statistics you need at least 30 participants per question (old rule of thumb).
Additionally, and here's some sociology for you, the trend in science has been to break up most research into its individual components. Broader research context is usually provided in the introduction and discussion and in frequent review articles.
The study you ask for is no doubt elsewhere in the literature, or these same researchers may have it in their pipeline.
They've had a lot of science coverage recently.
Newsweek is trying to reinvent itself, be less like Time and more like The Economist.
A few weeks back I saw them confidently declare in their introduction that aliens exist "and other things you should know".
That publication is imo, failing badly. I think their cover story title is crap. The research itself I don't agree with the criticisms made.
I should think it was a realistic expectation for a study that wanted to establish meaningful results in terms of how babies relate to colour and "racism" as opposed to how they relate to other overt physical charachteristics.
On the cover?
No, he just copied the title from the magazine cover.
But it does relate to racism, as it's about color blindness being a bad anti-racist strategy.
I am not arguing that "babies can see skin colour differences" has nothing to do with racism. Of course it does. What I disagree with is the allegation that the Newsweek article (the text) suggests that racism is inborn.
I do not have any information on this through anecdotal experience, nor am I aware of any research that studies how many scientific studies make it to the cover of Newsweek.
Ok. I have changed my mind. Thanks for the help. Rather than being closed I think this topic title should be changed to "New study shows babies can "see", and then that the thread be moved to the "science and humanities" forum, where it belongs.
Cueball,
Do you believe that every scientific paper should review ever link in the historical process that brought it to its findings, all the way back to Newton and Aristotle?
Or would you agree that there will often be value in telling a single story?
*****
Ok,
I think your point about Newsweek, is that they rarely have scientific stories on their cover, so we shouldn't assume this comes from a scientific perspective.
Their website sucks and I can't browse the recent covers, but that's probably correct. Excellent point.