What makes a racist?
Well parents, people of influence and society does.
Incidentally when people talk about racism, they often mean colourism.
Put several white people together of different countries and most would not
blink an eyelid. Put several people together who were born in the same country
and brought up with the same cultural but who are different colours, that’s when
issues start.
There is true racism, an example would be Africa where different tribes rise up
against other tribes, although a lot of true racism is due to religion and politics.
Rwanda for example or the holocaust.
This is an interesting acticle, a bit long but it ends with the following.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/developing-minds/201304/are-kids-racist
So how do we get our kids to be non-racist if avoiding talking about it is not the solution?
Well one thing’s for sure—your kids pay attention to who is around them and who you spend
your time with. Bigler’s storybook study mentioned above finds that the 4-5 year old children
of parents who have more diverse friends show less racial bias than the children of parents
who have less diverse friends.
What is more,
a study done by Bar-Haim and colleagues in 2006, showed that growing up
in a multi-racial environment versus a mono-racial one produced differences in race-based
responding in children only 3-months of age! This and other work suggests that one clear
thing parents can do is to not just talk about race and challenge children’s assumptions,
but model through their own behavior, the importance of interracial interactions and
relationships.
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