A Child’s Palette of Pre-Prejudice

Clark’s mother was so tense that her hands shook as she approached Louise Derman-Sparks to ask a question about her 2-year-old son.

The boy is enrolled in the nationally respected children’s school of Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena, and Derman-Sparks teaches there.

“Clark’s mother told me the following story,” said Derman-Sparks, who has written extensively on early childhood education.

“She was washing Clark’s hair, and when she finished he said, ‘Now my hair is white.’ She said, ‘No, your hair is black.’ He said, ‘No, it’s white, only the dirt was black.’

“So Clark’s mother took him to a mirror and showed him his hair was still black.

“But even when he could see his black hair, he insisted it was white because it was clean.”

The incident by itself seemed innocent enough, even a bit funny. But, considered in context with a couple of other disconcerting comments from her son (whose name has been changed for this account), it led the distressed mother to ask:

“Does this mean Clark is a racist?” There are no 2-year-old racists, said Derman-Sparks, who is writing an anti-bias curriculum for preschoolers in cooperation with the Pacific Oaks Children’s School faculty.

But children as young as 2 can exhibit a potentially explosive “pre-prejudice,” she said. Pre-prejudice is the lowest rung on a ladder that leads to racial prejudice.

Blocking an Approach

Pre-prejudice can be checked, and when it is, a ladder to racism is splintered, although that only blocks one approach to racist behavior and does not prevent other ladders being built later on, Derman-Sparks said.

“You can’t immunize children against racism, but you can eliminate pre-prejudice, and in so doing you begin to give children the tools to deal with prejudice as they grow older. That’s what we are trying to do,” concluded Derman-Sparks, who has taught at Pacific Oaks for 12 years after serving in Ypsilanti, Mich., as a curriculum and teacher supervisor for a Headstart program that was a national model.

The need for early childhood programs to combat racism was underlined by Lyla Hoffman, who retired this year as director of the resource center for the Council on Interracial Books for Children in New York.

“There have been dozens and dozens of studies showing children at a very young age pick up attitudes about race,” she said. There have also been a very limited number of curriculums written to deal with early childhood racial problems, Hoffman added.

But, she noted, “there is very little available for parents and teachers that explains the theory and research and how it fits into general child development, and gives you examples of what you can do about it. The idea of the Pacific Oaks curriculum is that it will put together what’s known about child development with actual observations of real live children to provide curriculum examples that have been tried and tested. This will be invaluable.”

Derman-Sparks says of the Pacific Oaks project, “The thing that’s radical about it is that nobody’s doing it. And nobody’s doing it because people don’t understand what’s happening to young kids. People don’t understand the gravity of the problem. As soon as children become aware of color differences, they connect them with racist attitudes and emotional discomfort among adults about racial differences. It’s a subconscious recognition for the children, but it’s a real and frightening recognition. Kids don’t live in a vacuum, you know.”

Clark, the 2-year-old who equated black with dirt, projected his error beyond hair color. He exclaimed “Yucky!” upon seeing pictures of blacks, and he refused to hold a black child’s hand “because she is dirty.”

After Clark’s mother voiced her fears, his teacher, Maria Gutierrez, made a concerted effort to change the boy’s direction.

Gutierrez, who is a dark-skinned Latina, read to him from books featuring black and Latin characters, she smeared black and brown dolls with dirt and let Clark bathe them, she developed a special friendship with the boy.

Three months after Clark’s mother talked with Derman-Sparks, he came up to Gutierrez and said matter of factly, “You’re my friend.” “Yes, I’m your friend,” responded the teacher. There was no apparent thought in Clark’s mind that Gutierrez was “dirty,” despite the color of her skin.

Derman-Sparks cites two theories about how racism begins: psychological and institutional.

Psychological racism involves individuals like Clark who, for reasons more or less specific to their own situations, develop biases against persons of other races.

The theory of institutional racism is that society as a whole promotes racist attitudes and that if those attitudes can be arrested in time, significant amounts of racism can be averted or at least diluted.

Although Gutierrez worked with Clark on an individual basis (his attitudes fit the definition of psychological pre-prejudice), Derman-Sparks sees her job as developing a curriculum to head off institutional racism. “We have to change social practices,” the teacher said. “People in this country live with a system that started by taking land from Native Americans and developed through slavery and exploiting the Mexicans of the Southwest and the Chinese who built our railroads. To a great extent, our economic base came from exploiting minorities, and I think it still does.

Tools for Change

“We want to teach children how to recognize bias and prejudice, and to give them tools for changing it.

“To do that, we want to teach children not to prejudge people or to base judgments on stereotypical information.”

Pacific Oaks College’s anti-bias curriculum guide is in its formative stages. Today it consists of yards of computer printouts filled with typographical errors, extraneous information and loosely organized facts.

When Derman-Sparks and her associates refine their work, they expect to have a curriculum guide, not a manual leading teachers through anti-bias lesson plans on a step-by-step basis.

“We expect that the format of the guide will be more a journal than a recipe book. It will describe and discuss different teachers’ thoughts and responses to specific needs of children,” Derman-Sparks said.

The guide, scheduled for publication next summer, will cover 2- through 5-year-olds. Pacific Oaks College and the Children’s School have supported it with hundreds of faculty hours, the California Community Foundation gave $16,000 for the program, and the Mattel Foundation supplied $3,000 for printing costs.

For the youngest group, Derman-Sparks said, the guide will concentrate on creating environments where there is concrete information about color, on the fact that people are different colors, and it will touch on people talking in different languages. The approach includes activities as simple as using lots of black and brown construction paper and play dough, and observing that these colors--generally little used in preschool--can be beautiful.

Three- and 4-year-olds are at an age where they begin trying to figure out how they got to be who they are. They start to categorize, Derman-Sparks said. For them, the curriculum guide will explore physical aspects of race, such as hair texture and color, skin color and eye shape. In short, the guide will concentrate on what makes people racially different from one another.

When they ask questions like “Why is Joe black?” or “How come Mary’s brown?” or “What makes Al white and me tan?” 3- and 4-year-olds profit from direct, specific answers.

Instead, they frequently get two types of responses that they can interpret as negative, and that they often then project to mean that other races are bad. The first such response occurs when well-meaning parents and teachers say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter what color a person is,” which the child already perceives is not true. The second common response is to avoid the issue with answers like “Ask your mother,” “I’m busy right now,” or “Why are you inside when you should be out in the schoolyard with your classmates?” In either case, according to Derman-Sparks, the child is left thinking that racial issues are so heinous that adults won’t talk about them, and racial bias is therefore reinforced in the child’s mind.

Five-year-olds--many of whom are entering kindergarten--can deal with cultural differences. The curriculum guide will offer ideas on teaching how cultural groups live, what their struggles have been, what their holiday traditions are. At this age, children are likely to laugh at foreign languages, call unfamiliar foods “yucky” and make fun of culturally “different” situations like ethnic dances, regional clothing and unfamiliar ways of eating, the Pacific Oaks teacher said. Such apparently derisive reactions usually are rooted in discomfort with the unfamiliar. Matter-of-fact discussion of the situations can lead to their acceptance, hammering another nail in racism’s coffin.

By the time they are 5, children are ready to take an activist role in understanding racial differences. The Pacific Oaks guide will advocate activities for 5-year-olds like taking part in holiday celebrations related to civil rights movements, helping to whitewash walls covered with racial graffiti, writing letters to greeting card stores requesting that they carry more cards depicting minorities, and contacting bandage manufacturers recommending the sale of black, brown and tan bandages.

Although the Pacific Oaks curriculum guide is funded only for children up through the age of 5, the problem doesn’t end there.

Derman-Sparks said the significant peer pressure begins among 6- to 8-year-olds. “It’s evidenced by racial name-calling and kids segregating themselves,” she said, adding that such activities can lead to clear-cut racism in adolescence.

Derman-Sparks and her colleague, Carol Brunson-Phillips, have written an anti-racism curriculum for college students.

“The next thing for us to do is an anti-bias curriculum for first- through third-graders,” Derman-Sparks said. “Eventually, we will have anti-bias curricula for all the grades through 12th, plus college.

“Our goal,” she said, “is to raise kids who don’t have any social bias, and to raise kids who can be social activists. Preschool is just the beginning of the process.”