Now let me use the information processing model of cognitive development to explain other mental factors in development of racism.
When exposed to the same words, images, stories, TV shows, etc. that display people in a certain way, we develop a mental schema of those people; the same thing happens to create our schemas of ourselves. Racial schemata we acquire early, when totally trusting those around us to be telling us the truth about everything, are deep cognitive structures that will become difficult to change, even if we seriously want to change. These are the racial stereotypes we’ve absorbed from our culture by implicit conditioning that become part of our unconscious minds that can cause us to say and do things our more mature, consciously thinking selves have learned better than to say. I’m remembering the story of a man who said the first word his son said was the ‘n’ word, and the boy probably got applauded for it. Racial conditioning begins early.
There are cultural differences in the first words/schemata that children learn. In the US and England children’s first words are nouns. In Beijing children first learn verbs and kinship terms. We learn words by hearing them and associating them with things and events. If we see our baby looking intently at something, we might name it. Later they will point at something, suggesting they want to know what it is; soon they will be asking: “What is that?” If we don’t label a person or a process, the child may realize it is something not to talk about. If they say something and we tell them to hush and not say anything, they will attach meaning to it—shame, doubt—that well may affect their feelings about it.
Between ages one and three, children become aware of themselves. They can now talk about ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ and know that is them when they look in the mirror. Have you seen babies crawl behind the mirror to find the child that must be there? It’s so cute. But by they time they are 3, if you surreptitiously put a dab of rouge on their nose and put them in front of the mirror, they will look surprised and immediately try to rub it off; some will grab a tissue first! We infer by then they have a sense of self. They are now somebody and they know it! The adjectives we attach to them can become part of their self-concept; if we say negative things to and about them, or if we say positive things about them, those value judgments also become part of who they are becoming. These events contribute to a feeling of superiority, which can lead to pride or to arrogance, as in white supremacy or the negative sense of self such as that in internalized racism.
Now if parents start referring to themselves and their child as being some color, the child begins to see itself as that color. Or as good or as evil, as in born in sin, those adjectives become part of the child’s sense of self. The earlier it starts, the more difficult it will be as adults to divest oneself of those notions. Pride and a strong positive self-concept begins with love, appreciation, acceptance, belonging. Shame and a negative self-concept begin with disrespect, lack of love, appreciation, acceptance, belonging; the sooner it begins, the longer it takes to recover.
These 3-5 year old children have great perception and capacity to name things and see connections between things, but their reasoning is not perfect. I’ve asked one to run and see if I’m in the kitchen and they would do it and come report to me that I am not in the kitchen. I never smirk; I always say thank you and we move on with the next item on the agenda. So, you can tell them lies, even pretty obvious ones about "those other people” and they will believe you. And when bad things happen, they can feel as if they caused it, feel guilty, and be ashamed; this can be hard to recover from as well.
By age 3 children are aware of individual differences in sex, age, height, skin and hair color and texture, etc. By age 4 they are aware of the concept of race. By age 9 boys are identifying with their dads and seeing them as Supermen. They also begin to challenge female authority. I remember my brother getting to that point and asked mother why she put up with it; “Boys are different,” she said. But apparently some white teachers see such acting out in black boys, not as expected behavior for that age, but as disrespectful and consequences for the child can be awful.
Humans are born knowing how to learn and motivated to learn. They learn quickly and soon know a lot and their memory improves quickly as well. However, even at age 5, if you ask them to remember something and come back in 5 minutes and ask them to recall what you asked them to remember, they may seem not even to know what you are talking about. But, somewhere between five and seven, they develop metacognition; after you come back and ask them to recall, they may not remember everything perfectly, but they know that they tried to remember and can recall 3-5 of the 5 words you asked them to remember. In other words, they know and they know that they know. Now they can think about thinking, and knowledge and memory and learning, and they can monitor their own mental processes. And they can wonder if they know what they think they know, which makes it possible to know when something doesn’t make sense. At that point they can be bothered by cognitive dissonance, and the angst when it becomes obvious that people they trust say one thing but do another.
My cognitive dissonance about racism began with the contradiction between what my people said about other groups of people and what I learned in Sunday School about all God’s children being loved by God and what you do the the least of God’s children, you do to God. And I saw this as serious because in my little Baptist Church it was made quite clear that the wages of sin involved the dreaded “h” word I was also not supposed to say. So, I feared my folks were doomed to hell, which was clearly terrible, so it caused me a lot of anxiety, angst, fear for them.
I remember Mother saying to me a number of times: “How would you feel if somebody did that to you?” So, I paid attention when they said or did or talked about doing something hurtful to ‘those people.’ Writing this, I’m thinking back and wondering about the age at which kids make choices about what behavior to imitate and which not to do? Depends, of course, on a lot of things and whether there is reinforcement or punishment for that choice whether it will become a behavior pattern.
Metacognition also makes it possible to have a theory of mind, an understanding that other people have knowledge, think, remember, and learn and that they may not know and remember and think and learn like you do and in fact may not always tell the truth. To measure whether a child is capable of having a theory of mind, researchers will sit with a child, and they will talk about what is in the crayon box. Then they empty the crayons and put something else, say candies. Then they close the box and the researcher asks the child: “If your friend comes in and you ask her what is in the box, what will she say?” A child with well developed metacognition who has a theory of mind may laugh at the joke and say, “Crayons!” But a younger child may say, “Candies,” because she knows the truth and can’t imagine the other child’s answer would be what she would expect in a crayon box. The young one’s can’t imagine what another person might be thinking; they think you think what they think, like what you like, feel what you feel, see what you see. But, once they can imagine someone thinking something else… something false… something bad, now they can comprehend that people might believe something they know better than to believe.
I can find no research to support this idea, but I think somehow, at a fairly early age, a child is mentally equipped to recognize prejudice and discrimination and begin to form an alliance with a racist way of thinking or a non-racist way of thinking or an anti-racist way of thinking. Their leaning will be affected by the significant people in their lives, whether those people are respected influences on them, and the kind of feedback they get for their actions and the things they say about people and about what people say and do. I predict this is happening by the age of seven.
I’ve already discussed our being capable of discrimination, telling the difference between things: people, faces, colors, toys, animals, vehicles, etc. Making those distinctions is crucial to our making the decisions that will save our lives throughout our lives. Attaching meaning and value to all those things, including skin color occurs as we develop language and vocabulary, which expands exponentially from 3-7 years. They do have the concept of race by age 4 but don’t under status till about 9.
The point I’m trying to make in this chapter is that people around us are engaging in various behaviors toward people (our folks and other folks) and expressing opinions about people (us and them) with varying degrees of emotion (positive and negative) attached to words and deeds. We will imitate some of it with or without thinking about what we are doing and saying. Others may or may not react to what we do and say with positive or negative words and/or actions—all of which will influence what we say or do in the future. And at some point, we will pay attention to what we are saying and doing and what others say and do about what we say and do, and we will be able to make judgments about all of that, and the consequences of what we said and/or did. So somewhere in this early growing-up period, we cease to just mind our elders; we are thinking about our doing so. And we are making value judgments about their words and behavior and what they say about our words and behavior. And so our character and personality form and we learn about consequences and facing consequences. We begin to have knowledge of right and wrong and a world view long before we have all these big words in our vocabulary. The concepts are there and influence who we are and shape our behaviors before we have the vocabulary to talk about it.