White Kids

Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America

Margaret A. Hagerman

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479879076
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Marriage & Family Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Riveting stories of how affluent, white children learn about race

American kids are living in a world of ongoing public debates about race, daily displays of racial injustice, and for some, an increased awareness surrounding diversity and inclusion. In this heated context, sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman zeroes in on affluent, white kids to observe how they make sense of privilege, unequal educational opportunities, and police violence. In fascinating detail, Hagerman considers the role that they and their families play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality in America.

White Kids, based on two years of research involving in-depth interviews with white kids and their families, is a clear-eyed and sometimes shocking account of how white kids learn about race. In doing so, this book explores questions such as, “How do white kids learn about race when they grow up in families that do not talk openly about race or acknowledge its impact?” and “What about children growing up in families with parents who consider themselves to be ‘anti-racist’?”

Featuring the actual voices of young, affluent white kids and what they think about race, racism, inequality, and privilege, White Kids illuminates how white racial socialization is much more dynamic, complex, and varied than previously recognized. It is a process that stretches beyond white parents’ explicit conversations with their white children and includes not only the choices parents make about neighborhoods, schools, peer groups, extracurricular activities, and media, but also the choices made by the kids themselves. By interviewing kids who are growing up in different racial contexts—from racially segregated to meaningfully integrated and from politically progressive to conservative—this important book documents key differences in the outcomes of white racial socialization across families. And by observing families in their everyday lives, this book explores the extent to which white families, even those with anti-racist intentions, reproduce and reinforce the forms of inequality they say they reject.

1

“Race Really Doesn’t Matter Anymore”

Growing Up with Privilege

One wintery afternoon, I drive 12-year-old Edward home from basketball practice. He is sitting in the backseat, sweaty despite the frigid temperatures outside. Snowflakes are just starting to fall from the sky, and I turn on my windshield wipers to brush them away. Edward leans forward and asks if we can stop at McDonalds for a snack. I reluctantly agree and think about where the nearest McDonalds is located. As we approach the restaurant, Edward looks out the window and says, “Hey, this isn’t where we usually go. We usually go to the one over by the mall!” Not thinking much about his comment, I tell him nicely that this is the most convenient location and that this is where we are going. He does not respond, so I glance in the rearview mirror to check his expression. Edward is looking out the window.

Because it is snowing, I opt to go to the drive-thru. I place his order and fumble around in my purse for some cash as we wait to pull forward. As I do so, Edward continues to look out the window. He watches a group of seven children walk across the parking lot in front of us. The kids all look to be the same age as Edward, likely in seventh or eighth grade. They are wearing clothes like Edward typically wears—winter coats, hats, jeans, boots, and gloves—and they are black. The kids are laughing, joking around, and carrying their school backpacks. As we wait for his milkshake, one of the girls makes a snowball and throws it at one of the boys, all of the kids laughing when the snowball hits the back of the boy’s coat. Watching the kids goof around, much as I had seen Edward goof around with his own friends on previous occasions, Edward states definitively, “This neighborhood really isn’t all that good, is it?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, wondering what he will say.

“I dunno,” he replies. “It just seems like there are a lot of poor people around here. We don’t usually stop here. My mom says it’s dangerous.”

“Oh,” I say nonchalantly. “Why do you think she says it’s dangerous?”

“Well, I don’t think she would say it unless it was true,” Edward tells me matter-of-factly.

It is our turn to pull up to the window. As soon as I pass back the milkshake to Edward, his attention shifts, and he starts talking about his snowmobile. But even as I listen to him chatter on and on, I am reminded of something Edward told me—not this day at McDonalds in the drive-thru but another day a few weeks prior. “We are all the same,” he had said. “Race doesn’t really matter anymore.” We continue on into the snow.

* * *

I often hear my students, my friends, and even my own family members talk about how they “were socialized” or about “how kids are socialized these days.” This word, “socialization,” is one that social scientists use to refer to the process of how new members of society learn about the social world. Traditionally, this term refers to the role that families play in transforming children into social actors who know the norms of a society and are able to interact with other members of that society. At the core of these understandings of socialization—both my students’ understandings and many social scientists’—is an assumption that kids will become members of society as the adults around them see fit. And yet anyone who has spent any time with children knows that kids do not simply take the ideas of adults and make them their own; kids constantly break rules, challenge adult authority, disagree with parents, form their own opinions, create their own make-believe games, build their own youth culture, produce their own imaginative artwork, disregard social norms, and so forth. Given this reality, scholars adhering to what is called the “New Sociology of Childhood” argue that this term “socialization” does not adequately take into account children’s active participation, or agency, in social learning processes.1 The word “socialization” removes the active role children play in their own lives. “Socialization” implies that children are passive, blank slates to be written on by adults in a deterministic fashion, empty vessels to be filled with whatever adults determine, or “sponges,” rather than, as the childhood sociologist William Corsaro argues, “active, creative social agents who produce their own unique children’s cultures while simultaneously contributing to the production of adult societies.”2

This same terminology of “racial socialization” is used to explain how children make sense of race. And this term carries with it the same problems just described involving limits to children’s agency, or free will. As the African American studies scholar Erin Winkler argues, the term “racial socialization” “refers exclusively to how parents teach their children about race and racism,… indicating something that happens to children.”3 Not only does this term reflect a lack of recognition of the role that children themselves play in forming ideas about race and racism, but it also assumes that parents are the sole providers of these racial lessons. In fact, common definitions of “racial socialization” are typically limited to “parents’ race-related communications to children”4 or “an adaptive strategy parents use to prepare children to negotiate experiences associated with social position.”5 These definitions are adult-centric and ignore children’s participation in this process altogether. For instance, many studies of racial socialization focus on the kinds of approaches parents take to conveying messages to their children, such as counts of how many times particular topics are brought up in conversation. As a result, much of what we know about how children learn about race does not come from children themselves but rather from the adults in their lives. This quantitative work is much different from ethnographic work that uncovers the interpretive processes involved in how kids make sense of the messages conveyed to them in their everyday lives. While of course we can learn much from existing research, children’s active participation in racial socialization processes needs further empirical analysis if we truly want to understand how commonsense ideas about race are formed by the newest generation themselves.6

In order to take account of the richer and more complex ways that kids learn about race, Winkler argues for the use of a new framework that she calls “comprehensive racial learning.” This is a term that refers to “the process through which children negotiate, interpret, and make meaning of the various and conflicting messages they receive about race, ultimately forming their own understandings of how race works in society and their lives.”7 This framework moves beyond simply what happens within the family and includes all aspects of a child’s life, such as neighborhood, school, peers, activities, travel, and media. This framework also embraces the theory that children learn through their interactions with and interpretations of the surrounding social environment. Rather than passively “being socialized,” children actively engage their own interpretive process of learning and making sense of the social world around them. I embrace Winkler’s theory of comprehensive racial learning in the pages to come, using this framework as a starting place from which to develop further theoretical work on how this process operates for children who are white and affluent—children such as Edward and the 35 other kids in this book.

Growing Up in a Racialized Social System

US society is and always has been structured by race.8 Race shapes the lives of everyone in the United States, whether people believe this to be true or not. Race organizes society, race influences how people think about themselves and others, and race is tied to power and inequality. More than just a country with a few bigoted individuals, the United States is what Bonilla-Silva refers to as a “racialized social system.”9 “This term refers to societies in which economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races.”10 In a racialized social system, people are classified into different groups based on a set of socially defined physical characteristics, such as skin color. While it is commonplace to think of race as biological, race is “an invented political grouping” that “has been disguised as a biological one.”11 As the legal scholar Dorothy Roberts explains,

We know race is a political grouping because it has political roots in slavery and colonialism, it has served a political function over the four hundred years since its inception, and its boundary lines—how many races there are and who belongs to each one—have shifted over time and across nations to suit those political purposes. Who counts as white, black, and Indian has been the matter of countless rule changes and judicial decisions. These racial reclassifications did not occur in response to scientific advances in human biology, but in response to sociopolitical imperatives. They reveal that what is being defined, organized, and interpreted is a political relationship and not an innate classification.12

In other words, race is a political category created by human beings and state practices and does not have a genetic basis. This process of racialization, or “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice or group,” has occurred throughout the history of the United States.13 The classification process, or the process by which racial categories are socially constructed, happens when people fill out their census forms or when children are born and their race is marked down on birth certificates. Historical examples of racialization include the prerequisite cases of immigrants such as Takao Ozawa, born in Japan in 1875, who petitioned the US government to be classified as “white” so that he could gain citizenship rights.14 Antimiscegenation laws, Jim Crow laws, and immigration laws—all of these laws draw on some collective and/or legal understanding of what race is despite the reality that these definitions are created by people, that they change over time or across different contexts, and that power is often connected to them.15 So too are privileges and punishments, such as the right to own land or being targeted by the police, distributed along the lines of this racial order.16 Though race is socially constructed, it is very real in its consequences.

The process of racialization in the United States is rooted deeply in history. From the genocide of American Indians to the stealing of their land to the enslavement and exploitation of African people, the United States of America was established from its colonial roots as a racialized society, or a society structured by a racial hierarchy.17 This structure was perpetuated by the exploited labor of Chinese and Japanese immigrants and the military acquisition of half of Mexico’s land, among other innumerable acts of racial violence over time. Indeed, the concept of race itself and the desire to establish this way of politically grouping human beings is the very product of racism, rather than racism emerging from the creation of race.18 Although this history of European colonial domination and the emergence of US white supremacy may seem part of the distant past, the legacy of this history—that is, the continued subordination of members of racial groups defined legally and socially as not white—continues to shape the most basic of institutions in US society.

In order to make these structural roots seem natural, and in order to justify the continuation of this racialized distribution of privileges and punishments, particular frameworks, or ideologies, that serve to rationalize one’s own privilege are produced and reproduced, beginning in childhood. Ideologies serve a very particular purpose in a racialized and class-stratified social system such as the United States. As the sociologist Heather Beth Johnson writes, “Ideology is a critical component in the contemporary United States because ideology—in how it helps to mask and justify systems of inequality—contributes to the collective denial and thus maintenance, of structural inequities.”19 For example, ideologies such as that of meritocracy, or the American Dream, justify the superior position of the wealthy by claiming that the rich worked harder than everyone else and therefore deserve their privilege and the social rewards that accompany it. Similarly, as the sociologist Amanda Lewis writes, “In a society riddled with social inequality, ideologies must naturalize a system that ensures subordination for millions.”20 Religion, capitalism, and science each played their own role in the formation of dominant ideological explanations that justified the racial hierarchy, making it seem “natural” that white people were in positions of dominance over all other people. Forms of racism that have been used across time to justify the mistreatment of people of color by whites have certainly mutated as times have changed, but the material consequences of racism still exist alongside reworked racial ideology. Without understanding how people learn dominant ideologies and how these ideologies are reproduced and reconstituted, we cannot entirely understand how racism (racial ideology) both persists and mutates into new forms in the United States. Importantly, these ideological discourses and practices are not simply expressions or outcomes of a hierarchy; rather, they are central to “the constitution of social and political life” in the first place.21 In other words, how white, affluent children make sense of race not only reflects but also reproduces and reinforces the existing racial order.

Understanding how white children produce, reproduce, and sometimes even reinterpret racial ideologies is central to larger understandings of how structures of white supremacy endure in a society such as ours. As the sociologist Tyrone Forma...