Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and the Child's Construction of Human Kinds (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change)

Rating:
Summary: Empirically useful, conceptually silly
Review: The common claim that young children have to be taught to distinguish races is simply not true. It has been studied extensively in controlled experiments. In Race in the Making, the liberal U. of Michigan anthropology professor Lawrence A. Hirschfeld sums up the findings: "As comforting as this view may be, children, I will show in this book, are more than aware of diversity; they are driven by endogenous curiosity to uncover it. Children, I will also show, do not believe race to be a superficial quality of the world. Multicultural curricula aside, few people believe that race is only skin deep. Certainly few 3-year-olds do. They believe that race is an intrinsic, immutable, and essential aspect of a person's identity. Moreover, they seem to come to this conclusion on their own. They do not need to be taught that race is a deep property, they know it themselves already."

For example, if you show preschoolers drawings of people and ask them to match the children with their parents, they will consistently tell you that the skinny white child is the child of the fat white parent, while the fat black child belongs to the skinny black parent (or vice-versa).

It seems obvious to me why little kids pay close attention to race. It's crucial for them to understand who is related to whom, and racial traits provide a more reliable guide than even body shape. (In technical terms, racial traits tend to be have higher narrow heritability coefficient than other traits like body shape.) The reason racial traits tend to be highly heritable and thus highly useful in multiracial situations for identifying family members is because race is family: a racial group is merely an extremely extended family that inbreeds to some degree.

Unfortunately, Hirschfeld gets himself tangled up in his own underwear trying to explain his findings. Being a good modern liberal, he believes that Race Does Not Exist. He never really gets himself untangled on this subject.He seems completely unaware of the fact that racial groups are just big extended families. In contrast, Occam's razor suggests that the reason we pay attention to racial resemblances is the same reason we pay attention to family resemblances.

Steve Sailer