Most think the youngest age it's appropriate to talk about race is age 5 or so, as they are ready to start kindergarten. This is too late.
A short thread.

We have years and years of research on children and their recognition of race. We know that 3-month-old babies already show preferences for faces that reflect specific racial groups.
By 9 months, children begin to categorize faces by perceived race-- this person is White, this person is Black. And by 3 years old, they are already associating Black faces with negative traits.
By age 4, a year before most people think it's appropriate to talk to kids about race, children already link White people with higher status and wealth.
By the time kids enter elementary school, researchers find that race-based discrimination is everywhere. Just as parents are beginning to have conversations about race, their children are already stereotyping others because of their color.
We all believe that children don't see race, but that's incorrect. They do. Race is the water in which we all swim, including our kids. It's not that "you've got to be taught", as Oscar Hammerstein wrote. The world teaches our kids to be racist; they've got to be UNtaught.
Don't wait to talk about race until your children have already absorbed racism through their pores and the air they breathe. Sing anti-racism to them in their lullabies. Recite love for all people over cereal. Chant equality while they're playing.
Don't fall back on bad responses like - "that's not polite to talk about." It's the height of impoliteness to NOT talk about it and allow your kid to grow up believing that race is real and racism is justified.
Don't say "skin color doesn't matter" because before your child is a year old, they already know that's a lie. Skin color SHOULDN'T matter and it's unjust that it does. That's what you should tell them.
Black parents don't wait to talk with their kids about race because a Black child's life depends on knowing the dangers of our racist society. Please don't wait to talk to your child so you and they can be part of an anti-racist future.
Done.

More from Life

THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)

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