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Key points
- Racism is learned. But not seeing, considering, or caring about racism is also learned.
- Colorblindness, the collective fear of naming “racism” for what it is, only perpetuates racism.
- Critical Race Theory (CRT) is the opposite of colorblindness. It recognizes, names, and teaches the history of race and racism in America.
- CRT opens dialogue about race and invites children to notice, critique, and resist the normalcy of racism in their own lives and relationships.
In our research, we talk to children about their school experiences, how they describe themselves and their friends, and the social groups they identify with. One young boy responded to our questions about racial labels by saying: “You know, you’re being really racist right now... You can’t just ask people about their colors.” As a third-grader, he already knows the primary rule of race: Don’t talk about it.
But that’s exactly what we do in the Development of Identities in Cultural Environments (D.I.C.E.) lab at Northwestern University. We talk about race. We listen to the ways that children understand race and how they make sense of racism in their own schools, relationships, and identities. And we find that when given the opportunity, children have a lot to say about race.
When we talk to adults about our research on how elementary school-age children understand their racial identities, however, it is often met with confusion, disagreement, and sometimes even outrage.
Children are “too young” and “too innocent” to understand or even care about race, people argue, or they claim that kids simply don’t notice. Too often, the conversation of race in childhood begins—and ends—with the idea that children do not see, consider, or care about race.
After all, racism is learned.
Indeed, it is. But not seeing, considering, or caring about racism is also learned. And the lesson learned is most often colorblindness.
Colorblind Racism
Colorblindness is not simply about being blind to skin color or not “asking people about their colors." Colorblindness is a broad-sweeping, widely shared story about how we should (not) talk about race or racism. Colorblindness is a story that focuses only on who we (say) we want to be as a nation without first reckoning with who we were in the past and who we currently are. It is in fact blind to history, blind to injustice, blind to people’s pain and suffering.
Colorblindness says that not talking about race will make racism go away. In fact, the opposite is true. By ignoring race, colorblindness also ignores racism, in all its forms.
Let’s try an analogy: Remember the classic line in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series when Harry Potter has learned to say “He Who Must Not Be Named” instead of saying the name Voldemort? Albus Dumbledore interrupts this norm of silence, saying: “Call him Voldemort, Harry. Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”
The same is true of racism. The collective fear of naming “racism” for what it is only perpetuates racism. It stays with us because we refuse to name it.
If we are “all the same” and “race doesn’t matter,” then racism is a non-issue, which of course makes it harder (if not impossible) to address. If we ignore white teens calling Black teens the “N-word” at school, we condone racism and allow Black teens to face the impacts of discrimination (while simultaneously telling them that said racism does not exist). If we cannot see the clear racial disparities in legal sentencing or cannot say that police brutality exists and is harming Black and Brown communities, then racial violence and injustice continue.
If we choose not to talk about racism or teach children the throughlines from our history to its present, they may learn, as one young Black boy in our study explained to us, that race used to matter before, but “Martin Luther King fixed it.” The belief that racism was "fixed" is a key reason why I argue that we need to bring Critical Race Theory into education.
Critical Race Theory and Naming Racism
The colorblind rationale undergirds much of the rage we are seeing as the current debate about Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools unfolds. Critical Race Theory is a framework developed by legal scholars including Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado who argued that racism is persistent and many “race-neutral” laws and practices work to uphold racist structures.
A key tenet of the CRT framework is that racism is “normal,” meaning that it is so widespread and deeply embedded in daily life in the U.S. that we often don’t even see it. CRT is the opposite of colorblindness. CRT recognizes that America was built on racism—setting up a society in which those who were identified as “not white” did not have equal rights, opportunities, or legal standing. CRT teaches the truth of this racial history and how it influences us today.
The current K-12 curriculum across the U.S. skews heavily towards colorblindness and the whitewashing of history by centering only the perspectives, experiences, and beliefs of white people. For instance, Asian Americans are often simply left out, while violence and racism against Black Americans are often downplayed or omitted.
The recent anti-Critical Race Theory bills passing state legislatures in places including Tennessee, Oklahoma, Iowa, Idaho, and Texas make righting these wrongs illegal.
The wording in many of these bills is intentionally broad and vague, for instance, banning any teaching that makes students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” As the authors of this New York Times op-ed point out, “Any accurate teaching of any country’s history could make some of its citizens feel uncomfortable (or even guilty) about the past.”
It is not actually CRT that legislators are banning and parents are vocally opposing, but the naming of racism. Parents, conservative activists, and policymakers are using the label of “CRT” to legally silence teachers from offering their students a meaningful understanding of race and racism in this country.
This move takes a giant step in the wrong direction.
School is the primary social institution where children will experience racism and at the same time where they are taught to be colorblind. When asked to explain his claim that “[race] doesn’t matter,” one 6th-grade white boy in our research replied:
“Because we’re not learning about it in school; we don’t pay attention to it. We just go along usually with our day and just not notice it because it’s just one of those things like I wear shoes; I sleep on a bed; I write with a pencil; I drive a car or I’m white; it’s just something that doesn’t matter.”
Schools are teaching the normalcy of not noticing when they could be providing critical lessons in racial literacy.
And yet, what is particularly promising from our research is that despite the norm of racial silence, some children do notice, name, and question the racism they see around them. They call it for what it is. As one Black 5th-grader explained, if she wasn’t Black, people would treat her better:
“A lot of people would treat me with respect sometimes, because like there are some people, not trying to be racist, but some people that are white would treat you differently because you’re Black.”
If children are taught only that “race doesn’t matter,” where should they put instances of racial injustice or experiences of racism? How are they to work toward doing what is right when they are not allowed to notice what is wrong? In fact, many children find themselves tangled in the rhetoric of colorblindness, working to make sense of where racism fits into the story that “race doesn’t matter."
CRT does not teach children to be racist, nor does it teach them to hate themselves, each other, or their country. CRT meets children where they are, giving them the language and historical perspective to make sense of the racism they see today.
Name It, Change It
Our research—and decades of other research—shows that children are already thinking about and noticing race and racism. Talking to them about race is not introducing them to a novel reality. On the contrary, opening dialogue about race, listening to what children know and how they experience racism, gives them the space they need to process, discuss, challenge, critique, and potentially resist the norms of racism.
Quite simply: If we care about racial justice and hope to rid our nation, our schools, our children, and ourselves of racism, we have to start naming it. We must name it so we change it.
The article manuscript is available on the publisher's page.
This blog post is co-authored by Dr. Ursula Mofitt and Chrissy Foo.
Dr. Ursula Moffitt is an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow working with Professor Rogers in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on contextualized racial, gender, and national identity development through a social justice lens.
Chrissy Foo is a graduate of Northwestern University and the DICE lab. Chrissy is now a healthcare consultant at AVIA, working with health systems across the country to increase patient access and equity through digital innovation.
