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Strollerderby
How do you fill out questions about race?
Schools have long sought diverse student bodies. They’re essential to promote affirmative action policies, and provide students with the opportunity to learn cultural lessons from each other.
Making up a diverse student body has gotten more complicated as students have become more diverse. As of this year, the Department of Education has all schools giving students the chance to identify as more than one race. As a result, the number of mixed-race students in colleges demographic data has shot up. At Rice University, students identifying as mixed-race have gone from the single digits to over 500.
The New York Times takes a hard look at what this means for college students. Some are wondering what parts of their racial and ethnic heritage to highlight on their applications.
It’s not only a question at the college level, though. I had a similar set of questions when looking at kindergarten entrance forms.
Right now, the majority of kids in the United States tick off “white” on the little Census ticky boxes that ask about race and ethnicity. That’s expected to change this decade due, sooner than originally projected.
Falling birth rates among white mamas are part of the reason. The number of white children fell about 10 percent in the past decade, while the number of minority children has grown about 38 percent. Immigration also plays a role. The biggest increase was in the number of Hispanic children.
What will these changing demographics mean for your kids? They may affect education, for one thing.
When I first started making the rounds of Music Together classes and library playgroups, I’d hear these questions all the time: “Is that your baby?” “How often do you care for her?” “Do you do any evening babysitting?”
People asked because I was young. Ten years younger than any other mom in the room, but about the same age as the nannies who attended these events in the posh suburb we lived in.
For me, this was always a painful moment, but one easily solved. We moved into an urban neighborhood with younger parents, and I got older. Even though I’m still ten years younger than most of the moms on the playground, I don’t look like a kid with a borrowed baby anymore.
For moms whose skin doesn’t match their babies’, the questions never stop. Laden with bias about race and privilege, they rankle deeper and longer. Finding an answer that educates rather than strikes back is a delicate balancing act. Today’s Motherlode explores two mom’s search for the right words.
Add this to the evidence proving that race isn’t real.
A British couple of Nigerian descent, already the proud parents of two beautiful black children, have given birth to a white baby. Doctors concluded that the child does not have albinism and geneticists cannot really otherwise explain the baby’s skin color. Little Nmachi has a thick head of blonde hair and blue eyes. (View photos and video at The Sun‘s website.)
“Father Ben Ihegboro, 44, a customer services adviser, admitted that when he saw the baby he exclaimed ‘What the flip?’ before joking: ‘Is she mine?’,” reports The Daily Mail. Nmachi’s 35-year-old mother, Angela, said, “She is beautiful, a miracle baby.” Neither parent knows of any white ancestry on either side of the family.
This week on CNN, Anderson Cooper and Soledad O’Brien are co-presenting a series called Black or White: Kids on Race. According to their admittedly unscientific pilot study at the heart of the piece, “white children have an overwhelming white bias, and black children also have a bias toward white.” University of Chicago professor Margaret Beale Spencer, who designed the study, says that white bias is not as strong among black children as it is among white children.
The study is basically a recreation of the famous “Doll Test” of the 1940′s. The results of that test were used to argue for desegregation of schools in Brown v. Board of Education. In the modern version, students ages 4-10 at four schools in New York City and four schools in Georgia were asked to point to “one of five cartoon pictures that varied in skin color from light to dark” in response to commands such as, “Show me the dumb child.” Despite the fact that all the cartoon faces were smiling and dressed in the same blue outfit, children more frequently identified the darker-skinned cartoons as having negative characteristics. (The cartoon characters were all girls, by the way. I wonder if the study results might have changed if the characters were all boys or children of both sexes and/or characters showing different emotions/attitudes.) Continue reading »
“Black children are an endangered species,” read the billboards along Georgia’s highways this month. The signs were paid for by Georgia’s largest anti-abortion organization, Georgia Right to Life. The group’s primarily white staff bought the ads as part of a campaign to woo more black women to their cause.
Georgia’s Right to Life is picking up on a larger effort by anti-choice groups around the country to frame abortion as a racist practice and organizations like Planned Parenthood as part of a vast conspiracy to prevent the births of black children.
It sounds like something you’d expect to read in a newspaper from the 50′s: Latino children are not as advanced, academically, as their White counterparts. Of course, the research done at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and the University of Pittsburgh does not simply say that White kids are inherently smarter than Latino kids; ideas like that were disproved long ago. Instead, the findings highlight the importance of parents in helping children succeed in school.
Continue reading »
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