Early developmental insights into the social construction of race

The way that societies assign people to racial categories has far-reaching social, economic, and political consequences. One framework for establishing racial boundaries is based on ancestry, which historically has been leveraged to create rigid racial categories, particularly with respect to being categorized as White. A second framework is based on skin tone, which can vary within families and across the lifespan, and is thus more likely to blur racial boundaries. The persistence of these distinct cultural beliefs about race requires that they be transmitted to each new generation, but there have been few cross-cultural studies on their development during childhood. Participants (5- to 12-year-old children, N = 123) were from the United States, in which the ancestry model has been more prevalent, or from Brazil, in which the skin tone model has been more prevalent. In both countries, 5- to 7-year-olds endorsed the belief that skin tone determines race, for example, by assigning biological siblings with differing skin tones to different racial categories. However, racial concepts diverged among the 10- to 12-year-olds, with children from the United States shifting toward a classification based on ancestry and children in Brazil endorsing a classification based on skin tone even more strongly with age. These differing conceptions were especially evident with reference to White racial categorization: Older children from Brazil persisted in classifying lighter skinned people as White when they had African ancestry, unlike older children from the United States. These findings provide important insights into the developmental and cultural influences on racial classification systems. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).