Racial awareness and social identity in young children

There is a growing body of evidence which demonstrates that racial awareness and even racial repugnance can be well developed in children of four or five years of age. The semi-projective techniques employed by some investigators have encouraged disputes in interpretation, but the substantive findings of out-group preference by the minority accompanied by pronounced ethnocentricity on the part of the majority is well supported by many sociometric studies. Since a child's sense of his social identity can only be achieved within the context of the system of preferences and biases which exist in a society, it will be argued that the development of prejudice in children is a product of the normal, necessary and rational process of progressively ordering the environment into manageable categories and their need to comprehend their place within it.