Hiram E. Fitzgerald - Handbook of Children and Prejudice: Integrating Research, Practice, and Policy

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In the summer of 2016, we met for lunch and discussed the virulent rise in explicit racism and discrimination in the United States and its extension to issues related to gender identity and sexual orientation. We were particularly concerned that social and behavioral science researchers were not explicitly tackling the negative impacts of racism on the development of children, documentation of which could lead to more effective social policies and practices. We were concerned that America was losing enormous talent and innovation by not investing significantly in the elimination of economic and social inequities that create barriers preventing especially low-income minorities from gaining access to the benefits of American society. Since we are university professors, and not politicians, we decided to kick off a project appropriate to our skills and talents and design a Handbook of Children and Prejudice that would approach issues of racism and discrimination from a life-span systems perspective. Our intent was to illustrate that the insidious claws of structural and personal racism begin to negatively impact developmental process from birth onward while simultaneously drawing attention to coping skills and resilience of racial minorities that has made it possible for them to survive hundreds of years of oppression, or contemporary implicit and explicit discrimination.

We cover issues related to racism and discrimination within each of the major minority groups in the United States: African-American, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian-American, and Latinx-American. We realize that just as there are multiple cultures subsumed within the category European-American (White), so too do each of the generic categories of minority groups in the United States subsume cultural diversity. We also were fortunate to be able to include chapters on Arab-American and Sikh-American children, perhaps signs that 10 years from now, a volume on children and prejudice will have to expand to multiple volumes to capture the rich and true diversity of the United States and the world at large. We also have five chapters addressing issues confronting LGBTQ youth and adolescents and hope that future volumes can include children of same-sex parents as research expands in that growing aspect of family life. The attached table, perhaps unusual for a preface, provides a guide for readers who may want to approach the chapters from a topical search strategy, rather than a sequential developmental age strategy, which is the organization of the volume.

We assembled an amazing group of scholars, each of which crafted an offering contributing to a collective of knowledge never previously organized so extensively around development and prejudice, all feeling the urgent need for the gathering of this work. Their collective efforts produced a handbook that we believe draws attention to the broad impacts of racism and discrimination over the first 20 years of life, as well as portraying the strengths of minority groups and societal programs designed to provide positive supports for individual and family development. Every chapter was revised at least once, consistent with our intent to have a peer-review orientation to the contents of the volume.

We extend our thanks to Judy Jones and Michelle Tam at Springer for their editorial help throughout the production process, and all the copy- and production-editors who play such critical roles in moving manuscript text to elegant prose and far fewer split infinitives.