Christia Spears Brown - Unraveling Bias: How Prejudice Has Shaped Children for Generations and Why Its Time to Break the Cycle

Contents

Prejudice starts young. In this enlightening book, Dr. Brown explains very clearly how we develop biases as children and how those biases get reinforced over time by policies and institutions. Best of all, Unraveling Bias offers actionable steps that parents, educators, and policymakers can take to eradicate bias and discrimination from our society.

Lara S. Kaufmann, director of public policy at Girls Inc.

Unraveling Bias is truly remarkable, timely, and incredibly important. This is a book that parents, educators, and policymakers will highlight, dog ear, and refer back to time and time again. I wish it had existed years ago, but Im so grateful to have it now!

Dolly Chugh, author ofThe Person You Mean to Be: How Good People Fight Bias

In Unraveling Bias, Dr. Brown pointedly reveals the subtle and pervasive ways that bias has fundamentally shaped childhood. By combining social history with the most current developmental science, the book traces the history of bias from the perspectives of research, law, and the social influence in the lives of children. It breaks down the forms, experiences, and meanings of bias in the lives of children. This book is crucial for our times not just because it synthesizes the relevant research, but because it provides the pathways for families, schools, and communities to unravel and break the cycle of bias.

Stephen T. Russell, Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents Professor in Child Development at the University of Texas at Austin

Given that bias is the root of so many of the worlds injustices and ills, it is perhaps the most important issue to understand and unravel today. Christia Spears Brown has given us an invaluable resource with her deeply researched book about how bias develops, how it affects our children, and how we can successfully fight it. This should be required reading for every American.

Melinda Wenner Moyer, author ofHow to Raise Kids Who Arent Assholes

This book by Christia Spears Brown is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the true nature of bias and the many ways it affects our kids. With a compassionate voice, ample research evidence, quotes from youths and parents, and insights from legal scholars and the courts, Dr. Brown charts pathways for breaking down entrenched patterns of discrimination and opening up new conversations about the pervasiveness and effects of bias in our society.

Linda R. Tropp, PhD, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

A passionate and occasionally harrowing account of the damaging racial, gender, and sexual biases children continue to encounter in schools, with thoughtful suggestions about how parents, teachers, and whole communities can confront them.

Stephanie Coontz, author ofA Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s

Informative and inspiring, Dr. Brown brilliantly weaves history, data, and stories from courts to classrooms in this timely and much-needed resource. Unraveling Bias empowers readers with actionable, science-backed tips for improving the lives of children for generations to come. A must-read for every parent, educator, and policymaker.

Kyl Myers, author ofRaising Them: Our Adventure in Gender Creative Parenting

In Christia Spears Browns fantastic and much-needed book, well find both good news and bad news. The bad news is that biason the basis of race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and much moreis real, pervasive, deeply consequential, and baked into both our personal practices and institutional norms. If we take that message to heart, then we can act on the good news: as individuals and as members of communities, we can transform our hearts, minds, and institutions, where biases thrive, while raising the children in our lives to do the same. Dr. Browns arguments are as historically and empirically informed as her language is clear. If we are ever to achieve the full promise of our diversely constituted democracy, its work like Unraveling Bias that will point the way.

Andrew Grant-Thomas, cofounder of EmbraceRace

Also by Christia Spears Brown, PhD

Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue (2014)

Discrimination in Childhood and Adolescence (2017)

Unraveling Bias copyright 2021 by Christia Spears Brown

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

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First E-Book Edition: November 2021

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021026220

ISBN 9781953295552 (print)

ISBN 9781953295897 (electronic)

Editing by Alyn Wallace and Vy Tran

Copyediting by Ginny Glass

Proofreading by Lisa Story and Kim Broderick

Indexing by WordCo Indexing Services, Inc.

Text design and composition by Katie Hollister

Cover design by Brigid Pearson

Cover image Shutterstock / Nowik Sylwia

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Ruth (Horowitz) Hartley died the year I started graduate school. I was a full professor before I learned her name. What I learnedtwenty years after I began conducting research about race and gender stereotypes and discrimination in childrenis that Ruths work played a critical role in the science I practice. Her contemporary, Mamie Phipps Clark, expanded on Ruths research and helped change race relations in American schools. But the biases of their time prevented both women from getting the credit they deserved. This book is dedicated to them.

This book is also dedicated to every kid who has been marginalized, disenfranchised, and silenced because of their race, class, immigration status, gender, or sexuality. May you live in a world that values your voice, your experiences, and your life.

Contents

B ias is a slippery beast. Invisible to the eye, hard to name, and harder yet to pin down and fight. It operates in the subtlest ways, through words or glances, in social norms and traditions, and, today, as powerful algorithms and influential data that, increasingly, shape the world around us at unprecedented scales. From schoolyard bullying to workplace inequities to the efflorescence of public violence, bias, stereotypes, and prejudices powerfully govern not only our social interactions, economic lives, and political institutions but our very identities and relationships.

As human beings, we are all subject to biases, which are part of our cognition. We take the lessons we learn as young people, frequently infused with harmful and damaging stereotypes, into the world with us, incorporating them into our sense of self, our sense of our place in the world, our understanding of social roles and relationships, and, ultimately, into how we recognize and distribute power and resources in our society.