The Role of Status in the Emergence of Pro-White Bias in Rural Uganda

Research investigating the early emergence of racial prejudice has been largely limited to contexts in which racial prejudice is most likely to emerge—multiracial societies that have pronounced racial inequality (e.g., United States, South Africa). The present study assessed whether pro-White racial bias is also early emerging in a homogenous Black community that has little exposure to modern media and where children presumably experience less overt discrimination than in past samples (e.g., South Africa). Black African children (N = 214) between 5- and 12-years-old living in rural Uganda exhibited substantial pro-White racial bias, preferring White over Black children 78% of the time. Ugandan children also judged White children as higher status than Black children, and these status judgments predicted their degree of pro-White bias. Our results indicate that pro-White racial biases can emerge even in a homogenous Black community and that, in some contexts, minimal status cues are sufficient for the early development of racial prejudice.

Cancer Predisposition Genetic Analysis in Children with Brain Tumors Treated at a Single Institution in Japan

Brain tumors affect one-third of all children with cancer. Approximately 10% of children with cancer carry variants in cancer predisposition genes. However, germline analyses in large cohorts of Asian children have not been reported. Thirty-eight Japanese patients with pediatric brain tumors were included in this study (19 boys, 19 girls). DNA was extracted from the patients’ peripheral blood, and cancer-associated genes were analyzed using targeted resequencing. Rare variants with allele frequencies <0.1% in the general population and variants suspected to be pathogenic were extracted and analyzed. Pathogenic variants were found in 7 patients (18%): 2 nonsense variants of CHEK2 and FANCI; 2 frameshift deletions in SMARCB1 and PTCH1; and 3 missense variants of TSC1, WRN, and MLH1. The median age at diagnosis was 9.1 years, and three of the 7 patients had a family history of cancer. One patient diagnosed with basal cell nevus syndrome, also called Gorlin syndrome, developed a second neoplasm, and another with an SMARCB1 variant and an atypical teratoid/rhabdoid tumor developed a thyroid adenomatous nodule. This is the first cancer-related germline analysis with detailed clinical information reported in Japanese children with brain tumors. The prevalence was almost equivalent to that in white children.

Developmental behavioral genetics research on school achievement is missing vulnerable children, to our detriment

Gene–environment processes tell us how genes and environments work together to influence children in schools. One type of gene–environment process that has been extensively studied using behavioral genetics methods is a gene-by-environment interaction. A gene-by-environment interaction shows us when the effect of your context differs depending on your genes, or vice versa, when the effect of your genes differs depending on your context. Developmental behavioral geneticists interested in children’s school achievement have examined many different contexts within the gene-by-environment interaction model, including contexts measured from within children’s home and school environments. However, this work has been overwhelmingly focused on White children, leaving us with non-inclusive scientific evidence. This can lead to detrimental outcomes when we overgeneralize this non-inclusive scientific evidence to racialized groups. We conclude with a call to include racialized children in more research samples.

Child Avoidance of Anxiety-Provoking Situations in the Classroom and Teacher Accommodation

This study examined: (1) school-based avoidance among students with problematic anxiety, (2) teachers’ levels of accommodation of avoidant behaviour, and (3) the relation between teacher accommodation and student avoidance and anxiety. Participants included 31 elementary school students with problematic anxiety (mean age = 7.7 years; range 5–11; 58% female; 71% White) and their teachers (mean age = 41.1 years; 100% female; 100% White). Children completed interviews about their anxiety, and teachers reported on students’ avoided situations and completed a questionnaire about their own use of accommodation. Results indicated that the most commonly avoided situations involved individual and group academic performance (e.g., reading aloud in front of class). All teachers engaged in some form of accommodating behaviour more than one day a week (e.g., assisted a student in avoiding things that might make him/her more anxious), and teachers who reported engaging in more accommodating behaviours had students with higher avoidance and anxiety. Findings suggest that additional training and research on teachers’ behaviours that maintain and/or reduce anxiety via reducing accommodating behaviours appears warranted.

Maternal Stress, Familial Ties, and Children’s Well-Being Across 23 Years

According to the family stress model, parental stress impacts child well-being through several mechanisms, which may be amplified in ethnic/racial minority families given increased experiences of stress. We extend this model to examine associations between maternal stress and child well-being at three points spanning 23 years, beginning when children were aged 8-12 years and mothers were aged 24-59 (n=193 dyads). Preliminary results indicate that maternal stressors are associated with increased depressive symptoms in childhood (B=3.56, p&lt;0.001), and this association was stronger among Black children compared to White (B=4.12, p&lt;0.001). Effects of maternal stress on children’s depressive symptoms strengthened among White children with proportionally larger kin networks (B=0.05, p&lt;0.001). However, this association weakens as children enter adulthood. Future work will focus on identifying social resources that account for changes in the intergenerational effects of stress.

Social Science in the Courtroom

Chapter 18 describes social science research of the 1940s and 1950s that showed how segregation harmed both minority and majority populations and thereby played a role in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Between 1896, when the Supreme Court endorsed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson to 1954, when the Supreme Court rejected segregation, social science had built a consensus about the many harms and costs that racial segregation imposed on Black and on White children. Like school desegregation, marriage equality’s victories in the courts were built on a social science consensus, specifically the social science consensus that children raised by same-sex couples have good outcomes.

Prologue

The prologue recounts in detail the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on July 19, 1935. An illiterate farm worker with a wife and three-year-old son, Stacy was accused of assaulting a White woman with a penknife in front of her young children. Captured after a three-day manhunt, Stacy was lynched by a racist deputy sheriff and his body riddled with seventeen bullets fired by mob members. No one was charged with his murder, but the lynching prompted an effort by Black leaders and the NAACP to persuade President Franklin Roosevelt to support an antilynching bill in Congress, using as a visual reminder of lynching’s horrors a photo of Stacy’s lifeless body hanging from a pine branch while several White children gaze at it. FDR refused, citing his reliance on racist southern senators for passage of his New Deal programs to combat the Great Depression. The prologue also explores the ancestral roots of Stacy and the family of the woman he was accused of assaulting. Both had ancestors among the early Virginia residents; Stacy’s were Black slaves, and his alleged victim’s were White farmers. The different cultures in which they were raised—one oppressed by the other—made Stacy’s lynching an example of White fear of Black men “violating” their wives and daughters.

“I Thanked God Right Then and There”

This chapter tells the stories of the Black parents and children who challenged school segregation in the five cases decided by the Supreme Court in 1954 under the caption Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The first case, chosen by Thurgood Marshall to show the unequal facilities for Black and White students, came from the small town of Summerton, South Carolina, in which Black children walked to schools in former sharecroppers’ cabins while White children rode buses to schools with four times the funding of Black schools. The next case, in rural Prince Edward County, Virginia, began with a strike by Black high school students to protest conditions at their overcrowded schools, where classes were held in unheated tar-paper shacks. The third case challenged segregation in the nation’s capital, led by a Black parent whose daughter was turned away from the all-White junior high nearest her home and sent to an overcrowded all-Black school. The fourth case, from New Castle County, Delaware, began when two Black mothers each protested the inferior schools their children were forced to attend. The final, and most famous, case began in Topeka, Kansas, whose four elementary schools were the only ones segregated in the state, when a father tried to enroll his nine-year-old daughter in the all-White school nearest her home rather than the Black school, a long walk and bus ride away. A federal appeals court cited the Plessy case as binding precedent but almost invited the Supreme Court to overrule it.

“The Basic Minimal Skills”

This chapter looks at the impact of segregated housing and schools on the performance of Black children on tests of academic skills, finding them lagging far behind White children. It shows that majority-Black school districts receive significantly less funding for education than majority-White districts. It then discusses in detail the 1973 Supreme Court case of San Antonio School District v. Rodriguez, brought by Demetrio Rodriguez and other Hispanic parents of children in the Edgewood district of San Antonio, Texas, whose schools received less funding than majority-White districts because of state laws that based school funding largely on property taxes. Statistics showed that poor and largely Hispanic and Black districts with low property values could not match the funding of affluent White districts. The Supreme Court ruled 5–4 against this challenge, with Justice Lewis Powell writing for the majority in stating that Texas (and other states) need provide minority students only with “the basic minimal skills” to participate in civic affairs, with a passionate dissent by Justice Thurgood Marshall. The chapter then returns to Detroit, where Black students came in last in the nation in test scores; more than two-thirds could not even grasp fundamental skills in reading and arithmetic. This barrier to advanced education and good jobs stems from the systemic racism that places Black children far behind Whites in school readiness, raising the question: How can Blacks catch up with Whites when they start so far behind?