Does racial diversity affect White children’s racial bias and reasoning? Depends on where they live and how their social world is structured

By 4-years of age, White children from across the United States begin to exhibit an awareness of racial inequalities, along with ingroup preferences for other White children. The present study explored how the size and racial diversity of White children’s social network (e.g., friends, family, classmates) and neighborhood (zip code) are related to variation in their explanations for racial disparities and anti-Black bias among a sample of 395 White children (aged 4-11 years old; Mage = 6.6 years) from 263 unique zip codes across the United States. White children in neighborhoods with low diversity were more likely to endorse an extrinsic explanation for racial inequality as their network diversity increased, whereas network diversity did not relate to children’s choices for those that lived in neighborhoods with high diversity. These findings held even after controlling for parents’ beliefs about diversity, which were themselves positively correlated with children’s network and neighborhood diversity. An exploratory analysis revealed that for White children in small networks only, as the number of children of color in their network increased, they were more likely to choose to play with a Black child. Results demonstrate how the diversity of children’s social networks and neighborhoods relate to children’s developing racial beliefs in contextually-dependent ways.