SIO403: At What Age Can You Talk To Kids about Race? Parents Wildly Overestimate

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:17 Thomas: Hello and Welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is Episode 403, I'm Thomas Smith, and gobble gobble, accidental sort of Thanksgiving related episode, even though it's, you know, a little bit after Thanksgiving. But Dr. Elizabeth Deitch joins us again. You may remember her from such episodes as Does Which College You Go To Really Matter? And that was a two -parter. So that was lot of fun. Back in August. Wow, it's been that long. But anyway, Beth Beth has a PhD in organizational psychology.

And this time she's looked into the science around how conversations about race happen with kids. There are two really good studies that Beth is going to take us through that talk about the timing of conversations. How early do they happen? How early do parents think they can happen? Stuff the second study involves a lot of questions around whether or not people were going to talk about race during Thanksgiving, which ended up being a coincidental but funny little tie -in.

I'll be curious to hear, after listening, of course, if you talk to your kids or your family or anybody about race this Thanksgiving, did that come up in any way? According to these studies, it comes up actually more than you might think on average. But there's, of course, a lot of nuance around that to go through. So we'll get to that interview with Dr. Elizabeth Deitch very soon.

First, if you'd like to avoid the annoying auto ad that always comes right before we get to our guest, consider going to patreon.com/seriouspod and pledging. That's the way this show continues. It's the only way my wife and I are currently employed, and it makes such a difference. And of course, you get the ad -free episodes and the bonus stuff, the monthly hangouts, the Seriously Awful Movies. That one, again, is scheduled, going to be really fun this month, and so much more. So patreon.com/seriouspod if you'd like to avoid this ad. Otherwise, here's this ad. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing today?

0:02:12 Beth: I'm doing good. How are you, Thomas?

0:02:14 Thomas: Doing well. I'm excited to have you back. I remember last time you got your hands on so many studies. I think it was, you tried to squeeze them all in. I've I'm excited for what you have for us this time. You know, there are places in the country where they decided the best way to talk about race is like the Fight Club version of that, where you're not allowed to talk about race ever, to anyone, and kids or anything, and you get arrested. I'm not exaggerating that much. That's the problem with exaggerational humor these days. I try to make a joke and it's like, oh, I didn't really do it enough. It's like kind of is that. But I know you looked into more of the actual science of kind question. And this a shout out to Lydia for, again, I've mentioned it, having the wherewithal to go back through the expert submissions because there's some gems in there, including this one. I'm excited to have you today.

0:02:21 Beth: Yeah, this time it's more limited.

0:02:34 Beth: Yeah, yes. No, no, you're not. No.

0:03:04 Beth: I mean, so, I live in New Orleans, which is a lovely blue city, but it's in a horrible state. We just elected a governor, Jeff Landry, who was our attorney general, who is a book -burning, homophobic asshole. He's a DeSantis clone. I'm afraid that some of the stuff, right, right.

0:03:19 Thomas: Yikes. Because that's working so well. Yeah. First step, DeSantis clone. Next step, a terrible candidate for president.

0:03:27 Beth: Yeah, no, we went all Republican. Some friends and I are like, where are we moving when, you know? So we have had several bills in our legislature that have not managed to make it through, But I fear what comes next with the new governor, because we did have a moderate Democrat governor who would sometimes veto things like horrible anti -trans bills and stuff. But they keep putting in things to try and prohibit the teaching of CRT, as if they're actually teaching critical race theory to kindergartners, and also even prevent people from collecting DEI information, diversity, equity and inclusion, and perhaps outlaw DEI departments in our state, which is really messed up, because then they're like, no, that's a federal requirement.

We kind of have to do it for the feds, so the difficulty in working those things out is part of why these things have not yet sailed through. They've all like failed, but who knows with the next session. So and a lot of this stuff is that they keep talking about what is developmentally appropriate, what is age appropriate, and you know you're trying to do these very difficult topics with children who just aren't old enough to understand it. That and was why this first here, there's two by these same people, Sullivan, Lee Wilton, and they're at Skidmore College, and Eben Appelbaum at Boston University. Diversity, um

0:03:31 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

0:04:07 Thomas: What? Yeah.

0:04:25 Thomas: Yeah, it's not like we can rely on that forever as a limiting force. Yeah.

0:04:52 Thomas: Let me

0:04:52 Beth: Right

0:04:53 Thomas: Jump in, sorry, to even separate from the awful political situation. Definitely, just as a parent, it's something, it is a question, as a white parent, you know, it's a question of, I don't know entirely the best way to go about this stuff, you know, and I would love to be more informed on that, because some of these questions, they come at you fast. White privilege means that it's not, it doesn't come at me in the same way that like having a marginalized racial identity might come at my children in a much more negative way at any time. But it is a, it is something where like, I want my, you kids to go about the world in a respectful way and, and that. And, and comforted by the fact that they're growing up with so much more diversity than I ever had, that they're probably already miles ahead of wherever I was as a kid, but it is, yeah, it's something you worry about, you know, I just want to do the best for my kids and for, you know, everybody around them. And I'm really excited to learn more about this.

0:05:33 Beth: Right yeah this first one, uh, do people know what's developmentally appropriate for children, um, talking about race, and then the other piece I have from these authors is some information on actual conversations that people had with children and and adults on, and comparing white people and people of color in how much they had conversations and what they talked about. So that's sort of more real world stuff. The first one, though, is more of an experimental study and in Journal of Experimental Psychology. That's a very good journal. They do do a little background stuff that children actually do know about race from a very early age.

0:05:49 Thomas: Yeah. Oh,

0:06:21 Beth: There's studies that show that even three-month-olds will prefer faces from particular racial groups. By nine months, they use race to categorize faces. By three years old, United States children start to associate low-status racial groups with negative traits. And by four, they can associate particular racial group, like white people with certain status markers like wealth and power.

0:06:38 Thomas: Wow.

0:06:47 Thomas: Is that getting any better? Because I've got to imagine a lot of that is just terrible media representation. I do feel like that is something that's getting better. You know, what's your sense of kind of the timing of this?

0:06:56 Beth: Hopefully. But I mean, I don't know how much like three and four year olds are actually getting their information from the media. They're clearly picking it up from people around them.

0:07:02 Thomas: Oh, okay. Maybe our kids get too much screen time, but yeah, they, I don't know, but from my observation of our kids, they get a tremendous amount from that. It's not just media, it's books, it's whatever, you know, it's like subtle things.

I don't have as many observations on like the racial component of that, but I know for sure for gender, our kids at a very young age associate, and it's funny because a lot of the books nowadays, and especially a lot of the book that we get, tend to try to cut head against the grain a little bit with typical gender expectations. We've had our kids, hilariously enough, actually take the opposite stereotypical view.

So we've had, I can't remember which, it was Phoebe or Arlo, but one of them was, oh, I think it was, yeah, yeah. I think it was Arlo one night was like, I want to be a doctor. And then Phoebe's like, you can't be a doctor. Only women, only girls can be doctors because every, you know, show and book is that that we have. And Then we're like, well, no, that's not true. Anybody can be a Doctor. And And then it was cool because they were both excited. They're like, Arlo, you could be a doctor, too.

0:07:07 Beth: Right, That's That's great.

0:08:02 Beth: Yeah. Yeah,

0:08:03 Thomas: So they do get a lot more from books and media than you might think at a young age. Unless maybe we're the outliers who just let our kids watch too much TV.

0:08:03 Beth: Yeah.

0:08:12 Beth: No, but that's good if they're at least getting something to counteract because it's really hard to, yeah, the people who think they're going to raise their kids in like totally gender neutral fashion. And it's like, no you're not because they live in the world, you know? And when it comes to race too, like if you see reports of say somebody who's done a crime or whatever, What color are they? And certainly, certainly there's some research that shows that there's more emphasis put on crimes done by people of color in media than there is crimes done by white people, and just things like that, that they begin to associate.

0:08:15 Thomas: Yeah, no way. Yeah. Yeah.

0:08:42 Thomas: Right. And you know you're going to get a mugshot when it's a black person. And when it'S a white person, you're gonna get some picture from before, you know, that's like they were in high school or some shit. Yeah.

0:08:46 Beth: Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, Or I remember there was a thing, a couple of pictures after Hurricane Katrina that both showed people wading through water with stuff they had gotten from a nearby grocery. Yeah. Yeah. And for the black people, they were looting. The white people were finding supplies, you know, And yeah, so these kinds of things, kids pick them up. Would love to see, I need to look this up. They did these doll studies where this was some years ago and I'm sure they're still doing them. I wonder what the more modern thing is because the sad thing was even children of color tended to pick the white doll as the best doll, you'd have to look that up now about see if that's actually still the case.

Um, the last time I heard about that was some years ago, um, you know the point is that children actually do notice race and know it's a thing at least by the time they even enter school, you know, preschool ages. And a lot of Americans who, white Americans especially, who want to adopt this colorblind approach to avoid talking about race, um, teach children to avoid talking about race, basically, even though doing so can help them develop empathy and get new perspectives and, uh, understand their own identity and, um, have less racial bias. But parents will be like, nah, it's not polite to comment on things

0:08:52 Thomas: Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, God. Yeah. Yeah? Mm hmm. Mm

0:10:01 Beth: Like that or something like that. And that teaches kids that that's something to to avoid. These researchers who've done a lot of stuff on children and race, a possible explanation that maybe adults are avoiding talking to children because they think that young children lack the capacities to really reason about race. And, you know, this idea of the conversations that it should be what's developmentally appropriate in schools does hinge on, well, it hinges on the belief belief that people understand what is developmentally appropriate, you

0:10:02 Thomas: Hmm? Hmm? Yeah, what does that mean? I to go one further, which I don't even know understand exactly who would decide that concept. Who is even going into that idea?

0:10:42 Beth: Idea is whether they can actually understand the concepts being presented in a meaningful way and engage with them in a three-year-old is probably not going to be able to have a substantive political debate with you, know, that would not be developmentally appropriate. Some that are more at their level, you could work with. And so, yeah, the idea that like, oh, young children, they are way too young to have any kind of serious conversations about race means that we don't want to have these things in schools. And also parents may avoid talking about them themselves. They look to see here, do people know? And did, it three pre-registered studies. Pre-registration is great.

0:11:20 Thomas: Mm.

0:11:20 Beth: That's when you, before the study, you submit what you're going to do, what hypothesis you're testing, hypotheses, your analyses are going to be. And that that That prevents sort of picking out things that looked good after the fact, you know?

0:11:31 Thomas: Yeah isn't it the file drawer problem or something I've heard it referred to? It's like, Like this would be a bias that, yeah, like like if we don't do that, then the only things that are getting published are maybe significant things or things where, you there's some reason that people wanted to share that, whether it's a, big you confirmation of something or what. And so that bias is kind of the overall field of information towards those things rather than like, well, how many times did you look for something and it just wasn't there and you wouldn't have heard about it? Yeah.

0:11:36 Beth: Yes, it also does even if you get negative results. Yeah.

0:11:53 Beth: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, there were a group of us who did a very involved daily diary study in grad school, and we just found nothing, nothing, Nothing at all. And so we don't have any published papers out of that, you Know, so yeah, yeah. Yeah. And so people don't know then that there are these no findings.

0:12:07 Thomas: Yeah. That's a bummer. Yeah.

0:12:16 Beth: So that is also, yeah, pre-registration because it's out there, at least on sort of the open websites for pre-registered studies. You can see that this was the thing that got done and there wasn't anything found, even if it doesn't get accepted as an article in some sort of mainstream talk-to-your journal. The information's out there. They used adult fluent English speakers in the United States. And for study one, they got them from Turk Prime, which I think is now Cloud Research. It's basically people sign up with Amazon and other places to do surveys for a little money. And so people got $2 and recruited 728 people.

After exclusions, like people didn't complete it and failed attention checks or training trials, they ended up with 567 with a mean age of 36. 54% of them were parents, 52% of them were female, and 21% of them were people of color. Then for the second one, they wanted to get a sample that was more specifically representative of the U.S. And so they used a company called Survey Sampling International to get a sample of eventually 628 people that were nationally representative in terms of race, sex, age, and income. They were somewhat older, average age 49, 58% parents, 53% female, and 40% BIPOC, that's Black, Indigenous, or people of color. And they do kind of put all those together. Mentioned that as limitations in their studies, that they aren't really separating out the people.

But they also make their data available if anyone else wants to look into those things. So for both of those, the first two studies, it was the same procedure where they indicated the earliest age at which they would talk to children about race. First they trained them on the sliding scale about months. You know, do you know that two years is 24 months

0:12:25 Thomas: Oh, gotcha. Yeah.

0:14:01 Thomas: Yeah,

0:14:01 Beth: And all of this? And so all, well, you got to make sure people, if there's any way to screw up a survey response, people will do it. Then they did like training items going, okay, you've got it, right? Please do the slider for 71 months, you know, right.

0:14:04 Thomas: I know. I'm laughing because it's like, I know. And you're the most tired when you got to think of your kid's life in terms of months. So it's, like, 16 months, I don't remember what that is.

0:14:24 Beth: Yeah, yeah. They ask them what time and month, earliest age that they thought it was appropriate to talk to kids about race. Then they also asked about their lay beliefs of children's development. Participants were asked to make estimates on a scale in months to indicate the age at which they thought children first developed behaviors, traits, and abilities. And they did three different domains, one that is race development, one that's non-race related social development, and one that was general development. Did ones that went from early stuff to late stuff. So like for the race questions, it would be at what age do you think humans first prefer faces from particular racial groups? You know, and that's actually three months, you know, to the latest one is at what age do you think humans first start associating particular racial groups with status? And more like almost four years, then they had control, control that was other social things, but not race related. Like what age do you think humans can tell the difference between faces and things that aren't faces?

0:15:04 Thomas: Yeah, geez. Hmm.

0:15:23 Beth: Um, uh, to, you know, at what age, do you think humans begin associating fatness with negative traits? Then the general things. So there's four of each. The general things are like, at what age do you think humans first recognize their mother's voice? You know, they start sitting up, all of that. Can pedal a tricycle, things like that.

0:15:41 Thomas: Gone through this three times, I'm sure I would fuck all those up like I'm, I doubt I'm

0:15:46 Beth: Yeah, yeah. Well, we wanted a range of complexity and things that were race-related, but also things that similarly went from low-complexity things to high-complexity things in other domains.

0:15:58 Thomas: Very curious for the results on this just because I'm curious even for those control items, like I don't know how accurate my memory is of that at all. I Uh, I'm wondering, I can't wait for these results. Yeah.

0:16:05 Beth: Mm -hmm. Right. Well, if it's just poor memory, you would kind of assume that people would overestimate, underestimate, you know, sort of all over the place, even out.

0:16:14 Thomas: Or Maybe They would Get The ones that are more intuitive and not, you know, Like, because I I'm Sure you're using a lot of intuition to just kind of guess on these things, right?

0:16:17 Beth: Right, right, Right. So then they also reported, in addition to that question about when they thought it was appropriate to talk about race with children, they reported their comfort talking about race on a seven point scale and consequences of talking about race. Like, if I talk to children about race, then they may become more racist. You know, that people might fear that you should avoid it because you're going to make bad things happen by talking about it. And also the which they endorsed a colorblind ideology. Know the like, you should not notice people's race, you and children do not notice people's race until we teach them, things like that. And then they about the racial homogeneity of their everyday social environment, of what proportion of your social environment, like school, work, daily life, is people who are within your racial group or not, from zero to 100%. And then finally, symbolic racism scale, where racism is this, sort of, sometimes it's also called modern racism, and it's ideas it includes are things like black people are wanting too much too Fast, they've already Gotten more than they Deserve. There isn't really any discrimination anymore, but

0:17:31 Beth: I'm not racist because I don't use the N-word, and these are just facts and they're not racist. Yeah.

0:17:25 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's Just how much Fox News do you watch? Yeah.

0:17:38 Beth: Yeah, so that's, yeah, symbolic racism. Then, of course, the participants' demographics, age, race, sex, whether they had college, parent status, experience with kids. So we have, as I noted, they just did white people and BIPOC people. They didn't separate out different races. Yeah, the interesting thing was that people overestimated for everything, but

0:18:03 Thomas: By overestimated, you mean age like up.

0:18:06 Beth: Yes, yes, like they, like, calculated a distance scale of, like if the actual thing was nine months, and the person said it was 12 months for that that one, that was like three months in the up direction. And so you had four questions. How many months off were you? If you had underestimated, that would be a minus, overestimated with a plus. So it was always overestimating. It is wild that, uh, they nearly always overestimated the onset of the social and race related stuff far more so than the, like, when can you sit up? When can you ride a tricycle? That kind of thing. So less than a year for general development questions. They overestimated it a little bit, but tended to be, um.

Oh, months, eight months, depending on whether you're looking at study one or two, that on average, they were estimating it was later than it actually was. But when you get to the social stuff, um, they overestimated by a little over two years, like when you think they first prefer individuals that speak their mother's language, when they start identifying themselves as a gender, all of those, they overestimated by two years.

0:18:06 Thomas: OK. OK, mm hmm. Sure. Yeah.

0:19:13 Beth: And for race things, they overestimated by almost four and a half years. Yes, yes.

0:19:17 Thomas: That's that's a lot.

0:19:20 Beth: And, and so, you know, things that actually happen at nine months, they're saying, oh, no, that's about age five. That So participants thought that the first conversation about race maybe should occur near a child's fifth birthday, would be first, like you wouldn't talk to them about it at all before they're five. Um, then they look to see, of the other things that they asked them to do, what was the strongest predictor of what they thought you could talk to children about race, and the far and away strongest one was, no, it was the distance score for race, how far you overestimated race. It was the fact that people thought that the children couldn't understand it until later ages. They said it was appropriate at a later age. The reason they think it's not appropriate to talk to four-year-olds about race, say, is because they think that they can't process it yet.

0:19:49 Thomas: The Fox News metric.

0:20:10 Thomas: Don't even notice it or don't. Yeah, sure.

0:20:12 Beth: Yeah. And they can process it. And So they did a third study then where they tried to see if this was causal. They, the first two studies, uh, it suggested that adults' estimates of the onset of children's abilities to reason about race are pretty distant from the best estimates available in the literature. And that inaccuracy is the strongest predictor of adults' willingness to talk with children about race. For the third study, they got 326 people. They randomly assigned the participants to one of three scientific literacy interventions.

Interventions, so main one was the critical child race development condition, where they learned about current scientific estimates about the age at which children show certain capacities related to race, like babies spontaneously prefer faces from particular racial groups at around three months of age. Then they had a couple of control conditions. In the adult race condition, they learned about recent findings about adults' race reasoning, and in the general development condition, they learned about general developmental milestones. The intervention was, in fact, effective.

The people who got that child race intervention had very low distance scores, and it caused participants to express a willingness to talk about race at a younger age than they would have otherwise. It down by like a year and a half, um.

0:20:13 Thomas: Mm hmm. Yeah.

0:21:32 Beth: And so it suggests that part of the focus in trying to argue for race education should be educating people about when children can in fact process it, because adults seem to think that children are capable far less than they actually are. Um. They said in this one that kind of led them to thinking about, um, well, what do people talk about with the kids and different things, are going to be appropriate yeah, at different ages. And so, that's when they get into the next study, which, how age and race affect the frequency, timing, and content of conversations about race with children, and want to look at whether there is a difference in whether and what people will talk about with children vis-a-vis race depending on the race of the parents and depending on the ages of the children. Expect that probably people of color are going to be talking about race more and maybe younger. Previous research has suggested that.

Talking about race seems to be a vital tool in combating racism because it allows people to give BIPOC children some strategies for counteracting discrimination and positive ethnic identification and positive interaction. And even for white kids, that if they learn to talk about race constructively, they do seem to display less racial bias, if they learned about positive intergroup interactions and have positive intergroup transactions. They, to see if these things vary by race and by the child's age.

Research with Black families shows that, like, nearly 70% of Black adolescents report having engaged in family conversations about prejudice and racism. Earlier, somewhere that's around 30 to 50% in the white families in previous research, um.

0:21:50 Thomas: Yeah that's what I want to know. Yeah I mean, for black families, it's a matter of safety and survival often, you know, like it's just, that's the definition of white privilege.

0:23:24 Beth: Yes. Especially Black families with sons who are 12 to 15 years old. Um. It's been found in previous, in research, they do a lot of talking about how you have to be obsequious when you encounter cops, um, is sad, but to keep them safe. Um, so that's why actually talking, previous research has shown that talking with minority kids about race has both positive and negative effects. It can increase their pride in their ethnic or racial group and their sense of connectedness, but also negative in the sense that they realize or are reinforced that their race is held in low public regard, and they're expected to have lower academic achievement and all of that, that sort of thing. Contrast, white parents tend to avoid conversations about race of the time, especially with young kids. This is, again, just previous research background.

0:23:30 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:24:14 Thomas: Okay. So we're still in the previous, we're not on this study yet. Okay, gotcha.

0:24:17 Beth: Sort of what they're working from, that a lot of adults, especially white Americans, they fear that acknowledging a person's race signals their own racial bias. They just feel uncomfortable talking about race with children. Avoid talking about it even when the opportunity presents itself. Like, oh, that's not polite or we're not going to do it. And justify that they don't talk about it because, oh it just didn't come up. And white children often learn to avoid talking about race. That's what you're modeling. You're modeling avoidance.

0:24:25 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot there because I want, like, for one, it really depends on the kid, because we could, and I think we did talk to Phoebe about anything and everything from a very early age. I can't really get Arlo to focus on or talk about anything other than Legos. Like, it just, like, like it's Yeah, not even being funny, it's like if I try to tell him something very important. Buddy, look, buddy, look. Hey, buddy. Pay attention. Pay attention. And he just doesn't. He's four. He is like close to five. And so I would. Like I was answering I guess survey questions about my kids it would be interesting and tough to answer. Because I can't talk to Arlo about anything. I mean I try. I still try. Maybe he still absorbs stuff. I don't know. But like kids are very different and And he man, we cannot get him to focus on anything that isn't specifically Legos or puzzles or the movies that he wants to talk about. And so, you know, it's not easy as just being like, hey, buddy, so the Civil Rights Act, you know, like it's tough.

0:25:03 Beth: Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:25:46 Beth: Right, right. And certainly in individual conversations, it's going to have to be tailored like that. But if we're talking about policy and schools, you know, there's definitely going to be more of a thought about what's the average child. Yeah, a lot of the previous work had not actually compared black and white people in the same studies with the same questions. They often used interventions that were things in labs. Here, they wanted to know what do people actually talk about in life. And they, again, took adult fluent English speakers speakers from the U.S. who had at least one child between the ages of 3 and 12. we ended up with a final sample size of 834, which was, yeah, 52% female, 66% white, 33 and some change BIPOC.

The mean and median and modal household income was in the $50,000 to $75,000 range. They tended to see that they were undersampled at both very high and very low income ranges. Of the 834, reported having at least two years of college, so maybe a little educated. The thing that I thought was really clever about this is that they they did this at two times. They had a study where they did some measures and they asked what you maybe intend to talk about over Thanksgiving. They did this over the Thanksgiving holiday in 2019.

0:25:55 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:28 Thomas: Pretty big.

0:27:13 Thomas: Thanksgiving themed episode, Beth. Wow, you're a genius. I love it.

0:27:16 Beth: Right. Yeah. Perfect. Hey, it works. Yeah, I didn't even think about that at the time we're doing it. Duh. It's Thanksgiving week. Yeah? So this was 2019. So, this was was before, uh, though the paper was published in 2022, before that, before the pandemic, um, the idea was that this is a time when people come together and also the holiday itself has um intergroup interactions, the idea of Native Americans and the whole story can be an opportunity.

0:27:36 Thomas: Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am still so uncomfortable with that, with the kids, like, every Thanksgiving I dread, like, what are they gonna have them do, are they going to do some, you know, very out of touch, like, Native American, whatever, or not, I don't know, I actually, it's hard to tell, you know, because I only see the results of the crafting they've done, I don't really know what the conversation is.

0:27:45 Beth: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the thing. You can tell the Thanksgiving story in a way that either highlights or minimizes the role of race, um, power and things like that. And I thought it was so clever that they did this over Thanksgiving. So they did, they did the first contact a little bit before Thanksgiving, uh, earlier in the week and then. Then a week later, they talked to them and were like, OK, what did you talk about? Did you talk to your kids about race? What did you tell them? What did they talk to them about?

First time, what had four survey blocks and they did a scientific literacy education thing that was just like the other study where they could either learn about child race development, adult race development or children's general development. Are all things that they're going to want to see. Do they predict whether people talk to the kids and what they talk about? They had the opportunity to select resources, uh, would give them information for talking with friends and family over the holiday.

And they were articles from popular press and they had four categories, food, history, how to's and and children's books. And within each of those categories, there were four types of focus. There were ones that focused on pilgrims, that focused upon Native Americans, that focused on African American culture around Thanksgiving, and one that's the total control condition focused on turkeys. And so, like, for example, in the food category, you could select an article about pilgrim recipes.

Now, the pilgrims one, you can select an article about Wampanoag recipes, the Native American ones, about soul food recipes, or about cooking a turkey. They could select as many or as few resources as they wished, and they coded them as to whether they selected how many race -relevant selected resources they chose. Then they asked about their intention to talk about race with both children and with other adults, because that was another part. They're like, do we talk more or less often to children than adults?

And do we talked about same or different things? Indicated at the first time how likely they were to talk about each of the following topics with children and then with adults or counterbalance. So half of them got with adults and then with children. The topics were gratitude, giving thanks, helping pilgrims, Native Americans, race, Halloween,

0:28:07 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah

0:30:19 Beth: They got these from things talking about what people usually talk about. Movies and media, gender, environmental issues, personality, and scientific research. They were all judged on an extremely unlikely to extremely likely seven-point scale. Then they got their demographics. Then, a week later, they did a follow-up, and the follow-up was 492 people and so that's the sample that they end up doing most of their analyses on.

0:30:22 Thomas: Yeah. Okay

0:30:46 Beth: Because they're the people that they because you know you can't force people to and they're that they had both right right, right, they did, uh, to see if the people who dropped out, the attrition was, um, in terms of uh, race, in terms of their education, in terms of, yeah.

0:30:46 Thomas: They didn't give everybody back basically. People fell asleep after the big turkey dinner.

0:31:01 Thomas: Ah yeah I was gonna say a lot of families where like their super racist uncle just took over the conversation, they're like, I don't want to do that study anymore.

0:31:12 Beth: Yeah. And honestly, it was astonishingly similar. All the racial groups had about the same level of attrition. You got about 55 % of the people came back. Seemed to have similar characteristics in terms of gender and income and education. So it wasn't like, Like, you the educated people came back for part two and the less educated people didn't. So that suggests that maybe the attrition at least is less of a problem.

0:31:40 Beth: Honestly, that's not bad to get 55 percent of your people back on a time time study. That's pretty good.

0:31:38 Thomas: Hopefully random. Yeah Yeah. Yeah. It's depressing how hard studies are to do. I've learned.

0:31:49 Beth: Yeah. How hard it is to get people to do the things. Then they asked if they actually had conversations about race, did they talk to the children about race, and yes, they asked the number and ages of the children. They asked for a success of the conversation, that was an open -ended question, a challenge or failure of the conversation, open -handed question, and then they ask what topics were covered, and they could could select from a checklist, but also you could add in any other themes or topics in an open -ended option at the end. And were Native American culture, American or Black culture, power or privilege, historical moments involving violence or oppression. Now you really get to the Thanksgiving story.

0:32:34 Beth: Multiculturalism, benefits of diversity, the importance of avoiding talking about race. About multiculturalism was things like, you know, each racial or ethnic group contributes something unique. The You benefits of diversity are the things like it's important to have many different types of people. The importance of avoiding Avoiding talking about race was stuff like it's not polite to talk about skin color. Moments involving positive contact between multiple racial groups. So you could maybe spin the Thanksgiving story that way if you're not super honest. Whiteness, politics and race, scientific research about race. This study was one of the topics that

0:32:33 Thomas: Yeah, that's Yeah we're

0:33:12 Beth: You could pick that you talked about. Yeah, how, Right, how and when children learn about race, and then they have the opportunity to describe any other themes in an open-ended question that they wanted to share. Participants who did not talk to children about race in the past week, they were asked why they didn't in open-handed question. And then they, from those same list of topics, indicated that if they were to talk to their their children about race, what topics would they choose to focus on and what topics would they chose to avoid? Then asked about behavioral intentions to talk to their children about race again in the next month. They answered the same questions for adults. So did you talk? What were the topics? If you didn't, what would you do? And then they did scales. Scales they were perceived consequences of talking to children about race, you know, things like if I talk to children about race then they may say something that another person could see as racially biased, um, you know, so that sort of fear of I'm gonna look racist or my kid's gonna look racist, um,

0:33:13 Thomas: Doing this weird thing where we're yeah.

0:34:18 Thomas: I would say like my biggest, you know, again just to throw the the white parental hesitation in there, like I would say my biggest fear in this, this and talking my kids about race, is that it's going to have them direct inappropriate attention to their classmates in a way that will make their classmates not feel great. It's like a it's and that's what is true with everything with kids. Like it's the same concerns about talking about sex stuff too early or talking, that is like I really want to do, you most informed thing, but it's hard to know exactly what that is. And it's hard to pull that off within the realistic environment of being a parent of kids and being exhausted all the time and not remembering what's going on. There's a lot of challenges to it.

0:34:36 Beth: Right. Mm. -hmm. Right. Right. Right. And ironically, other research has shown that parents who are most desirous of encouraging positive racial relations and attitudes are the ones who are more likely to fear saying something wrong, encouraging their children to say something wrong, and so maybe be even more avoidant. You know, there was an incident when I was a very small child that I still remember because it was confusing to me at the time, and I maybe was like first grade or so, and I was having a slumber party, going to have a slumber party. And I was telling my mom about the girls who were going to be in it. And one of them in there was Tanya, and she's black. And, uh, and my mom said something about like, so, you know, 'cause I mentioned that, "Are you afraid she'd be uncomfortable or something like being the only black girl?" And I wasn't like, I was like, "What?"

0:35:17 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:35:49 Beth: 'Cause to me it was just like, I would go, she has red hair, you Know, to me, It had no more value than that. And my mom unwittingly, because they definitely tried to raise me in the like free to be you and me era of the 70s and 80s, unwittingly gave me the idea that it was a thing to be the only black kid. It hadn't occurred to me before that.

0:35:52 Thomas: Right. Yeah. Yeah. There. Is a really weird tension between, because now, like, I'm, I'm strongly believe that like the colorblind bullshit is not the way, like that Seems to be The Current thinking on it, and I agree with that, but, but there's also a tension between when do you want to take those innocent kid interactions, which, again, my kids are in a really diverse place right now in both their schools. And they have all kinds of interactions like that that are totally, you value free. You know, it's just like like you said, red hair versus, you Know, color of the kid's skin.

And it's like, well, when I be turning that into something negative? Like, I know it's not going to be that Forever. I'm not under the delusion that like, yeah, they'll never see a difference really. But like, that's not how it is. But will I be pulling that attention? That is kind of the same worry. It's like, will I be directing That in a negative way when kind of leaving it to naturally develop for a few years when they're super young might have just given them more healthy, more relationship with those traits and not turn them into like these, you very important value laden things, things.

0:36:22 Beth: Oh, yeah. Mm hmm. Mm hm. Right, Right. You know, but I think they're still going to see how other people treat people of color and white people around them. Um, know there's studies that show that even grade school children, you know, six, seven year olds are experiencing discrimination and negative attitudes, and your kids are going to see that no matter what. Um, I think you shouldn't try and be value laden in your responses. You know, the way my mom responded, totally unwittingly, was that she suggested that there was something more of a big deal about this, and it might be a negative thing. And so she wanted to reassure me that it would be cool.

0:37:59 Beth: But I was like, why would it not have been

0:37:57 Thomas: Yeah. Well, it sounds like she just didn't that what you were saying was totally neutral. Exactly. It's like she was, she was like confused as to what you're trying to say, maybe. Yeah, sure.

0:38:01 Beth: Cool? Right, right, right. Right. But children are noticing race. They not colorblind from birth, You know, and they will notice it. And the idea of we're just not going to talk about it and it'll naturally develop, that's going to be like naturally developed, like the society around you, which is not necessarily a super great thing. Um, and so, uh, so um, that was definitely one of the scales, your perceived consequences of talking about race, um. Then your comfort in talking about race.

And these were all asked in reference to adults and to children and their beliefs about children's race and perception. Things like children do not naturally think about racial or cultural differences, or children don't notice people's race and culture, that whether people believe that they believe that children don t, they are colorblind, you know. Then they also asked about some race -related beliefs and experiences. Talked about the racial homogeneity again, your everyday environment, is it zero to 100% people like you?

Adult race and perception scale, which gets into that, like, should not notice other people's race, we should just treat everybody the same, you know, we should be colorblind. And then also the symbolic racism scale for this one too, same as the one before that. And in their results, there's a lot of results.

So the the way they present it in their paper is that they first give some information, the two samples, and then the effect of participant race, and then looking at time point one data and then time point two data, and they're trying to see what are predictors of conversations and the content of the conversations and age effects along the way.

Um, were some things that were interesting in the effects of participant race on whether they, uh, talked, intended to talk to children about race, and did talk to children about race. And um, also with adults. So, um, recode the intention so that zero was the neutral point, point so that

0:38:11 Thomas: Yeah? Of course. Absolutely.

0:40:07 Thomas: Sorry.

0:40:07 Beth: It was a seven point scale.

0:40:08 Thomas: What does this mean? I don't know.

0:40:09 Beth: Yeah. And I'm telling you, it's a seven point scale from, um, I am very unlikely to talk to them or, uh, I am very likely to talkto them. And so they made zero point the, I'm neither likely nor unlikely. I don't know. And then like somewhat unlikely is, you know, minus one, unlikely, um minus two, absolutely not going to talk to them, minus three. And Then on the other end, you know, might talk to them, talk to him, or absolutely definitely talk to them, we're like one, two, three in the positive direction.

And so in the intentions to talking to, talking about race with children, the BIPOC people, it average was about neutral, like as many people thought they would as wouldn't for the white people, they were at a minus one, so they were definitely leaning towards a yeah, probably not. Um, almost exactly the same for adults, and intentions to talk to about race with adults was like minus 1.1 for the White people and just like 0.06 for the BIPOC people, so um, will some, won't some, are like, I don't know. Um, also, uh, a difference in the race relevant resources they selected. Remember, they could ask about articles that they wanted to read.

And on average, the white people selected 42% race relevant resources and BIPOC people selected 52%, uh, race relevant resources. Um, and these are all significant differences, differences, then at time two, uh, people who did report talking, uh, with children about race was like 50% of the white people and 76% of the people of color, so definitely a difference on that, and rates of talking with adults about race, and this is what's interesting, because it's so much less, 25% for white people, and 37% for the people, so they talk to adults about it far less than children.

Were no race differences in the mean age of conversations and the percentage of conversations that they had with children five or under. Those were not significant. Effects of their interventions, those things they tried in the other study of, we're going to educate you some about when children can process race information, essentially had no effect on anything, um

0:40:10 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Okay. Gotcha.

0:40:56 Thomas: Interesting. Okay, huh.

0:42:23 Thomas: Oh,

0:42:23 Beth: Yeah, yeah, and they were like, maybe it was just that, you know, a single thing didn't really enough to impact in the real world, or other factors were more important, but they really just didn't get much of it right.

0:42:23 Thomas: Wow. Yeah. I mean, you got a lot to think about during the Thanksgiving holiday. Be in one ear out the other, as they say.

0:42:40 Beth: Right, and and, and, you know, also, they had pretty high rates of conversations about race overall. Um, was kind surprised that 50% of the white people reported talking with their children about race. And as we said, this was before all the George Floyd stuff and that getting to be in the public conversation. But it may be that Thanksgiving is a prime opportunity to talk about these things, because you really do kind of have to wrestle with colonialism in that.

0:43:07 Beth: Yeah, the impact of their demographics, um, there were not effects of race on the rates of conversation with really young children, so that didn't seem to be, uh, issue. Um, cases where people talked with multiple children about race, they did the computed and average age of conversation, and the distribution of the age of children that they were talking about these things with seemed to center around age eight, which was normally distributed. So weirdly, not less when they were a little older, but also less when they were younger. Having younger children in the household did predict fewer conversations with children about race. So if you had little kids, you were less likely to talk about race, they didn't find any effect of maximum of children and conversation about race.

0:42:47 Thomas: Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. Yeah That

0:43:51 Beth: With with adults, it was interesting that only 29 % of participants overall engaged in conversation about rates with adults. Is substantially lower than for children. And people who talked about race with their their children were likely likely to talk about race with adults too. So then they wanted to see like, what was it that predicted the conversations with children, whether you would have it or not. And all their stuff as predictors, you know, child's age, participants, race, participants age, participants, gender, age of youngest child, your self -reported comfort, that self - reported fear of consequences of talking about race, your symbolic racism score, your racial homogeneity score, the extent to which you think children are colorblind, your scientific literacy interventions, and race -related link preferences, and your behavioral intentions to talk with the children.

And there were only two significant predictors of in conversations with race with children, And that was behavioral intentions to talk about race, which there's so much research that shows that having a behavioral intention to do something makes it more likely that you will, in fact, actually do it. You know, and there's things like that. You have things in your head that you're like, I should get a haircut or

0:44:28 Thomas: Yeah Yeah,

0:45:07 Beth: Whatever. And it floats around and it never happens until you're Like, I'm going to make an appointment tomorrow and do that. Make that call or whatever. And yeah.

0:45:07 Thomas: That's my entire head is those things. Yes. Right. I do know we both have ADHD, so I don't know how representative we are, but that's my entire brain is those things. And then occasionally I do one of them.

0:45:18 Beth: Oh yeah. Yeah. And so until you actually have a solid behavioral intention, it doesn't really happen a lot of times, but once you really say I'm going to do this, then that was a predictor.

0:45:33 Thomas: Yeah. You need that critical mass. Yeah,

0:45:36 Beth: Right, right. So, you know, having an intention to have conversations like this at Thanksgiving was a good predictor of actually doing it. The other significant predictor was the participant race. So people of color had way more conversations with children than white people. It was like, 75% versus about 50%. For adults, there several significant predictors, perceived consequences of conversation about race. That's, I don't want to appear racist sort of thing.

0:45:36 Thomas: Yeah. Yep.

0:46:06 Beth: Intentions, of course, their comfort talking about race, the age of the participant, weirdly, older people a little more likely to. Household income, a little bit less likely to talk about it at higher income levels. And participant women were more likely to talk to other adults about race than men. But Yeah.

0:46:27 Thomas: Are there adults? Oh, okay.

0:46:29 Beth: Yeah, weirdly though, participant race did not predict whether or not they'd talk with other adults without race, so they talked with children way more, but their rate of talking to adults was about the same. Um, also asked, remember, the people who didn't have a conversation um with children, children or adults, to think about what they would focus on if talk with their children and what they could avoid. And part of this is weird because these are not the same people then that they're asking about these topics because, They're Asking people who did talk about race with children and then also with adults. They do each of these things with both. What did you talk about? What topics? And that's a different group of people than the ones who said what I would talk about, with children. But there is definitely with adults, there is an to which they would talk about certain topics, that people overestimated the extent to which they'd talk about benefits of diversity, multiculturalism, politics, power and privilege.

And true, especially of white people, but also black people, the idea that intentions were higher than the people who who actually did talk about race for each of the topics. Now, that doesn't tell us, because like I said, they're different people. So it doesn't tells us if the idea is that people who don't talk about race are different kinds of people than the people who do talk about race. And so their higher selection of topics that they talk about is just optimism of the people don't actually do

0:46:59 Thomas: Hmm. Okay. Yeah.

0:48:05 Beth: It. Or it could be that, right. Oh, I'm totally going to get into concepts of power and privilege and all of this.

0:48:07 Thomas: I'm going to talk about all kinds of things about race. We're going to start with 1619. are going to go through the whole every year.

0:48:15 Beth: Right. Right, right. Or it could be the case that people have intentions, then they don't manage to do it in practice. And unfortunately they didn't ask about intentions to talk about these concepts in time one. And I'm sure they're going, God, I wish we did that. So it is, as I said, it's different groups of people. So you kind of can take what you will from that, that people who didn't talk said they would talk about these conversations a lot more than those who actually did.

Idea that some people didn't talk about race. Remember, we asked, why didn't you talk about it? Their most frequent response was that they thought there was no need to talk about grace with children. Things like because it's not a topic that needs to be discussed. Remember that was an open ended question. Question, followed by concerns that the child would be too young to understand. So people are like, honestly, my son's only six years old, so the conversations we could have would be fairly limited. Don't think it would be appropriate at his age and maturity level to inundate him too much with talk about race. When they were asked what they would avoid if they were to talk about their with their kids, the most pertinent topics, uh, were politics and race, whiteness and power and privilege, um, pretty much all of the basic findings. Um, so the main finding is that first of all, a high percentage of people actually did talk to kids about race.

0:49:00 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. I

0:49:37 Beth: You know

0:49:38 Thomas: Wanted to ask a clarifying question about that. What, know, what qualified is that? Like, how was that answered exactly? You know, if somebody had a conversation around the Thanksgiving turkey of like, did you know the Native American, like, Did that count? You

0:49:38 Beth: Yeah.

0:49:50 Beth: Because it was one of the topics that you could the

0:49:53 Thomas: % is high. Like, I don't think 50 % of people that were like, so Black Lives Lives matter. Let's discuss this around Turkey dinner.

0:50:02 Beth: It may have been more like Native American stuff, um, I can see that of the people who did

0:50:06 Thomas: And do we know if it was done in a way that sucked or not?

0:50:10 Beth: Okay, that the question, uh, the did you have a conversation was, did you talk with your children about race? That was just straight up yes, no, and then if yes, you went into the, what did you, you talk about? If no, you went into the what would you talk about? Do you think if, you did? And yeah, certainly for black people, the main topic that they talked about, the one with the most proportion talking about it was African Americans, also benefits of diversity, multiculturalism, negative historical contact, which I think may be special For the a Thanksgiving holiday, were far less conversations that had to do with politics, whiteness, with power and privilege.

You know, they may think those are harder conversations, but they're also ones that are probably the most important for anti -racism efforts. Whitenness, and power and privilege, um, if we don't talk about those you're, you're definitely missing out on stuff. Um, yeah, no, 50 of the white people talked or said they talked to their kids about race. You know, maybe it is they get all this Thanksgiving stuff at school and you either reinforce it or counteract it or whatever. Um, 50 of white people, 75 of the people, and um, other, other main finding was that black people, well, people of color, they did not separate them out,

0:50:21 Thomas: Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:51:26 Beth: In fact talk about race with children far more than the white people did. There and were several topics that BIPOC participants talked about at higher rates. Did, even though they didn't talk about it as much as the other topics, they didn'Talk about things like whiteness and power and privilege more thanthe white parents did. Then they also were kind, kind of surprised by this finding that adults talked about race with their children much more often than they did with other adults. And they didn't actually expect that.

0:51:52 Thomas: That doesn't surprise me at all. That's really weird. Don't know. Just feel like you're in a mode of like, you might need to teach a kid something. And with adults, It's like, all right, what am I getting? You know, I don't know. Know. I'm not sure, I guess it would depend on what's on the news. Like with adults, it's like, yeah, you talk about what's going on, probably more, oh

0:52:00 Beth: -hmm, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, so they run counter to the idea that people specifically avoid discussing race with children. And that's actually a unique, unique contribution to this paper is that They asked about children and adults in the same study because you get rates for children, you get rights from adults, but they're different studies and it's hard to compare. Does suggest that people have different barriers to talking about race with adults than they do with children. The, that there were more predictors that were relevant to talking about race avec adults does show that, and that it included things like, like your comfort talking about race, your fear of consequences of talking about race.

Things mattered for conversations with adults, but not for children. And so, yeah, that does sort of suggest that we're going to have to have kind of different interventions to get conversations going with children than you do with adults. Of the things they brought up, which I thought was, was fascinating is that, that's also casts some questions on interpretations of some previous studies, uh, find that adult were hesitant to raise questions of race with other adults because almost all of the, like in lab studies of conversations about race with children, have an adult experiment or observer. And so what you're talking about with your child is not just

0:52:19 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right.

0:53:27 Beth: For your child, but also there's this adult observer watching you, yeah, it's

0:53:27 Thomas: I can't even parent well without being observed, it's hard, big

0:53:34 Beth: Yeah. Yeah, so you kind of have to consider that in evaluating, uh, research on conversations with children, um, Um, takeaways are that the people of color talked about race more often than white people. We talked about race with children far more than adults. People were afraid of looking racist or just were uncomfortable talking about race with adults was the

0:53:42 Thomas: Takeaways, sure. Yeah.

0:53:58 Thomas: Another thing with the adult and kids thing is like, if you start a conversation about race with an adult, there's a, you, chance, chance they're the worst fucking person, maybe, whereas like if I start talking about race with Phoebe, I'm not worried she's gonna be like, you know, MAGA, here's the thing about, she's not gonna go on a rant, pull uh out a red hat and be like, ah, shit, shouldn't have started talking about this, yeah

0:54:06 Beth: Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah, politics was a topic that parents very much avoided talking about with kids. There were not a whole lot of conversations about politics That was like 11 percent of the conversations, whereas with adults, it was about 30 percent of the conversations. You know, I mean, they may not be as able to process politics stuff. That's fine.

0:54:37 Thomas: Well but race is political, but I guess not, yeah, okay, talking about specific, like, like political science, I don't know.

0:54:39 Beth: Right. Well, I think there's kindof maybe more of an issue that people are not talking about power and privilege and whiteness. The idea of whitenesse, I think people don't quite know how to go about that, because one of the things when people are talking to children of color about race is that they're also trying to inculcate a sense of pride in your racial background and your ethnic heritage and things like that. And it's kind of not so easy or great to do that as a white person, you know. So the idea that you do actually belong to a group, what this group means, what it's viewed in society versus other groups.

It's important for white kids to know that too, um, that seems to be a topic that parents really didn't want to talk about very much, and also power and privilege, you, those are the things that people freak out about having in schools because they seem to think that talking with children about that means you're telling them to feel bad themselves personally, even though that is absolutely not what people are trying to do, um, you know, maybe also parents feel that that they might have to talk about their own privilege, of, maybe we didn't actually earn everything we got here.

0:54:49 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, well, and a lot of people just don't, a lot white people don't believe in that as a concept even, so that's part of it too.

0:55:51 Beth: Right, right, right. But still, Right. It was kind of encouraging that so many people did, in fact, report talking about race with kids. Think it probably would be even more now after we've had all of the stuff with Black Lives Matter and, you know, know high profile cases of police brutality and things like that. Um, so you know, I think it might be even more and that is encouraging. So I think maybe probably interventions for talking with children would be, it'd be useful to give parents resources for how to talk about some of these difficult topics like the power, privilege, white whiteness,

0:55:55 Thomas: Yeah yeah Yeah. Yes, please do. I'm

0:56:26 Beth: Stuff, uh. So it is the, one of the first studies that I found that actually did try to just sort out what exactly are you talking about in a naturalistic setting, in a real life context when you are with your family and this is how it just goes, not in a lab, not with special instructions, just like, what did you do? What did you talk about? It was within the past week. So even though self-report always has some possibilities for bias and recall, you didn't have to recall that far back.

0:56:56 Beth: Um, so that's really, really useful is only asking people to recall what happened in the last week. Um, yeah, that was sort of. Um, yeah, is that children understand more than we think they do. Um, uh, parents need to talk about race with their kids just like people of color do. Um, I mean, 50 may be good, but but that means 50% aren't, you know?

0:56:31 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah sure. Yeah cool.

0:57:16 Thomas: Yeah, well, and I don't even, I have high about the quality of conversation of all that 50% personally. But yeah, no, I mean, maybe another further topic for another time can be more about those resources and how to actually do it. Would be helpful as well, well. But thank you so much for taking us through these studies. It seems a little more encouraging than I might have thought. And like you say, I mean, some of this data before George Floyd, before the massive, you know, 2020 kind of protest and energy there, I'd be interesting. There's some of these studies where it feels like they need to do it every year somehow, you Know, just like see how it changes.

0:57:22 Beth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I did have a study in this folder that I would have to go pull up and look at, but it was about the extent to which people talked more about race after George Floyd than pre and post Floyd.

0:58:03 Thomas: Always more to talk about.

0:58:04 Beth: Right, right, that seemed like, um, that it increased the extent to which black parents talked to their kids about race, but did not increase the extent which white parents talked about race, um. They look at pre and post George Floyd's death, um, it's like the parents who are silent and avoidant seem to just stay silent and avoidant.

0:58:13 Thomas: Ooh, dang. Ouch.

0:58:23 Beth: Um, And so, I mean, half may be better than historical, probably is, uh, in terms of white people talking to their kids about race. But Um. It still definitely suggests that there is a ways to go.

0:58:23 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:58:33 Thomas: Well, Dr. Beth Deitch, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this. As usual, anything you want to shout out? Any you want to direct people?

0:58:37 Beth: Uh. Just always direct people to our local New Orleans Secular Humanist Association, NOSHA. If you go to nosha.info, uh... Or search for us on Meetup. You will find information about all the things we do. Informational programs. Banned book club. This month we are reading the most banned book in America. Genderqueer. Yeah. Hours. A lot of things going on.

0:58:58 Thomas: So fun. That's excellent. Thanks as always and you have a great Thanksgiving week. Talk to a bunch of kids about race. Just pull kids off the street, anywhere you see them, talk to them about race. Alright.

0:59:08 Beth: You have a great Thanksgiving, too. Yeah. Yeah. And be sure you mention power and privilege and whiteness. The concept of whiteness is a hard one, you know, admit I don't know how I would broach that, um, now of course that sparked some curiosity me to go and look for more, and on probably

0:59:18 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. All I'm sure we'll get another email. We'll get another submission. I can't wait.

0:59:33 Beth: Probably, oh