Engaging Racial Identification in Children in the Classroom: Commentary on Archangelo and O’Loughlin: Exploring Racial Formation in Children: Thoughts from an Encounter with Black Children in Brazil

Abstract

With the world in turmoil on so many fronts, psychoanalytic psychology, indeed all of psychology that focuses on the individual mind and individual behavior, faces challenges in maintaining its relevance to the social world. The past 2 years of widespread suffering related to the COVID pandemic, to resurgent political violence, and to racial injustice have upended billions of lives, while exposing how many people have always had to struggle to keep their heads above water. Prominent among the many new challenges facing the mental health fields is how to help children cope with such times of general upheaval. There are aspects of a contemporary psychoanalytic sensibility that can be of use in decoding children’s reactions to their social world, pointing the way toward remedial engagement with ongoing destructive elements. Ferenczi (1933) introduced us to the notion of “identification with the aggressor”; Fanon (1963) put that concept to work in the context of colonial aggression, part of which is the denigration of the subdued population by the colonial occupier. Colonized people, per Fanon, will identify with the aggressor and the denigrated image of themselves propagated by the colonizer. Racial disparities are evident in media coverage, in health care, in the administration of justice, and elsewhere. Children notice these things and adults, especially those who don’t live with protection from these calamities, don’t know how to help them interpret what they see. The effect on children appears in evidence of anti-dark-skinned prejudice in the work of Kenneth Clark and Mamie Clark (1939) and, daily, in classrooms in examples like those cited by Archangelo and O’Loughlin (2021) Their work launches us on a vital consideration of how teachers and others who interact with children can engage with their internalized prejudice and with the socially pervasive projection of “undesirable” characteristics into relatively dark-skinned bodies. I suggest that the preference for white dolls over black dolls noted by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, and by Archangelo and O’Loughlin, is the racially coded tip of the iceberg of children’s reactions to what they see and hear. Furthermore, that the responses they give to researchers’ questions reflect their assumption that grown-ups in authority, especially but not only, white ones, also have a preference for white coloring and expect the same from children. In short, I am suggesting that there is nothing inborn about preference for light-skinned dolls and people; their preferences reflect what they have taken in of nearly ubiquitous prejudice in their social world. I must add, however, that during 3 years during which I worked as a psychologist in the Newark N.J. Head Start program, in which 3and 4-year-old children and families were nearly universally dark skinned, not a single child commented on skin color in my light-skinned presence. I would not doubt that I was discouraging such comments in some way of which I was unaware. One day, however, a little boy sat down next to me and started stroking my arm and I thought “OK here it comes – -“. After a moment, he said “Why do you have so much hair on your arm?”