Racial Perspective

Recently I read an interesting article on Newsweek.com about children seeing race. The article focused on how parents should teach their children about racial differences. The author writes that discussion about race is critical considering the fact that children as young as 6 months can recognize and differentiate skin color. It was determined that most parents do not discuss race with their children, leading their children to think that there are in fact divisions among race and that they should not be amongst those of another race. Children then become more susceptible to judging others. Therefore, talking to kids about racial differences is important because it helps them understand that they should not discriminate.

It seems as though the answer to the prevention of discrimination is knowledge. The kids who never talked about race were more likely to judge people based on race than those who did. I think that this concept can be applied to the origins of slavery. Over the past few days in class we have talked about some of the ways slavery originated, but we never talked about why people think they have the right to make others work for them in the first place. Because the first settlers in America were mainly European and white, they had little exposure to people of different ethnicity like Native Americans or Blacks. The Americans' lack of knowledge about people of other races made them automatically assume that they had authority over them. This makes me wonder both about human nature and the way people determine superiority.

What do you think about some of the psychological reasons behind slavery?