natural assumptions: race, essence, and taxonomies of human kinds

Social Research, Summer, 1998 by Lawrence A. Hirschfeld

There is of course nothing self evident in determining racial identity this way (nor is it self evident that interracial children of any mixture should belong to a single "mixed race" category, as proponents of such a census category have recently advocated). Plausibly, learning any cultural convention for assigning racial identity is linked to the political ideology that it supports. Ultimately, however, learning a rule requires that its adherents have more or less the same mental representation.

When and in what form is a mental representation of the one-drop rule acquired? Taking this as a question of conceptual development, I turned to methods long favored by developmental psychologists; namely, experimental manipulations. I (with the collaboration of Ken Springer) asked second and sixth graders and adults in a northern Midwestern university town and a large Southwestern city to tell us what happens when parents of different races have children. Specifically, we showed children drawings of four couples: a black male and a white female, a white male and a black female, a white male and a white female, a black male and a black female. We then asked the children what race the couples' children would be, "white," "black," or "something else." Not surprisingly, younger and older children and adults judged that children of the same-race couples would racially match their parents. However, when asked about the children of interracial couples, second graders chose at random; older children opted for either black or white, but with no particular preference; while adults overwhelmingly chose black for all the interracial couples items.

A follow-up study posed the same question to a different group of children. Instead of asking them for the racial category identity of the child, we asked what the children of the four would look like. Children were shown pictures of infants that were physically black, white, and intermediary. Again, second graders chose at random, indicating that they subscribe to no particular convention for solving racial ambiguity. In response to questions about the inheritance of physical features of race, sixth graders's overwhelmingly expected--in contrast to their judgments about category identity--that the mixed-race child would have black features. Adults judged that the inheritance of physical features would follow a radically different pattern than the assignment of racial category identity. In the racial category task, adults inferred that mixed-race children are black; in the physical trait task, adults expected the mixed-race children to be intermediate in appearance. In sum, the results of the two tasks demonstrate that both sixth graders and adults hold a version of the one-drop rule. Strikingly, however, they do not hold the same version.

This divergent pattern of reasoning is interesting on two counts. First, it tells when one-drop rule is learned. Second, while the rule is evidently learned, it is acquired in a fairly peculiar way. Children and adults subscribe to very different versions of the rule. In itself, this is not surprising; children typically converge on adult beliefs incrementally, at any given stage sharing some but not all of adult belief. But in this case the difference between adult and children's beliefs are not incremental but conceptual. Children's version of the rule is not simpler, merely lacking some of the subtleties of the adult account. Rather, children subscribe to a very specific and physicalized version of the rule. It is not obvious what experience motivates children toward this physicalized (and essentialized) interpretation.