Raising the Future: Race and the Politics of Child-Rearing

• In Event: Understanding the Determinants of White Americans' Racial Attitudes

Abstract

Jennings and Niemi’s famous study (1965) on parent-child socialization showed that prominent political orientations like partisanship can reproduce across generations. Despite the survey fielding during an era of important racial change, only two measures of racial attitudes were included in this original survey: a policy question about busing and feeling thermometers towards racial groups. In this study, we analyze a new parent-child dyad study we fielded on a diverse sample of 500 parent-child pairs, including an oversample of Black Americans. With this data, we replicate Jennings and Niemi’s race questions to consider how polarization and recent social movements have changed the correlation between parent-child attitudes. In addition, we introduce new measures to better understand the dynamics of race socialization in the contemporary period. These include assessments of whether parents have actual attitudes about race socialization, current debates over race in school curriculum, and whether teens recognize their parents’ race socialization goals. Our analyses speak to growing racial polarization by juxtaposing variation in these several outcomes by racial background with differences by partisanship. Taken together, the results speak to how parents engage their children on race in a diversifying country and what the future of multi-racial democracy in the United States might look like.

Authors

• Allison Penelope Anoll, Vanderbilt University

• Andrew M. Engelhardt, Stony Brook University

• Mackenzie Israel-Trummel, William & Mary