Abstract
In White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America, Margaret Hagerman brings readers into the everyday lives of upper-middle-class, white, U.S.-born families, illuminating the “racial socialization” children experience. She shows how decisions about where to live and conversations explicitly and implicitly about race shape children’s views on race and inequality. Hagerman identifies the age-old tension for parents between striving for what’s best for their individual children and the civic goal of what’s best for all children. The former, when enacted by parents with privilege, reproduces privilege, while the latter aims for equity.
While other sociologists studying parenting and privilege—most notably Annette Lareau—focus on class privilege, Hagerman focuses on race privilege, an important elaboration of this literature. Hagerman studied white families in three different communities in the same midwestern metro area, which she calls Petersfield. Sheridan is a predominantly wealthy, white, and conservative suburb of Petersfield. Wheaton Hills is a neighborhood within the city of Petersfield, where many affluent white parents send their children to a variety of local private schools rather than to the urban Petersfield public schools. Most Wheaton Hills parents identify politically as liberal. The neighborhood of Evergreen also lies within the city of Petersfield but differs from Wheaton Hills in the very progressive political identities of most of its residents. Hagerman spent two years conducting participant observation with white families in these three neighborhoods. She also conducted in-depth interviews with 36 middle-school aged children and 30 parents.
White parents in all three neighborhoods shape their children’s views on race, most importantly by shaping their “racial context”—especially the neighborhood in which they choose to live and, for some, the private schools in which they enroll their children. Hagerman argues that these choices fundamentally shape children’s perspectives, even while parents may speak about racial injustice and the importance of diversity.
After parents make these context-setting decisions, some of them attempt to rectify the lack of families of color by, for example, engaging in community service for economically disadvantaged communities of color. Other parents try to use media—for example, sharing the fictional account in The Help, about black domestic workers, watching diverse television shows like Glee, or talking about race-related news stories like the trial of the man who killed Trayvon Martin. This leaves many children in the more liberal neighborhoods of Wheaton Hills and especially Evergreen to develop, as Hagerman describes it, a “white savior complex,” in which they feel good about their acts toward social justice while simultaneously maintaining the privileges that go along with their affluent, white biographies. Further, Wheaton Hills children attending private schools seem to receive the implicit message that they are “special” and “deserving” of a rarefied education, in contrast to children from less wealthy, predominantly minority families. Still others, especially those in the conservative suburb of Sheridan, do not prioritize discussions of race, taking a colorblindness approach that seems to lead their children to call any mention of race “racist” and to believe that racism and racial inequality are things of the past.
Overall, Hagerman finds that the affluent white youth in her study assume they will be successful. In addition, much like the privileged youth in Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods (2011), they exude a sense of entitlement. Other recent work on race, class, and inequality in education also emphasizes how parents with cultural know-how seem to influence schools, teachers, and children in ways that reward privilege (for example, see Calarco 2018; Lewis and Diamond 2015), sometimes described as “opportunity hoarding” (Tilly 1998). Hagerman moves beyond the focus on what happens in schools to what happens in families themselves.
Beyond adults setting up the racial contexts of children’s lives, peers and siblings also shape ideas about race. We get a window into how children’s ideas develop through Hagerman’s careful attention to conversations about race between friends and siblings. Overall, young people seemed more comfortable speaking explicitly about race than the adults around them, even if the refrain “that’s racist” was a common one between peers, sometimes even spoken in jest. Kids even expressed racial stereotypes that their parents might refrain from saying out loud, such as, “All of the black kids have pot on them” at school.
I very much appreciate Hagerman’s attention to how students’ views about race develop. The findings resonate with my own findings of colorblindness race frames and beliefs in meritocracy among elite college students (Warikoo 2016). But Hagerman’s study goes further, revealing the processes by which race frames develop in childhood, under the influence of parents and peers. This is an important contribution to the literature on the development of ideas about race in the United States. Hagerman’s attention to differences among affluent whites in racial socialization, especially as driven by their choice of neighborhood and political identities, is another important contribution in an era in which Americans are increasingly segregated not only by race and class, but also by political identity.
Given the rich complexity of Hagerman’s analyses of affluent whites in the three different neighborhoods, I was sometimes surprised by the portrayals of families. Hagerman develops the idea of “justified avoidance”: “strategies of vehemently claiming not to be racist while simultaneously acting in ways that secure advantages for their own child” (p. 74). I would have preferred a more empathetic stance toward parents and analyses that take for granted that parents of all backgrounds will do what they can to support their children’s success. For example, do parents, too, recognize the tension in their espoused desires for both equity and their children’s success? How do they make sense of this tension?
In other words, I worry about the individualism embedded in analyses that lay blame for the reproduction of inequality on individual parents’ actions, especially because it suggests individual-based solutions. In the book’s conclusion Hagerman argues that white parents can address racism “only if they are willing to give up some of their own white racial power by rejecting the idea that their own child is more innocent and special and deserving than other people’s children are.” This implicit blaming of parents attempting to secure advantage for their children as racist seems to ignore the ways that social policies, legal decisions, and economic conditions have created the conditions that allow some parents—especially those with race and especially class privilege—to provide so much privilege to their children, even if all parents act in their children’s best interests.
To take one example, the celebrities in the Operation Varsity Blues who illegally paid for their children’s fake credentials in order to get them into selective universities clearly broke the law and the ethical standards of most parents. On the other hand, when wealthy alumnae donate to their alma maters knowing that those donations may give their children a boost in admissions, do we blame those parents, or the universities that create admissions systems that welcome those donations? I wanted to hear Hagerman remind readers about the institutional drivers of inequality more, at least in the conclusion of the book, if only because this is our best hope for a more equitable society.
Overall, this is an important book for anyone interested in the development of race frames in children and in how that development varies among affluent whites living in different neighborhoods, with different political identities. Filled with numerous illuminating—and sometimes shocking—ethnographic details about quotidian life among affluent whites, White Kids is sure to provoke important conversations about the intersection of class and race in discussions of privilege.