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178 There is a debate among scholars over which sources of information (sometimes called “socializing agents”) are most powerful in how children learn about race. The literature falls into two broad camps: those who believe the family is the most critical agent of socialization and those who argue that forces outside the family have more influence. Authors in the first camp claim that the family is primary because it decides “what to filter out, [and] what to promote” (Boykin and Ellison 1995, 124). However, scholars in the second camp argue that socialization about race is controlled by forces outside of the family, such as schools and media. They hold that, although the family does act as an agent in the process, it cannot completely overpower the pervasive negative racial socialization messages communicated by society. This book argues that the truth lies somewhere in between these two positions and that the nexus of the process is the child. Children, in fact, are pulled in many directions by a wide range of forces—those most often cited in this study were parents, other family members, school (teachers and curriculum ), media, peers, church, neighbors, travel, and place. This tug-of-war leaves young people with a puzzle to solve, with multiple conflicting messages to reconcile, and the result often seems to be confusion and ambivalence. The findings presented in this book show that, while the existing literature can tell us much about the sources of messages, we need to reorient the way we look at how children learn about race. Tellingly, there previously was not even a scholarly term to describe how children develop racial identities, attitudes, and strategies, only the general term “socialization,” a somewhat passive word— often viewed as something that happens to children—or “racial socialization,” which refers only to “parental practices that communicate messages about ethnicity and race to children” (Hughes et al. 2008, 226, emphasis added). This book introduces the concept of comprehensive racial learning to help us rethink 7 Conclusion “I Learn Being Black from Everywhere I Go” CONCLUSION 179 the learning process, centering on children and their active learning process rather than on sources or “socializing agents.” Using the framework of comprehensive racial learning, Learning Race, Learning Place shows the importance of looking at this process from children’s points of view and listening to their interpretations of their experiences, which, as we saw, can be quite different from what the adults around them expect or intend. Throughout the chapters we have seen that children’s and mothers’ assertions of what the children think or experience or feel do not always match. Indeed, the story would have been quite different if only parental perspectives were included. Methodologically, then, this book shows “how we study kids affects what we learn about them” (Boocock and Scott 2005, 33, emphasis in original). It demonstrates the importance of examining various other actors and influences at the children’s prompting , of not just studying children, but listening to their voices and letting them tell us where to look. And in this study, both they and their mothers collectively pointed to place as a primary and overarching factor in the children’s comprehensive racial learning. Although I was not asking about (nor even particularly thinking about) the role of place, children and mothers alike raised this issue so repeatedly that it emerged as central to the analysis. Throughout this book, we have seen copious examples of how place directly and indirectly enters into children’s comprehensive racial learning—directly through their own experiences with it and indirectly through its impact on their mothers’ messages and sometimes those of their peers, teachers, and others. Out of the many hundreds of pages of interview transcripts resulting from this study, one exchange stands out for me as the most concise illustration of this complex and layered influence. It was the exchange I had with Corey (thirteen), who told me he would rather live in Las Vegas than in Detroit. ERIN: So why would you like [Las Vegas] better than Detroit? What— COREY: I mean, the black people, they don’t act right. . . . I mean, they litter and sell drugs, a lot of stuff like that. In Las Vegas, they don’t do a lot of that. ERIN: Do you think white people litter and sell drugs? COREY: On TV, but not for real. This far I’ve never seen it. When asked why he thinks Las Vegas is different from Detroit in these ways, he...

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