The Role of Physiognomy in the Development of Racial Awareness

Summary This study investigated three basic questions concerning American children's development of the concept of “race”: (a) What are the salient cues used to distinguish Negroid from Caucasian groups? (b) Do black and white children utilize the same cues to discriminate between their races? (c) Does a segregated versus integrated environment influence the development of racial awareness? Two groups of preschool children were tested: (a) 35 white children from a racially segregated environment; (b) 22 white and 20 black children from an integrated environment. The stimuli consisted of a series of artist sketches of a male face displaying a variety of racial characteristics (skin color, physiognomy) and a nonracial feature (color of shirt collar). Children's perceptual awareness of racial features and conceptual understanding of “race” were assessed by a discrimination and a free classification task. Results indicated that (a) physiognomic features were the more salient cues for distinguishing between races than was skin color; (b) white children were more aware of hair features than skin color; (c) white children in a segregated community developed racial awareness earlier than those in an integrated community.