An Assessment of Racial Awareness, Preference, and Self Identity among White and Adopted Non-White Children

This article reports levels of racial awareness, racial preferences, and racial identities among non-white children (American Negro, Korean, American Indian), who have been adopted by white families, and their white siblings who have been born into those families. The respondents are all children between the ages of three and eight. The basic question addressed in the research is how similar or different are the reactions of these children compared to those of the same sex, age range, and race who have been reared in typical family settings. The major findings are that black children who are reared in the special setting of multi-racial families do not acquire the ambivalence toward their own race that has been reported among all other groups of young black children and that there are no significant differences in the racial attitudes of any of the categories of children.