# Perception of racial discrimination in Brazilian school-aged children

## TL;DR

This study explores how Brazilian children perceive racial discrimination in school settings and finds that they struggle to recognize it when it occurs.

## Contribution

The study introduces a novel task to assess racial discrimination perception in Brazilian children using video-based scenarios.

## Key findings

- Children performed poorly at recognizing racial discrimination when it was present in scenarios.
- Age significantly influenced perception of discrimination in one specific condition.
- Children were better at rejecting discrimination when it was not present.

## Abstract

Fighting racial discrimination requires the ability to notice it when it occurs.

The present study aimed to investigate the perception of racial discrimination in a sample of Brazilian school-aged children.

Fifty-three 6- to 12-year-old children were recruited from two public schools in a small town in the state of São Paulo, but there was no registration of the ethnic background of one child and, as a result, he had to be excluded. Therefore, the final sample consisted of 52 participants (10 black, 32 mixed-race, 10 white). A task designed to assess children’s perception of racial discrimination and used in previous studies was translated into Brazilian Portuguese and administered to participants. Children watched four videos of stories about an adult character who made a choice between a black child and a white child in different scenarios) (e.g., choosing a class leader, a student to represent the school in a science fair, a winner for the music contest and someone to complete the soccer team), with the choice always benefiting one over the other. Children were distributed into three conditions that varied in terms of whether racial discrimination was present or not. Two situational cues were manipulated: the skin color of the potential target of discrimination and information about the adult character’s past choices. At the end of each story, participants had to answer a question about the reasons for the choice made.

A significant effect of age was found on the PD task, but only for one condition (C1) when there was a pattern of apparent racial discrimination and when situational cues were provided, U = 21.0, p = .006. A D-prime analysis revealed that children were good at rejecting the existence of discrimination when it was not present; but they performed poorly when it was present, d′ = − 0.44.

These findings point to an important question regarding the when and how Brazilian parents and educators talk to children about ethnic-racial relations. This is an important future direction, and it can better inform intervention programs and public policy directed at preventing and fighting racism in our country.