When Margaret Hagerman was trying to recruit white affluent families as subjects for the research she was doing on race, one prospective interviewee told her, "I can try to connect you with my colleague at work who is black. She might be more helpful."
White Kids: Growing Up With Privilege in a Racially Divided America, summarizes the two years of research she did talking to and observing upper-middle-class white families in an unidentified midwestern city and its suburbs. To examine how white children learn about race, she followed 36 of them between the ages of 10 and 13, interviewing them as well as watching them do homework, play video games, and otherwise go about their days.
These kids and their parents display a range of beliefs about race. "Racism is not a problem," one girl tells Hagerman, adding that it "was a problem when all those slaves were around and that, like, bus thing and the water fountain." Meanwhile, the girl's mother nods along. Other parents in the book have educated themselves better, but often, intentionally or unintentionally, still end up giving their kids advantages that, in the abstract, they claim to oppose. (White Kids is not, as Hagerman writes at one point, "a particularly hopeful book.")
I spoke to Hagerman, and that second group kept coming up in our conversation—how, despite their intentions, progressive-minded white families can perpetuate racial inequality. She also discussed ways they can avoid doing so. The interview that follows has been edited for length and clarity.
Joe Pinsker: One reading of your book is that the way white parents talk about race with their children does matter, but that what you call the "bundled set of choices" they make about what types of people their children encounter every day might matter even more. Can you talk about that set of choices and what it determines?
Margaret Hagerman: I use the phrase bundled choices because it seemed to me that there were some pretty striking patterns that emerged with these families in terms of how they set up their children's lives. For example, I talk in the book about how choosing a neighborhood leads to a whole bunch of other choices—about schools, about the other people in the neighborhood. Decisions about who to carpool with, decisions about which soccer team to be on—you want to be on the same one as all your friends, and all these aspects of the kid's life are connected to the parents' choices about where to live.
I'm trying to show in the book that kids are growing up in these social environments that their parents shape. They're having interactions with other people in these environments, and that's, I think, where they're developing their own ideas about race and privilege and inequality.
Pinsker: Some of the parents in your book may see the problems with choosing mostly white neighborhoods or schools, but the explanation they usually provide for those choices is that they just want what's best for their children. This rationale is generally considered understandable, even honorable, but can you talk about its dark side?
Hagerman: One of the things I talk about in the book is what I call this "conundrum of privilege," which is that these parents have a lot of resources economically as well as status as white people. They can then use those resources to set up their own child's life in ways that give them the best education, the best health care, all the best things. And we have this collectively agreed-upon idea in our society that being a "good parent" means exactly that—providing the best opportunities you can for your own child.
But then some of these parents are also people who believe strongly in the importance of diversity and multiculturalism and who want to resist racial inequality. And these two things are sort of at odds with one another. These affluent white parents are in a position where they can set up their kids' lives so that they're better than other kids' lives. So the dark side is that, ultimately, people are thinking about their own kids, and that can come at the expense of other people's kids. When we think about parents calling up the school and demanding that their child have the best math teacher, what does that mean for the kids who don't get the best math teacher?
