Racial habits form early in childhood through environmental cues.

Evidence

Not only do these habits shape how we interact with people of different racial backgrounds, they also guide how we think about and value groups collectively. And like many habits, they are formed when we are young. Take, for example, my family’s move to the west side of Moss Point. I had already learned a lot about race and racial inequality, even though I was eight years old, before my new neighbor’s father called me a nigger. White people were expected to live in one place and black people in another. Of course, there were exceptions, but the exceptions proved the rule. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 146

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The childhood-habituation claim explains the author’s premise that habits precede and exceed overt racist incidents — the 8-year-old already had learned race before the slur.

Related

• Racial habits form through daily experience rather than overt racism (similarity 0.85)
• Race is learned as practical know-how, not as explicit rules. (similarity 0.84)
• Racial habits are learned dispositions passed from parent to child (similarity 0.82)
• Racial beliefs are learned in a world not of our own making (similarity 0.82)
• Changing racial habits requires changing social worlds, not individual minds (similarity 0.80)
• Racial habits are inherited racism encoded in accumulated ordinary decisions (similarity 0.80)
• Overt racism no longer sustains racial inequality; daily habits do. (similarity 0.80)
• Racism is learned at school, not innate (similarity 0.80)
• Habits are acquired socially and deeply rooted, not instinctive (similarity 0.79)
• Racial habits are unthinking daily actions that sustain the value gap. (similarity 0.79)
• Habits are acquired, relational, and give order to experience (similarity 0.79)
• Inferring traits from outcomes while ignoring causal history yields racial habits (similarity 0.78)