LST FAVES: How To Not (Accidentally) Raise A Racist

This is Bridgette Vittrup.

I am an associate professor of child development at Texas Woman's University.

Bridgette has done a lot of research on the question that we're examining today: What are the most effective ways for white families to talk to their kids about race? Bridgette studies how children develop racial attitudes and the many roles that parents play in that development.

Now, before we get started, I want to acknowledge that race is a topic that a lot of white parents avoid because it's just plain old complicated.

It's hard to know where to begin.

But Bridgette is here to show us that talking about race with our kids doesn't have to be hard.

She's got some really simple, approachable ways to help us get started.

We asked you guys to send in your questions on talking to your kids about race, and Bridgette will be answering some of those.

First, we're gonna hear more about her research, which is super fascinating.

Bridgette Vittrup is white, and she's passionate about discussing race and racism both professionally and personally.

I am married, uh, to my husband, Glenn, who is a Black man, and so I have two biracial children.

Alonzo is eight, and Aliyah is four.

four.Bridgette lives with her family in Texas, in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, but she didn't grow up in the United States.

She's actually from Denmark.

And at the time, it was probably about 98%, 99% white.

And, um, in a country like that, you are never...

Race is not really part of your identity because you never see anybody that looks different than you.

So, um, this was not anything that I really started talking about until I moved to the United States and I was kinda confronted with the fact that, you know, things are different.

When Bridgette was 20 she moved to the States for college, and she says after she'd been here a little while, the way people talked about race struck her as odd.

Like, why were people talking about the civil rights movement as if it were ancient history, while at the same time she was hearing about racial inequality happening all around her?

And I remember a, um, a guy I went to school with that was talking about, um, you know, why is it that only, you know, Black people have to show their card when you go to, um, Sam's Club or a Costco, and I thought, "Well, that's weird." And, and we kinda had a conversation about it.

Um, and so I think it was just little by little some of those conversations, being exposed to them, um, that kinda made me realize this is not just a historical thing.

This has been, this is still going on.

Bridgette's interest in race ramped up in grad school.

She was studying psychology, and she was curious about how children developed racial attitudes and biases.