White parents who tell their kids that race doesn’t matter are ignoring the long shadow of racism

Published Wednesday, The Conversation reports on new research into how white families in the American South talk—or don't talk—about race with their children. Sociologist James Thomas of the University of Mississippi says his team interviewed more than a hundred white Southerners and found roughly one in three said they never discussed race with their kids at all, while another forty-four percent leaned on race-neutral language, teaching children to see people as simply "people" rather than as members of racial groups. Thomas argues that even this well-intentioned framing can obscure the everyday reality of racism, leaving children unprepared to recognize it in their own lives. The research comes amid renewed public attention to the topic following the death of eighteen-year-old Nolan Wells, a Black teenager who went missing during a July fourth boat trip with a group of white friends on the Mississippi Gulf Coast and was later found dead; the cause of his death remains undetermined as investigations continue, The Conversation notes.

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