It is obvious that immigration trends have changed in Spain. Now citizens from South America and North Africa have gone beyond the borders and form part and joined the multicultural society we live in. But, how do minors perceive this situation? According to a study carried out by researchers of the Faculty of Education Sciences of the Universidad de Granada, “there are racial prejudices among the young”.
More than two hundred students of different school centres of the province of Granada have participated in the study. The researchers in charge of the project, Antonio Fernández Castillo and José Dionisio Fernández González, of the Department of Evolutionary and Education Psychology, have adapted and validated the available instruments for the evaluation of racism in adults for students aged between 12 and 14. It has allowed them to analyse both subtle and manifest racial prejudices in children.
Racial prejudice
They consider as subtle racism that type made from the distance and is “cooler” and indirect, whereas manifest racism is not the done thing in our society and appears in a more direct, open, intolerant and clear way.
The results drawn from the study point out that 63% of the students are egalitarians. a hopeful data for the new generations. However, 27% of the students are subtle racists, and 10% are manifest or open racists.
More subtle with age
The researchers have detected significant differences related to the age of the students. Although manifest racism represents a minority of the studied cases, it predominates in younger students. On the other hand, subtle racism is accentuated as the students get older. The researchers have observed in them a parallelism with adults´ behaviour. Both adults and adolescents show a suppression of open racist expressions but they keep showing the subtle ones such as the exaggeration of cultural differences, thinking that personas are very different from each other, defending their own values or showing less positive emotions towards minorities.
According to the experts, when children are 13 years old manifest racism reduces and turns into subtle racism.
In any scale, the researchers maintain that boys are more racist than girls. It could be due to the fact that “boys have different attitudes and social values and are affected by other social and family influences, which makes them assume a different role than women”.
Among the measure proposed, the researchers plead for promoting values education both in the family and the school ambit as a primordial component of personal and social children development, working with minors in the respect for different traditions and cultures, and encouraging social rapprochement.
Reference: Prof Antonio Fernández Castillo. Department of Evolutionary and Educational Psychology. Universidad de Granada.
Phone numbers: 958 249 037 / 958 243 968.
E-mail: afcastil@ugr.es