Quote:
Originally Posted by Ben E Lou
TV and the "good-guy vs. bad-guy" dark-light stuff have influences here, but they're minor. Five-year-olds are far more concrete than that. The much bigger influence is "Jimmy Black was mean to me today, but Jimmy White gets gold stars on all of his papers." But hey, feel free to pretend.
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I don't think this is the case. I think that the influence of culture/nature is much stronger at 5 years old, and the influence is that darkness equals evil. Nothing to do with skin color at all, and not particular to our culture. What primal story, fairy tale or fantasy does not equate the bad guys with darkness and shadow? Even without TV that fact gets put across, and I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't largely biological. I think that is having a much larger influence on a five year old than their limited life experience. Where we live there are very few people with dark skin, and so my kids probably have more exposure to blacks through things like books about Jackie Robinson or Martin Luther King and almost no exposure to any concept of black people being "scary" or "mean". Yet I wouldn't be surprised if they equated a darker person a being mean, just through this primal correlation between dark and evil.