I DON’T SEE RACE

Where Are Your Horns?

In eighth grade, a girl in my homeroom reached over and felt the top of my head and asked, “Where are your horns?” I had no idea what she was talking about. She sometimes called me “Jew,” and once she wrote “Joo” on my notebook. I wasn’t offended because I didn’t really understand what I was supposed to be. I was trying hard to fit into a small, almost entirely white Protestant community, and for a while I thought “Jew” might be some strange local term of affection.

There were other clues I missed. I heard adults talk about “Jewing” somebody down on a price: “I Jewed him from $500 to $300.” I thought they were saying “chewed.” This made no particular sense, but adolescence contains so many things that make no sense that I apparently filed it away with algebra, gym class, and girls.

One conversation can change a room.

What I didn’t understand was that the people around me had already decided something about me that I hadn’t yet figured out about myself. I was different, although I didn’t look different. I had the same skin color, wore the same clothes, spoke with the same accent. If racism was about how people looked, as I vaguely understood it then, what exactly was the problem with me?

I had learned about racism mostly through Black American history. There were enslaved people, segregation, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., drinking fountains, lunch counters, and grainy photographs of white people screaming at Black children trying to enter schools. Racism was awful, but it was also history, or so I thought. Then I graduated from high school in 1981 and discovered, although I didn’t fully understand it until much later, that mine was the last graduating class before the school was “desegregated.”

Desegregated in 1981. Even now, that date astonishes me. The Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 that state-mandated racial segregation in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause.¹ Somehow, twenty-seven years later, my community was still working through the practical implications.

At the time, I barely understood what was happening. My school was absorbed into a much larger system, and the old high school became one of several grade schools. I didn’t know I had been attending school in a community actively trying to remain overwhelmingly white, or that one of my teachers had been involved in resisting desegregation. I certainly didn’t understand my own peculiar place in all of it. As I remember it, among the students making our school somewhat less homogeneous were three Black kids, one Jewish kid, and a student with a physical disability.

I was the Jew. We were apparently diversity.

• 1954: Brown v. Board of Education declares state-mandated school segregation unconstitutional.¹

• 1964: Civil Rights Act.

• 1981: I graduate from a school still confronting desegregation.

• 27 years: Time between Brown and my community apparently receiving the memo.

Two years later, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, managed to provide an almost perfect description of this kind of box-checking diversity. Defending the composition of a federal coal-leasing commission in 1983, Watt announced, “I have a black, I have a woman, two Jews and a cripple. And we have talent.”² I remember hearing about it and thinking, That’s my school.

The Black students seemed to find different ways of fitting into a community that was simultaneously trying to prevent more Black students from arriving. One was from Trinidad, which somehow made him “exotic,” as though being from somewhere else put him into a slightly different category (although seeing him with his entire family dancing at a Friday assembly of the white student body was akin to watching a minstrel show.) Another was a big, funny guy whom everybody liked, and humor seemed to function as a kind of passport. The third was also enormously likable and, as I remember him, much more interested in people than school. He was also gay, although he was closeted and none of us talked about it. Given the place and time, that was hardly surprising. Gay people were still routine punch lines.

Looking back, I don’t know how consciously any of us adapted ourselves to that community. Maybe the Trinidadian kid was simply exotic to me. Maybe the funny guy was funny because he was funny. Maybe my gay classmate wasn’t spending every waking moment calculating how to fit in. It would be unfair to rewrite their adolescence for them forty-five years later. What I do remember is how difference seemed to work. People could be different and still be liked, even enormously popular, but certain kinds of difference were easier to accommodate when they arrived wrapped in something reassuring: funny, charming, agreeable, exotic. Other differences were better hidden.

I was doing my own version of fitting in. I wanted people to like me, so I laughed at jokes, tried not to make trouble and, for quite a while, didn’t even recognize when the joke was about me. This is one of the stranger things about childhood: you can be living inside a social system without understanding its rules. You simply begin learning which parts of yourself a particular room welcomes, which parts it tolerates, and which parts are better left outside.

We Didn’t Raise Him This Way

Years later, during my first psychiatric training at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I met a 12-year-old boy whose parents were alarmed because he had suddenly become intensely racist. This wasn’t a kid repeating something stupid he’d heard at school. He had become so distressed by the presence of a Black student in his art class that he managed to get himself moved to another class. His parents were horrified and kept saying, “We didn’t raise him this way.”

I believed them. They were liberal, thoughtful people, and nothing they described suggested a household where racial hatred was being served with dinner. More importantly, their son’s racism wasn’t occurring by itself. He was becoming increasingly suspicious, his thinking was changing, and eventually it became clear that he was developing severe paranoia. We treated him with an antipsychotic medication, and something remarkable happened: the racism disappeared.

I don’t mean the medication transformed a racist child into an enlightened one. Antipsychotics do many useful things, but multicultural education is not generally listed in the package insert. We treated his paranoia, and as the paranoia receded, so did his fixation on the Black child.

I’ve thought about him many times since, not because his case suggests racism is a psychiatric illness. It doesn’t. Most racism has nothing to do with psychosis, and describing prejudice as mental illness would let the rest of us off the hook far too easily. What fascinated me was the order in which things seemed to happen. The boy was frightened first. His mind then needed to explain the fear, and once it went looking for someone to blame, it didn’t have to invent a category. The category was already sitting there waiting for him.

Psychiatrists see this process in an unusually exposed form in paranoia. Something feels terribly wrong, and the mind begins constructing a story to explain why. Depending on the person and the culture surrounding them, the culprit might become the CIA, the neighbors, immigrants, Black people, Jews, Muslims, or whoever happens to be available and believable. The fear can be completely real even when the explanation isn’t.

We prefer to imagine that our minds work in the opposite direction. We gather evidence, think carefully about it, reach a conclusion, and then have an emotional response. Sometimes we even do. But humans are also remarkably good at feeling threatened first and deciding who is responsible afterward. Research on intergroup bias suggests that perceived threat, uncertainty, group identification and social categorization can all intensify the distinction between “us” and “them.”³ That boy hadn’t invented racism, and his parents hadn’t taught it to him. His illness had simply reached into the culture surrounding him and found a ready-made suspect.

His parents were therefore right when they said they hadn’t raised him that way. The problem was that parents aren’t the only people raising children. The rest of us are in the room too.

Who Decides Which Differences Matter?

That boy made me reconsider something I had never understood about my own childhood. I had assumed prejudice began with noticing an obvious difference. Black people looked different from white people, so some white people became racist. It was a crude theory, but I was a kid. What never fit was my own experience because I didn’t look different. The girl searching my head for horns hadn’t discovered anything by looking at me. Somebody had already told her where to look.

That eventually became the more interesting question: who decides which differences matter?

Children notice everything. They notice skin color, accents, clothes, hair, bodies, height, weight, behavior, who smells funny, who has braces and who can’t throw a baseball. Yet we don’t build social hierarchies around every difference children detect. The differences have to acquire meaning, and that meaning comes from somewhere.

Social psychology provides a wonderfully strange demonstration of how little it can take to get this machinery moving. In Henri Tajfel’s famous “minimal group” experiments, people were divided into groups on essentially arbitrary grounds, without an existing history of hostility or meaningful conflict. Even these nearly meaningless categories could produce favoritism toward one’s newly invented in-group.⁴ Later research has repeatedly found versions of this minimal-group effect, although the size and expression of the effect depend on context and culture.⁵

• Minimum requirement for forming an “us”: surprisingly little.⁴

• Long history of conflict required: apparently not.⁴

• Actual biological difference required: no.

• Human ability to turn an arbitrary category into something meaningful: disturbingly efficient.

• Human ability to agree about what the categories mean: considerably worse.

This doesn’t mean human beings are “born racist.” It means something more interesting and, in some ways, more troubling. We appear remarkably prepared to organize ourselves into groups, but the content of those groups is learned. Evolution didn’t put Jew, Black, Muslim, or immigrant into the human brain. Culture fills in the blanks.

Nobody needed to give the girl in my homeroom a formal lecture on antisemitism before she looked for horns. The lesson had already arrived. Nobody needed to explain to my psychiatric patient that a Black child could become the object of his fear. When his frightened mind needed a suspect, the culture had already supplied one. Sometimes the lesson comes from parents, but it can just as easily come from friends, jokes, television, churches, schools, neighborhoods, politicians, or simply noticing who lives where and who seems welcome in which rooms.

This is why I’ve never found “I don’t see race” particularly convincing. Of course we see differences. The more interesting question is what we decide those differences mean. Human beings certainly appear to have an enormous capacity for tribalism, but tribalism and racism aren’t the same thing. The former supplies an astonishingly flexible us-and-them architecture; societies supply the names, histories, stereotypes and hierarchies that fill it. Research on social categorization has spent decades trying to understand both the ease with which these boundaries form and how making identities more complex can sometimes weaken them.⁶

Once those categories acquire a history, they begin accumulating stories: They are dangerous, they are greedy, they are lazy, they are taking something from us, they don’t belong here. The nouns change remarkably easily. The basic story barely changes at all.

Einstein’s Other Life

Albert Einstein understood something about this that we rarely include in the version of him taught in school. We learn Einstein as the man with the wild hair, the violin and E = mc². We learn that he transformed physics, fled Nazi Germany and eventually settled in Princeton. That version is certainly important. Relativity did, after all, rearrange our understanding of the universe.

What I don’t remember learning was what Einstein did after he got here.

Einstein had watched Germany transform Jews from neighbors into an alien population living inside their own country. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and never returned to live in Germany. His property was seized, his writings were targeted, and Nazi attacks on “Jewish physics” turned one of the world’s most famous scientists into an enemy of the state.⁷ He settled in Princeton and discovered that a country capable of recognizing the insanity of Nazi racial ideology remained remarkably comfortable with its own racial hierarchy.

Einstein became friendly with the singer and activist Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the great contralto Marian Anderson. When Anderson came to Princeton and was denied lodging at the Nassau Inn because she was Black, Einstein invited her to stay at his home, the beginning of a friendship that lasted for years.⁸ This wasn’t a photo opportunity arranged by somebody’s publicist. It was what Einstein did when a friend wasn’t allowed into the hotel.

In 1946, he traveled to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the first degree-granting historically Black college in the United States. He received an honorary degree, lectured on relativity and spoke against racism, calling segregation a “disease of white people” and saying he did not intend to remain quiet about it.⁹

That Einstein barely appeared in my education.

• 1933: Einstein leaves Germany after Hitler comes to power.⁷

• 1946: Visits Lincoln University and publicly condemns American racism.⁹

• 1951: W.E.B. Du Bois is indicted by the federal government; Einstein offers to testify as a character witness.¹⁰

• Amount of this I remember learning in school: approximately none.

• Amount I remember learning about Einstein’s hair: considerably more.

Why?

I don’t mean this as some conspiracy in which America’s school boards secretly agreed to hide the radical Einstein. The simpler explanation may be more interesting. We like geniuses clean. Einstein gave us relativity. Martin Luther King Jr. gave us civil rights. Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. History becomes much easier to teach when everyone stays in the chapter where we put them.

Einstein didn’t stay in his chapter.

He could easily have decided that antisemitism was his problem. He had certainly earned the right. His country had turned against him because he was Jewish, and he had fled a regime that would murder millions of people for belonging to the same category. Nobody would have blamed him if he had spent the rest of his political life concerned primarily with Jewish survival.

Instead, something about being the target seems to have widened his field of vision. He recognized the machinery. The histories of Nazi antisemitism and American anti-Black racism were obviously not identical, and Einstein didn’t need them to be. He seems to have understood the more basic process by which a society decides that one group belongs less than another.

That may be the part of Einstein’s biography worth teaching alongside relativity.

What Did We Learn?

That is also the part of Jewish history that has always mattered most to me. The lesson cannot simply be that terrible things happened to Jews, therefore Jews must protect Jews. Of course Jews should protect Jews. My great-aunts and great-uncles had a wonderfully concise summary of several thousand years of Jewish history: “Everyone wants to kill the Jews.”

It wasn’t a particularly nuanced theory of international relations, but history had supplied them with an uncomfortable amount of supporting evidence.

That was part of why I became an ardent Zionist when I was young. Zionism didn’t feel like one more political ideology. It felt like the obvious conclusion of Jewish history. Jews had been expelled from countries they considered home, confined to ghettos, subjected to pogroms and finally murdered industrially by a modern European state. Political Zionism arose in late nineteenth-century Europe in precisely this environment of nationalism, antisemitism and growing arguments that Jews needed political self-determination.¹¹ If Jewish survival always depended on somebody else’s willingness to let Jews remain, then Jews needed one place where nobody else controlled the door.

Israel meant Jews finally had a room from which they could not be expelled.

I still understand that need. I don’t look back at my younger self and think, What an idiot. Quite the opposite. Given the history I knew and the family I came from, it made enormous sense. What has changed is that I now find myself thinking more about the door. What happens when people who desperately needed a room acquire the power to decide who else gets to remain in it?

That question has become increasingly uncomfortable as I watch Israel, Gaza and the wider Middle East. I don’t experience this as a choice between being Jewish and somehow betraying Judaism, or between supporting Israel and wanting Israel to disappear. I experience it as an argument taking place inside the Jewish identity I inherited. If centuries of Jewish history taught me that dehumanization is dangerous, I don’t know how to suspend that lesson when the people being dehumanized aren’t Jews.

There is no magical moral property that comes from having been persecuted. Victims do not automatically become more compassionate people, and collective trauma can leave communities with many legacies, including vigilance, fear and a powerful concern with future threat.¹² Sometimes people who have experienced exclusion become especially sensitive to the exclusion of others. Sometimes people who spent generations worrying about being thrown out become extraordinarily protective of the room once they finally possess the keys.

That isn’t particularly Jewish. It’s particularly human.

• Number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust: approximately six million.¹³

• Phrase that came to symbolize one lesson of the Holocaust: “Never Again.”

• Precise definition of who is included in “Never”: apparently still under discussion.

• Precise definition of who is included in “Again”: same problem.

This is where Einstein seems important to me again. He didn’t have to stop being Jewish to care about Black Americans. Recognizing somebody else’s persecution didn’t diminish his own history. It enlarged what that history meant.

Perhaps that is what experience is supposed to do.

What Is Racism?

When I was young, I thought racism required obvious hatred. A racist was somebody screaming a slur, burning a cross, or refusing to let a Black child enter a school. It was Bull Connor and fire hoses. It was obvious, ugly and performed by people who presumably knew exactly what they were doing.

Those people certainly exist, but after spending a career listening to how human beings actually think, I find the territory before hatred much more interesting. Who gets assumed to be normal? Who gets treated as suspicious? Who has to be charming before being accepted? Who is allowed to make a mistake without proving something about everyone who looks like them? Who gets to be an individual, while someone else becomes the representative of an entire group?

Racism doesn’t necessarily begin with hatred. It can begin much earlier, when a difference becomes a category, the category acquires a story, and the story begins determining who belongs. The sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois famously described the “color-line” as the central problem of the twentieth century, recognizing that racial categories did much more than describe people; they organized power, opportunity and belonging.¹⁴ More than a century later, psychologists and social scientists are still studying how easily categorization can become stereotyping, bias and unequal treatment.

James Baldwin approached the problem from another direction. He repeatedly argued that America’s racial mythology told us at least as much about the people who needed it as about the people it was supposedly describing. Toni Morrison made a related point in her writing about the construction of “the Other”: creating an outsider can help define and stabilize the identity of the insider.¹⁵ The outsider isn’t simply somebody we dislike. Sometimes we need the outsider to help tell us who we are.

That idea takes me straight back to my 12-year-old patient. He was terrified, and his mind needed an outsider. The culture handed him one.

It also takes me back to my school. The community wasn’t simply deciding who Black people were. By fighting desegregation, it was also deciding who it was: white, Protestant, us.

I happened to look like them, which made the whole thing confusing. I had the right skin but apparently the wrong ancestry. The girl touching my head wasn’t examining me to discover whether I was Jewish. She already knew I was Jewish. She was examining me to see whether the story she’d been given about Jews was true.

For years I wondered how she knew I was different when I looked exactly like everyone around me. Eventually I realized that was the wrong question. She hadn’t discovered the difference.

Someone had taught her that it mattered.

The Room

I don’t think the solution to racism is pretending our differences don’t exist. “I don’t see race” has never struck me as much of an accomplishment because, of course, we see differences. Research with children suggests that awareness of socially meaningful racial categories develops early; what children eventually believe those categories mean is shaped by the social world around them.¹⁶ Human beings notice almost everything about one another, frequently including things we would prefer they didn’t.

I am Jewish, and that matters to me. Being Black matters. Being gay matters. Being Palestinian matters. Being Israeli matters. These identities contain histories, families, languages, cultures, wounds, jokes, recipes, memories and communities that people treasure. Making everyone identical isn’t tolerance. It sounds more like a very boring cocktail party.

The problem isn’t that we notice differences, but what we decide those differences mean, and eventually what they permit us to do to another human being. That’s what bothers me about racism and all its relatives. They take the most complicated creatures we know and make them simple. A person becomes a Jew, a Black person, a Muslim, an immigrant, a Palestinian, an Israeli. Eventually even those categories become unnecessarily complicated, and we’re left with the two categories human beings have been remarkably good at understanding for thousands of years: us and them. Once the label becomes more important than the person carrying it, things that would otherwise seem cruel or absurd can begin to sound perfectly reasonable.

Maybe that’s why I keep returning to the idea of the room. I spent part of my childhood trying to figure out how to get into one without realizing there was an entrance requirement. Some people were welcomed because they were funny or charming or useful or exotic. Some could enter but apparently needed to leave a part of themselves outside. Others were never supposed to get through the door at all. I was already inside, more or less, except that occasionally someone would remind me that I wasn’t quite the same as everyone else.

The strange thing is that being on the outside doesn’t necessarily teach us how to behave once we get inside. I wish history worked that neatly. People who have been excluded can become wonderfully sensitive to the exclusion of others, which is what I find so moving about Einstein’s involvement with Black Americans. But they can also become extremely protective of the room once they finally possess the keys. Fear doesn’t automatically disappear when people acquire power. Sometimes it simply gets a better security system.

Being Jewish hasn’t given me an answer to any of this. If anything, my own family cured me fairly early of the idea that a category tells you very much about the person inside it. My great-grandfather was a Lubavitcher rebbe. His children wanted almost nothing to do with his religious world. My great-uncle became a Reform rabbi. My parents wanted me to become a rabbi despite not really raising me to believe in God, and my mother once offered a visiting rabbi a ham and cheese sandwich. I became a psychiatrist. If somebody had asked me to identify the authentic Jew in that collection, I wouldn’t have known where to begin.

What that history did leave me with was a fairly reliable suspicion of certainty about other groups of people. When somebody tells me an entire population doesn’t belong, I want to know why. When I’m told those people are inherently dangerous, incapable of reason, or destined to hate us, I become even more suspicious. And when cruelty toward them is described as unfortunate but necessary for our own safety, the language begins to sound familiar. The groups change, the histories are different, and the suffering should never be lazily equated, but the stories people tell themselves before excluding or hurting other human beings have an uncomfortable family resemblance.

Perhaps that is what Einstein recognized when he arrived in Princeton. The treatment of Black Americans wasn’t the Holocaust, and Einstein never needed it to be. He had seen what happens when a society begins turning neighbors into categories and categories into threats. He recognized enough of the machinery to object when he saw another version of its operating against somebody else. My 12-year-old patient’s illness exposed something similar from the opposite direction. His paranoia needed an explanation for his fear, and the culture offered him a person who could serve as the threat. Once we treated the fear, he no longer needed the story.

That makes me think differently about the girl in my eighth-grade homeroom. For years, I remembered the incident mainly because it was so bizarre. A girl felt my head looking for horns, and I was so clueless that I wasn’t even properly offended. I probably laughed. I was trying to fit in, after all, and laughing was much easier than stopping the conversation to review the history of European antisemitism, about which I knew considerably less than I thought I did.

What I understand now is that neither of us had invented what happened between us. She had inherited a story about Jews, and I had inherited a different story about America. Her story told her that Jews were strange enough that perhaps we really did have horns. Mine told me that racism was something terrible white people had once done to Black people in grainy photographs. We were two kids standing in the same classroom with histories neither of us fully understood.

I spent years wondering how she knew I was different when I looked exactly like everyone else around me. Eventually I realized that this was the wrong question. She hadn’t discovered the difference by looking at me. Somebody had taught her that the difference mattered, just as somebody had taught my community that having more Black children in its schools represented something worth fighting against.

Maybe that is the part of racism I understand differently now. It doesn’t require us to stop seeing differences, and it probably couldn’t if it tried. It requires us to notice what happens after we see them: which differences become interesting, which become frightening, which become jokes, which determine who gets through the door, and which eventually become reasons for keeping somebody outside.

More than forty years later, I can still remember that girl’s hand on the top of my head. I don’t remember exactly what I said afterward, and I doubt either of us gave the encounter much thought once the bell rang. She didn’t find the horns she had been looking for, and I went on trying to fit into a place I didn’t yet understand.

It took me much longer to understand that the important thing wasn’t that I didn’t have horns. It was that somebody had taught her to look for them.

NOTES & SOURCES

1. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954). The Supreme Court held that state laws segregating public schools by race violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

2. Dale Russakoff, “Watt’s Off-the-Cuff Remark Sparks Storm of Criticism,” The Washington Post, September 21, 1983. The Congressional Record also preserves the quotation and contemporary reaction to it.

3. Miles Hewstone, Mark Rubin, and Hazel Willis, “Intergroup Bias,” Annual Review of Psychology 53 (2002): 575–604. The review discusses social identity, uncertainty, threat, status, power and other factors associated with intergroup bias.

4. Henri Tajfel, M. G. Billig, R. P. Bundy, and Claude Flament, “Social Categorization and Intergroup Behaviour,” European Journal of Social Psychology 1 (1971): 149–178. The classic minimal-group studies examined discriminatory behavior in the absence of prior hostility or meaningful conflict between groups.

5. Sabine Otten, “The Minimal Group Paradigm and Its Maximal Impact in Research on Social Categorization,” Current Opinion in Psychology 11 (2016): 85–89; see also the cross-cultural meta-analysis of in-group bias.

6. Richard J. Crisp et al., “40 Years of Multiple Social Categorization: A Tool for Social Inclusivity,” European Review of Social Psychology 32 (2021). The review examines how more complex and overlapping social categorization can reduce simple in-group/out-group representations and contribute to “re-humanisation.”

7. Albert Einstein’s departure from Germany followed Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Einstein renounced his German citizenship and did not return to reside in Germany; Nazi authorities targeted him and his work as part of their campaign against so-called “Jewish physics.” See the American Museum of Natural History’s Einstein exhibition and the Institute for Advanced Study’s Einstein biography.

8. Einstein’s friendship with Marian Anderson and his decision to host her after she was refused lodging in Princeton are documented in accounts of his civil-rights activities, including Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism (Rutgers University Press, 2005).

9. Einstein visited Lincoln University in May 1946, received an honorary doctorate, lectured on relativity and spoke against racial segregation. Lincoln University’s historical materials document the visit. See Lincoln University’s archival account of Einstein’s visit.

10. When W.E.B. Du Bois was prosecuted in 1951, Einstein offered to appear as a character witness. His intervention and broader relationship with Du Bois are discussed in Jerome and Taylor, Einstein on Race and Racism.

11. For the emergence of modern political Zionism in late nineteenth-century Europe and its relationship to European nationalism and antisemitism, see Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (Schocken Books, 2003), and Anita Shapira, Israel: A History (Brandeis University Press, 2012).

12. Research on collective and intergenerational trauma describes complex responses to historical persecution rather than a simple progression from victimization to greater empathy. See Rachel Yehuda et al., “Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation,” Biological Psychiatry 80 (2016): 372–380.

13. Approximately six million European Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany and its allies and collaborators during the Holocaust. See the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Holocaust Encyclopedia.

14. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois famously wrote that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.”

15. Toni Morrison explored the construction and function of racial “Otherness” throughout her work and explicitly in The Origin of Others (Harvard University Press, 2017).

16. Research in developmental psychology indicates that children perceive and reason about racial categories from an early age, while prejudice and the meanings attached to categories develop through interactions among cognitive development and the surrounding social environment. See Andrew Scott Baron and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “The Development of Implicit Attitudes,” Psychological Science 17 (2006): 53–58; and Kristin Pauker et al., “Race Essentialism and Social Contextual Differences in Children’s Racial Stereotyping,” Child Development 81 (2010): 1799–1813.