This Is the Most Depressing Study I've Ever Read

White parents have a whole lot of work to do.

On Tuesday, I received an email alerting me to some new research papers being published in one of my favorite journals, Developmental Psychology. Scanning the table of contents, one paper immediately stood out to me: “Exploring Whether and How Black and White Parents Talk With Their Children About Race: M(ai)cro Race Conversations About Black Lives Matter.”

I immediately downloaded it and read it. It filled me with sadness and rage. We still have so very much work to do to educate White parents — including, if not especially, highly educated White parents — about the realities of racism and the importance of talking to kids about it.

Today I’m going to describe what the study found and share what I think we can collectively do (yes, all of us!) to start making things better. Because I know you’re all here in part because you want to make the world a better place.

In the new study, researchers at Northwestern, Wake Forest, Tulane, the University of Washington, and Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago surveyed 344 Black and 381 White economically and educationally-diverse parents of 8- to 11-year-olds about whether and how they had talked to their children about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The survey was conducted in 2020 and 2021, before support for the movement started to wane. The parents were recruited from 11 major cities.

First, the parents were asked if they’d ever talked to their kids about BLM. If the parents said yes, they were asked to share what they told their kids about it. If they said no, they were asked why they hadn’t talked to their kids about it and whether they’d had other conversations with them about racism. The researchers then organized the responses they got into various categories.

What they found was so very disheartening.

Let’s start with the “yes” responses and what parents said to kids when they did talk about BLM. Overall, 80 percent of parents — 84 percent of Black parents, and 76 percent of White parents — said that they had talked their kids about BLM. This sounds promising, not least because studies suggest that prior to 2020, only about 30 percent of White parents talked to their kids about racism.

But hold that thought. When these parents were asked what they’d said to their kids, a less rosy picture emerged among the White parents in particular.