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What an incredibly sad thing.  A new study has found that a sample of mostly white American children from ages seven to 10 believe  that black children feel less pain than white children. Our research shows that a potentially very harmful bias in adults emerges during middle childhood, and appears to develop across childhood,” said the study’s lead investigator, Rebecca Dore, a Ph.D. candidate in developmental psychology at U.Va., at newswise.com. Dore noted that this finding is important "because many kinds of explicit biases emerge in early childhood – such as children wanting to play with friends of their own race – but those types of biases often decline in later childhood." But, she points out, the racial bias in children’s perceptions of others’ pain appears to strengthen from early to late childhood. The researchers found no evidence of a racial bias among their study participants at the age of five, but the bias began showing up among participants at the age o...

People are more likely to cross races for dating, but only with others they meet online, a new study has found. According to newswise.com,  race does still matter online. "People still self-segregate as much as they do in face-to-face interactions; most, that is, still reach out to members of their own racial background." But here's the exciting new twist: people are more likely to reciprocate an online cross-race overture than previous research has suggested. "And – once they have replied to a suitor from a different race – people are then themselves more likely to cross racial lines and initiate interracial contact in the future," the Web site reports. It's not every race that's willing to be open to other ethnic groups.  "The tendency to initiate contact within one’s own race, the study observes, is strongest among Asians and Indians and weakest among whites," newswise.com notes. What I found really interesting in the report of this...

I've been thinking a lot about Trayvon.  But it really didn't hit home until a friend posted on Facebook that she didn't want to have to worry about her two black boys as they grow up. I know those boys.  The older was a friend of my son's when they were younger.  The younger I know only as a baby, and what a beautiful one.  To think of these precious children at risk just because they're boys, and black, stopped my heart for a minute. But that's what all this is really about.  The stigma and dread black boys and men live with every day of their lives.  As President Obama said yesterday, he, too, has been followed in department stores and heard locks click on cars when he was walking by. How can you live this way?  Yet we expect members of the black race to endure this, no, expect this, when they go out into the world.  President Obama also gave voice to the fact that very often, it's black men who are committing the crimes.  But how e...