Racial Recognition by Nursery School Children in Lynchburg, Virginia

T HIS paper deals with the relationship of age, sex, race, and family status to the ability of nursery school children to recognize Negroes and whites. It is an analysis of a part of the data from research on race awareness conducted in the racially segregated city of Lynchburg, Virginia.' Other parts of the research, not included in this presentation, attempt to measure racial preference, willingness to associate with members of another race, and racial selfidentification. There have been several studies made of racial recognition among preschool children with which this analysis can be compared and contrasted,2 but this study differs from previous ones in the methods it uses and in its concentration on the relationship of social factors to racial recognition in a racially segregated community. An underlying assumption of this paper is that the ability to recognize racial differences reflects social training.