Around the globe, individuals are affected by exclusion, discrimination, and prejudice targeting individuals from racial, ethnic, and immigrant backgrounds as well as crimes based on gender, nationality, and culture (United Nations General Assembly, 2016). Unfortunately, children are often the targeted victims (Costello & Dillard, 2019). What is not widely understood is that the intergroup biases underlying systemic racism start long before adulthood with children displaying notable signs of intergroup bias, sometimes before entering grade school. Intergroup bias refers to the tendency to evaluate members of one’s own group more favorably than someone not identified with one’s group and is typically associated with prejudicial attitudes. Children are both the victims and the perpetrators of bias. In this review, we provide evidence of how biases emerge in childhood, along with an analysis of the significant role of intergroup friendships on enhancing children’s well-being and reducing prejudice in childhood. The review focuses predominantly on the context of race, with the inclusion of several other categories, such as nationality and religion. Fostering positive cross-group friendships in childhood helps to address the negative long-term consequences of racism, discrimination, and prejudice that emerges in childhood and continues through to adulthood.

This study investigated 3‐ to 11‐year‐old US children's (N = 348) perceptions of access to resources, social group preferences, and resource distribution decisions and reasoning when hypothetical peers differed in social class (poor or rich) and race (Black or White). Data were collected in 2019. The sample reflected the region where data were collected in terms of gender (44% girls, 30% boys, 1% another identity) and race and ethnicity (46% White, 10% multiracial or multiethnic, 9% Black, 5% Latinx, 2% Asian, 3% another identity), and parents reported a higher average level of education than the regional average. Results revealed both marked age differences in children's perceptions, preferences, decisions, and reasoning and specific combinations of peer group memberships that were especially likely to receive preferential treatment. With age, children perceived that rich peers had greater access to resources than poor peers, but when both peers were poor, White peers were perceived to have more resources than Black peers. Social group preferences changed with age, from mixed social class and racial group preferences, to preferences for rich peers, to dislike for rich peers. Resource allocation decisions and reasoning reflected both social group and fairness concerns: young children distributed more to White peers especially if they were also rich, participants in middle childhood explicitly favored rich peers regardless of their race, and older children distributed more to poor peers and reasoned about either moral concerns for equity or social class stereotypes. Thus, overall, younger children's responses often reflected broader economic and racial inequalities while older children often sought to create more equity, though not always for moral reasons.