Anti-Black racism remains a pervasive crisis in the United States today. Racist social systems are rooted in prejudicial beliefs that reinforce and perpetuate racial inequalities. These beliefs have their developmental origins in early childhood and are difficult to change once entrenched in adolescence and adulthood. What causes children to form prejudicial beliefs and racial biases—and what steps can be taken to preempt them from forming—remain open questions. Here we show that children’s exposure to and beliefs about racial inequalities predict the formation of anti-Black biases in a sample of 712 White children (4-8 years) living across the United States. Drawing from constructivist theories in developmental science, we outline a novel account of the emergence of racial bias in early childhood: As children observe racial inequalities in the world around them, they develop beliefs about the causal factors underlying those inequalities. Children who believe that inequalities reflect the inherent superiority/inferiority of racial groups develop biases that perpetuate this worldview, whereas those who recognize the extrinsic causes of racial inequalities develop attitudes geared towards rectification. Our results demonstrate the importance of early intervention to disrupt problematic beliefs before they emerge and highlight children’s awareness of structural racism as an important target for anti-racist intervention.

By 4-years of age, White children from across the United States begin to exhibit an awareness of racial inequalities, along with ingroup preferences for other White children. The present study explored how the size and racial diversity of White children’s social network (e.g., friends, family, classmates) and neighborhood (zip code) are related to variation in their explanations for racial disparities and anti-Black bias among a sample of 395 White children (aged 4-11 years old; Mage = 6.6 years) from 270 unique zip codes across the United States. White children in neighborhoods with low diversity were more likely to endorse an extrinsic explanation for racial inequality as their network diversity increased, whereas network diversity did not relate to children’s choices for those that lived in neighborhoods with high diversity. These findings held even after controlling for parents’ beliefs about diversity, which were themselves positively correlated with children’s network and neighborhood diversity. Surprisingly, there was no evidence that either network or neighborhood diversity related to children’s anti-Black bias. Results demonstrate how the diversity of children’s social networks and neighborhoods affect children’s developing racial beliefs in contextually-dependent ways.