Alex Manning, Ph.D., a lecturer in the Yale Sociology Department, who teaches courses on racism, sports, families, and abolition, was quoted in a recent New York Magazine article to discuss Maggie Hagerman’s new book, Children of a Troubled Time: Growing Up with Racism in Trump’s America, and children’s racial learning more generally.
According to Manning, who has researched how young people make sense of race through youth sports, how children respond to Trump’s vitriol seems to reflect their preexisting racial and political educations. Some kids heard anti-racist narratives from parents while others heard Trump’s message reinforced at home; still others likely received no explicit guidance and had to decide what to make of Trump’s statements themselves. “The very strong, braggadocious racialized narrative that Trump’s pushing can stick more because there’s nothing else there to question it,” says Manning.