The Collaborative Emergence of Race in Children's Play: A Case Study of Two Summer Camps

Abstract

This study empirically explores the emergence and use of concepts of race in preadolescents' collaborative peer cultures and interactions. Using an interactionist approach, I show how the ways in which kids established and negotiated race category membership and then evaluated each other's actions accordingly, and informed how they used clique dynamics in structuring peer relations in two racially varied recreational settings. Children in the predominantly white setting and the multiracial setting appropriated, used, and negotiated race somewhat similarly, particularly regarding the invisibility and nascent emergence of whiteness as a racial category and the assumption of a shared culture and connection among kids of color. They differed, though, in how they complicated and resisted race-based clique dynamics. Because of the presence of kids of color, the greater range of relational options available to youths in the multiracial setting introduced a wider range of power dynamics into clique structures and more instability and fluidity into conceptions of race, thus disrupting easy definitions of in-group and out-group membership and affecting the social negotiation of identity in the children's peer cultures.