You've got to be taught before it's too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You've got to be carefully taught!

So sang Lieutenant Cable in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Musical South Pacific, neatly compressing for an earlier generation the argument that racism is not something you are born with, but something you learn.

And if racism can be taught, then it follows that it can be un-taught. Accordingly, many schools across the US nowadays use various anti-racism curricula. But very few of these programs have undergone rigorous evaluations, so their worth remains unknown.

Julie M. Hughes and Rebecca S. Bigler of the University of Texas and Sheri R. Levy of the State University of New York tried to remedy these shortcomings by testing a short and simple example of the range on offer.

Their evaluation was simple, too. They wrote short biographies of 12 famous Americans, six of whom were European American and six were African American. They created two versions of each African American biography: one included information about discriminatory experiences endured by each person at the hands of European Americans; the other edited out those disclosures.

Hughes and company then took their biographies to two schools, one that primarily served European American, the other mostly African American students. Half of the participating classrooms in each school received six lessons that used the versions of the biographies including the accounts of discrimination. The other half were given the same series of lessons but using the discrimination-free teaching materials. The researchers then surveyed the children about their racial attitudes. In all, 117 children, aged 6-11 years, participated.

It emerged that European American children who learned about historical racism had more positive and fewer negative views of African Americans than did those whose lessons that did not include information about racism.

By contrast, African American children who learned about racism and African American children who received similar lessons that omitted information about racism did not differ in their racial attitudes. Rather, both types of lessons appeared to have positive effects on African American children’s racial attitudes, especially in relation to younger children.

The authors suggest that the discrimination information might not have affected the African American students because they knew more about racism at the start of the program than did the European Americans.

More research on the long-term impact of this type of anti-racism program is needed, but Hughes and her colleagues take heart that such a simple intervention can have a positive – and measurable – impact.

• Summary of “Consequences of Learning About Historical Racism Among European American and African American Children” by Julie M. Hughes, Rebecca S. Bigler, and Sheri R. Levy in Child Development, November/December 2007, Volume 78, Number 6, pp1689-1705.

[For an unexpected sidelight on the song “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” and the politics of race in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical South Pacific, see the essay of that name by Andrea Most in Theatre Journal, 2000, Volume 52, Number 3, pp307–337. She writes: “During a touring production of the show in Atlanta in 1953, the song again raised hackles, this time offending some Georgia legislators who introduced a bill to outlaw entertainment having, as they stated, 'an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow.' State Representative David C. Jones claimed that a song justifying interracial marriage was implicitly a threat to the American way of life." She also quotes Hammerstein's retort: "I am most anxious to make the point not only that prejudice exists and is a problem, but that its birth lies in teaching and not in the fallacious belief that there are basic biological and physiological and mental differences between races”.]