ABSTRACT
It is widely recognized in the research literature that by age five, children have achieved a basic, adult-like concept of race (Horowitz, 1939; Clark and Clark, 1947; Proshansky, 1966; Katz, 1976). The consistency of this finding is remark-able in light of the elusiveness of race as a concept. As the Encyclopedia Britannica points out, the term race has variously referred to linguistic, national, cultural, social, and even political groupings. Although anthropologists and ethnologists have uneasily settled on the notion that race implies genetically transmitted differences, they continue to have considerable difficulty in differentiating among races, in agreeing about classification criteria, and in reaching consensus on the number of distinct racial groupings (Dunn & Dobzhansky, 1952).
