Hillel Hinton-Williams

How do we teach our children to live in our complex world? Being born into any number of circumstance a child would seem to need an infinite amount of schooling in order to learn the rules, norms, values, traditions of the culture they live within. So why don’t they? How do children as young as 4 years old show a complex understanding of the norms and biases of their culture?

Socialization! It is the developmental processes through which individuals acquire the values, behaviors, and motivations necessary to become competent members of a culture. Every sub -culture has it’s own idiosyncrasies and traditions which requires a unique method of socialization to perpetuate itself through new members. As this is true for artist or athlete or architectural cultures it is more deeply true for social identity categories like ethnicity, race, sex, gender, religion, and many, many others.

This paper focuses on Racial/Ethnic Socialization(written as cultural Socialization throughout). More specifically this paper looks at how ERS is presented in a Science-Fiction Narrative and relates that presentation to real world socialization practices. From Preparation for Bias, to promotions of mistrust, and culture specific values and coping mechanisms I analyze different methods of Socialization present in the Novel, “Red Rising” by Pierce Brown.