I don't remember where I got the recommendation for The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism, but I suspect it was Shannon at Peter's Cross Station. In any case, I sat down to read this with very few preconceptions, knowing very little, in fact, about how kids learn race and racism.
It's a fairly academic book, and the introduction is the densest part. The authors are positioning their research against theories of child development that argue that kids learn linearly and primarily cognitively. Theorists with these leanings had found that young kids didn't "see" or "understand" race because their seeing or understanding didn't show up on the question-and-answer type tests researchers gave them.
Instead, the authors used a least-adult research model to observe kids in their "natural setting," that is, with each other and away from other adults. One of the authors spent 11 months in a day-care/preschool center, carefully positioning herself as a non-authoritative adult and thus not an interruption to the children's free play -- even when they were doing and saying things they stopped in the presence of other adults.
And what she found was that they not only "saw" race (it was a very diverse center), but they "did race" -- that is, race was a concept they played with, tried on, and imposed upon each other. They used it to identify themselves, to identify others, and to reinforce and resist the hierarchies of identity that exist in the wider society.
She concluded, unsurprisingly, that children learn relationally -- they observe the world around them, draw conclusions, and experiment with those conclusions to see how well they hold up and work. In other words, they mimic the race relations they see around them -- even if the race relations they see are at odds with what they are explicitly told about difference.
She also observed that white adults -- both white parents and the white teachers who were committed to positive diversity -- assumed that kids don't see difference unless it's explicitly taught to them, despite evidence to the contrary. They held on to these assumptions quite dogmatically, in fact, and in the few instances they couldn't deny the children's knowledge (one little girl used the n-word to refer to another), they were more focused on denying responsibility for that learning than in either intervening in it or addressing its effects.
So, what does all of this mean for me as a white adult and potential parent? It means telling the truth about race and racism, even to very little kids when they ask. It means being rigorously honest with myself about how I engage race and learning how to undo the ways I participate in maintaining structures of power. It means paying attention not just to what people say, but to how they act and respond. It means that we all have a lot of work to do.