Children's distributive justice judgments: aversive racism in Euro-American children?

Euro-American 2nd- and 4th-grade children (Ms=7.67 and 9.82 years) heard stories about Black and White characters who produced artwork yielding a windfall reward. Children allocated rewards to characters, justified their allocations, and judged the fairness of patterns representing different justice principles. Older children allocated more money to Black than White productive characters and to White than Black needy characters, consistent with predictions from aversive racism theory. Rationales most often relied on equality principles; older children gave more equity-based justifications for Black than for White characters. Fairness ratings of patterns representing 4 justice principles revealed effects for age and character race. Implications for understanding the developmental course of moral judgments as they apply to racial differences are discussed.