White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America (NYU Press 2018) This book explores how white, affluent children growing up in an urban and suburban Midwestern community learn about race, racism, inequality, and privilege in the context of their white families. Based on a two-year ethnography that included participant observations of families in their everyday lives as well as child-centered interviews with middle-school aged children and interviews with their parents, Hagerman explores how the process of white racial socialization, or racial learning, unfolds in affluent, white families, and the role that white parents and kids play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality.
Kids on Racism, Politics, and Inequality: From Massachusetts to Mississippi Drawing on interviews with kids from the two very different social contexts of Mississippi and Massachusetts, this study compares what children in the present moment think about racism, politics, and social inequality in America, how the social context in which children live shapes their perspectives, and why differences across contexts matter in terms of what kids think and how they experience it. To read an essay on this work, please visit: The Los Angeles Review of Books, Quarterly Journal, No. 10, Childhood Issue, "Those Who Care and Those Who Don't: Children and Racism in the Trump Era" by Margaret A. Hagerman.
Selected research published in academic journals and edited volumes: (click link below image to access)