Are children in kindergarten innocent? According to a new study by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality, whether someone says yes depends largely on race.

The survey, which drew on a survey of 325 US adults, found that Americans as a whole view black girls as less innocent and more mature for their age, from ages 5 to 14.

The report calls this “adultification,” when children are viewed as more mature than they really are. “It’s the stereotype of black women as being loud, aggressive, and over-sexualized,” Jamilia Blake of Texas A&M University, one of the report’s authors, told Science of Us. “You can trace [these stereotypes] all the way back to slavery.”

Posed a series of questions, survey participants were more likely to say that black girls, compared to white girls, need less nurturing, less protection, to be supported less, to be comforted less, are more independent, know more about adult topics, and know more about sex. Not only are these misconceptions wrong, but they can be harmful — leading to stereotyping in which innocent mistakes by kids are treated as if they’re willful crimes by adults and contributing to the overly harsh punishments of black kids.

There is suggestive evidence this leads to unfair treatment. A 2015 report from the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies found black girls are six times as likely to be suspended from school compared to white girls. And federal investigations have found that black students are punished more harshly than white students in schools even when black and white students engage in identical behavior.

Similarly, the latest report by the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality suggests that “the perception of Black girls as less innocent and more adult-like may contribute to more punitive exercise of discretion by those in positions of authority, greater use of force, and harsher penalties” in the juvenile justice system.

But the report also cautions that, before drawing definitive conclusions, more research is needed on the causality between perceptions of black girls’ maturity and innocence and their outcomes in schools and the justice system.

The new report acts as a follow-up to a 2014 study that found people view black boys as older and less innocent starting at the age of 10. “Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection,” Phillip Goff, an author of the 2014 study, said in a statement. “Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.”

This is also far from the only research to show that Americans’ broad perceptions of black people are very different from their perceptions of white people. Time and time again, studies have found evidence of such prejudice across multiple characteristics.

Studies find persistent signs of racism in the US

One series of studies, released earlier this year, used various visual tests to see how people perceive the bodies of white and black men. The findings were consistent: When participants believed the man in the images is black, they generally saw the man as larger, more threatening, and potentially more harmful in an altercation than a white person. And they were more likely to say use of force was justified against the black men than the white men.

Other research suggests there can be superhumanization bias at work, as well, with white people more likely to associate paranormal or magical powers with black people than with other white people. And the more they associate magical powers with black people, the less likely they are to believe black people feel pain.

Another study found people tend to associate what the authors call “black-sounding names,” like DeShawn and Jamal, with larger, more violent people than they do “white-sounding names,” like Connor and Garrett.

“I’ve never been so disgusted by my own data,” Colin Holbrook, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. “The amount that our study participants assumed based only on a name was remarkable. A character with a black-sounding name was assumed to be physically larger, more prone to aggression, and lower in status than a character with a white-sounding name.”

This is just a small sampling of the research. But no matter how these kinds of studies are conducted, there’s a clear bias going on: Many Americans tend to associate black people with criminal behavior, violence, and other negative qualities.

These biases can seriously impact people’s lives

We have seen real-life evidence of these biases at work.

Consider the 2014 Cleveland police shooting of 12-year-old Tamir Rice: After he was killed, the officers involved reported that they thought Rice was 20. While it’s impossible to get into these cops’ heads to see what they were thinking, it’s possible they genuinely believed Rice was older because they saw Rice as bigger than he really was. And that may have helped police justify lethal use of force that would otherwise be unthinkable for a 12-year-old boy.

This may help explain other police shooting disparities as well. Based on nationwide data collected by the Guardian, black Americans are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to be killed by police when accounting for population. In 2016, police killed black Americans at a rate of 6.66 per 1 million people, compared to 2.9 per 1 million for white Americans.

Some of these disparities are explained by socioeconomic factors — such as poverty, unemployment, segregation, and neglect by the police when it comes to serious crimes — that lead to more crime and violence in black communities. As a result, police tend to be more present in black neighborhoods — and therefore may be more likely to take policing actions, from traffic stops to arrests to shootings, in these areas.

But these structural disparities don’t appear to explain everything. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross found, “There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.” That suggests that perhaps other factors are involved in the disparities seen for these shootings, including racial bias.

It’s not just the criminal justice system, either. Racial biases can help explain why, for example, black Americans face worse job prospects. In one study, researchers sent out almost entirely identical résumés — except some had stereotypically white names and others had stereotypically black names. The white names were 50 percent more likely to be called back for interviews.

And they can help explain why black Americans get paid less. A 2015 analysis by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics found that black Americans with advanced degrees make roughly the same as white Americans with only bachelor’s degrees.

The list can go on and on. When Americans fundamentally perceive black people as different than white people, they are going to treat people differently based on their race. So racism remains a staple of American life.