Is Your Baby Racist?

What utter crap.

By the way, I didn't read it - I merely judged it based on a couple paragraphs. How's that for scientific method?

First, it's from Texas, where they put human beings to death - disproportionately black, poor, disabled.

Second, it provides children with categories - "White" and "Black" - and then purports to measure their attitudes based on the pre-fabricated categories. They could have said "boys" and "girls", "rich" and "poor", "Jews" and "non-Jews", "Christians" and "Muslims", "Mummy" and "Daddy", "straight" and "queer" - whatever - and got similar results.

Especially in a civilization where suspicion, fear, oppression, exploitation, disenfranchisement, marginalization, and hatred of the "Other" is at the very basis of social and economic life.

But, by conducting and popularizing phony pseudo-scientific "studies" like this one, the managers of this uncivilized society get away with blaming the ordinary folk. Why, they're friggin' born racist, aren't they?

 

I read the whole article - it's not about whether babies are racist.  It talks about the fact that children aren't colour blind and they do notice skin colour.  The article suggests that many parents are not talking to their children effectively about racism, even though they think they are.  Saying to a five year old that "everyone is equal" doesn't mean anything.  It also compares the way parents talk about gender issues with the way they talk about race issues.  It suggests that parents are doing a good job explaining that boy and girls can both grow up to be [insert profession here] but that same discussion is not had with respect to race. 

Stephen Colbert has his whole "I don't see race - I'm colour blind.  I've been told I'm white" schtick.  We know that's ridiculous. 

The article also says that parents of black children are more likely to talk to their kids about discrimination in part to prepare them that it's out there. 

Babblers who have children - how do you talk to your children about race and racism?  do you?  how old were your kids when you started?

Why would Newsweek name their cover something that has little to do with the article?

5 year olds are not babies.

Even among young children, I don't think "rich and poor" or "gay and straight" are really understood concepts. Certainly when I was that age, I had no idea that there were people who were gay and people who were straight.

Probably to a degree, though to no means close to the nuanced and more complex understanding an adult would have. And at that age, you wonder how much of it is conditioned into them, along the lines of "boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls" variety.

Unionist, I really don't see what the problem is with the actual research, getting kids to look at pictures and gauging their reactions.

Racism should be investigated at different ages imo, that would allow us to know at what age it happens, which would constrain theories of the causes of racism. Let's say hypothetically it happened between the ages of 4 and 5... then a logical explanation would be that kids are copying their parents. If it happens between the ages of 7 and 10, then your explanation about media influences would gather support.

Funding such research suggests that racism landed on earth yesterday and it's a totally mysterious phenomenon.

This is not science; it is a dominant class trying to cover up the social origins and cures of racism.

Otherwise, let's fund some bullshit professor to show 5-year-olds photos of nicely dressed suburbanites and homeless folks and see how they react. Oh, and photos of Hassidic Jews in full regalia. And what about men kissing each other on the lips? Shouldn't we see what age homophobia starts at? Wouldn't that be fun? Oh, and maybe some aborted foetuses while we're at it.

Nope. No. It's not disinterested research.

As for Texas, everything that emerges from there is evil until proof to the contrary.

 

In the gentlest possible way, I'd like to suggest that maybe, just possibly, it's conceivable that this article is not discussing issues of race and racism from an antiracist point of view. 

Personally, I started screaming at sentence 2:

If this is the starting point, it looks to me like research based either in blithe ignorance or in active malice. To then go on to suggest that the fact that the results showed racism proves children are reacting to visual cues, is to ignore the clear fact of a racist society -- something that's pervasive even in what Newsweek is pleased to call "liberal Austin." Sure, Austin has a good university and a statue of a black woman in the airport and lots of "nice" anglo liberals and all that, but I hardly think it's a racism-free island. 

I thought Unionist's post was satire, but then I read on and Unionist is really criticizing the research without reading what it was about, and because it was from Texas. It is pointless to argue with someone who does not follow the rules of debate and logic. Ze's response adds even more absurdity. It's like Ze didn't read the whole thing, or has some difficulty with reading comprehension.

Be happy to talk about it, Restructure, but it's tough to do so when your contribution is limited to "your posts are absurd." 

For instance, how do you feel about this quote from the article:

Hey! I found Dr. Vittrup's PhD. thesis!!!

I'm not going to ruin your fun by giving away any punch lines or plot twists. But she does a "background information form" for her victims survey subjects, which you'll find at Appendix D. There are only 14 questions - and here are 4 out of the 14!!!

 

Slightly off topic, I recommend reading Seeing a color-blind future by patricia williams. It is compiled from lectures she gave. 

" At this level, the creation of a sense of community is a lifelong negotiation of endless subtlety. One morning when my son was three, i took him to his preschool. He ran straight to a pile of lego and proceeded to work. I crossed the room and put his lunchbox in the refrigerator, where i encountered a little girl sitting at a table, beating a mound of clay into submission with a plastic roiling pin. "I see a Mommy," she said to me cheerfully. "That must mean that your little boy is here somewhere, too"

"Yes, he's here," I answered, thinking how sweetly precocious she was. "There, he's over by the Lego."

She strained to see around the bookcases. "Oh yes," she said "Now I see that black face of his."

I walked away without responding, enraged-how can one be so enraged at an innocent child-yet not knowing what to say just then, rushing to get the jaggedly dangerous broken glass of my emotions out of the room.

I remember being three years old so well. Three was the age when I learned that I was black, the colored kid, monkeychild, different. What made me so angry and wordless in this encounter forty years later was the realization that none of the little white children who taught me to see my blackness as a mark probably ever learned to see themselves as white. In our culture, whiteness is rarely marked in the indicative there! there! sense of my bracketed blackness. And the majoritarian privelege of never noticing themselves was the beginning of an imbalance from which so much, so much else flowed."

My 3 year-old grandson, has a black father, and a white mother and lives in a racially mixed area.  At times when he meets others he refers to them as either milky, brownie, or chocolate. He called a south Asian girl a brownie,  his mother a milky, and refers to totally African appearing people as chocolate. He refers to himself as a brownie.

His parents would never speak like that.   The fact that he had such specific names for groups of people, seems to indicate that he picked up the terms from other children in daycare, or the playground. I don't think at his age he thought of them himself, but it does show that  children from an early age are aware of differences, we have a long way to go to a "color-blind future."

I would think that he will  find that those he calls 'milkys' still have a majoritarian priviledge, and for his sake I hope that future comes soon.

North Carolina? Are you shitting me? The "Triangle" comprising Durham, Chapel Hill and Winston-Salem is the highest concentration of advanced degrees in the country. More medical research is conducted in that small area than just about anywhere in the world. When Ted Kennedy needed treatment for advanced brain cancer, where did he go? Duke University Medical Centre. But go on clinging to your ridiculous and outdated stereotypes about those stupid people from the South...

This is ridiculous and bigotted comment. I agree that this "research" is ridiculous and does not have much merit.  However you could say the same thing about Canada by your criteria. Our federal government oversees a system of systematic racism against First Nations people, denies land rights, clean drinking water, refusal to look for hundreds of missing FN women, etc., etc., etc.  If one were to study Canada's shameful treatment of FN you could say that everything that emerges from here is evil until proven to the contrary. And that would just as ridiculous as your statement above.