Is Your Baby Racist?

Among other instances, the twelve tribes are defined with specific characteristics, and the cannanites are said to be all evil, and their genocide is justified at length with significant detail.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/tribes.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jericho

It's one of my reasons for not believing religion, and also for not believing a lot of sociological theories that say that nationalism and racism are modern phenomena. They are at least 2000 years old, and if the dates are to be believed, at least 3000 years old.

That Thomas King fella is out to lunch.

Or ... perhaps he's just hungry?  Tee hee.

That, in my opinion, is so right-on topic that it's worth underlining eight or nine times. I mean, the article talks about kids seeing black people, but whiteness remains the default position and is barely noticed in the article.

I think Unionist is a little more advanced than Rhetoric 101.

I'm sure Unionist is only giving us a little patented whimsical flair as he points out the irony of a paper written in one of the most racist states in the union, which harbours a penchant for government-sanctioned murder and currently occupies unceded First Nation (and Mexican) land, pontificating about how children are born racist and wouldn't it be a good idea if we talked to them once in a while to try and stop that.

Doesn't context count for anything anymore?

I apologize for my comment about Ze. I actually though Ze did not read the article, but it turns out that ze and I had different readings of it. My comment was inappropriate and I made incorrect assumptions.

How does it ignore that the children and parents are living in a racist society? I thought the whole point of the article was to show that perception of skin colour differences is primitive like perception of sex, and by not talking about race with your children, you allow all the other environmental influences to shape their racial perceptions (which are going to be negative/racist).

I thought they mentioned "a liberal city like Austin" to show that overt racism is not necessary for children to develop racist attitudes. I don't think they were trying to say that liberals cannot be racist, or that a liberal city is a racism-free city. (Do you think that liberals cannot be racist? I'm just wondering why you interpreted the article so differently from how I did, as perhaps my experiences with white liberals would make me not read into the sentence that way.)

I think that is useful information for parents of colour who are raising children of colour. Note that they made sure to distinguish between hearing those messages often and hearing them occassionally. Also take into account the next paragraph:

Perhaps. But ad hominem and stir is a recipe.

I would say it goes to confirm my thesis about Texans. Thanks, I wasn't aware of that individual.

Most studies of toxic texitis that I've read conclude that nurture outweighs nature, so I think we're saying the same thing here.

Good question. Let me think. What do you call someone who notices socialists everywhere? Or Jews?

Start with the heading of this thread, read the article more closely, and reread the responses defending it as valid.

Your offensive comments will never succeed in getting me to stop telling jokes in this thread.

This thread was opened with the same aim as the Newsweek article - to blame racism on ordinary folks instead of (in the case of the U.S.A. in particular) on the very structure and culture of one of the most inhumane societies on the face of the earth. It is based on the kind of pseudoscience which held sway in Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. Once that is established, what can one do except: 1) tell off-colour jokes, or 2) shut up? Given my rather legendary incapacity to follow option #2, I'm left with humour. But for you to compare my satire about Texas with misogyny - well, that says a little wee something about you, doesn't it?

However, we've barely met, so I'll give you time to reflect on your righteous indignation about the poor marginalized Texans before I reach any final verdicts. You write well, so there may be some hope yet.

I think it's pretty obvious that he's being half serious -the serious part being his disdain for studies like this -I'm not sure if you are though.  You see this as the same dismissal towards some other study done by "women" now -well which is it?   If you have any arguments defending this particular study's methodology or the probability of its hypothesis instead, I'll resist my own cynical urges a wee bit longer.

Ok, my jury just returned. The verdict isn't good. I'll leave it at that.

Generally, I assume a study's methodology is sound unless there is something wrong or suspect about the methodology. Do you have any arguments against this particular study's methodology? Unionist mentioned that everything that emerges from Texas should be considered evil until there is proof to the contrary, but as I mentioned before, I believe that this attitude towards this particular study is illogical.

By "the probability of its hypothesis", what are you referring to? That children would notice differences in skin colour even if nobody discussed it with them?

Restructure:  "Generally, I assume a study's methodology is sound unless there is something wrong or suspect about the methodology. Do you have any arguments against this particular study's methodology? Unionist mentioned that everything that emerges from Texas should be considered evil until there is proof to the contrary, but as I mentioned before, I believe that this attitude towards this particular study is illogical.

By "the probability of its hypothesis", what are you referring to? That children would notice differences in skin colour even if nobody discussed it with them?"

Now you're just being disingenuous.   Read what I first wrote about the problems with its methodology, then READ the article posted:

Newsweek:  "At the Children's Research Lab at the University of Texas, a database is kept on thousands of families in the Austin area who have volunteered to be available for scholarly research. In 2006 Birgitte Vittrup recruited from the database about a hundred families, all of whom were Caucasian with a child 5 to 7 years old.

The goal of Vittrup's study was to learn if typical children's videos with multicultural storylines have any beneficial effect on children's racial attitudes. Her first step was to give the children a Racial Attitude Measure, which asked such questions as:

How many White people are nice?
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)

How many Black people are nice?
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)

During the test, the descriptive adjective "nice" was replaced with more than 20 other adjectives, like "dishonest," "pretty," "curious," and "snobby."

Vittrup sent a third of the families home with multiculturally themed videos for a week, such as an episode of Sesame Street in which characters visit an African-American family's home, and an episode of Little Bill, where the entire neighborhood comes together to clean the local park.

In truth, Vittrup didn't expect that children's racial attitudes would change very much just from watching these videos. Prior research had shown that multicultural curricula in schools have far less impact than we intend them to—largely because the implicit message "We're all friends" is too vague for young children to understand that it refers to skin color.

Yet Vittrup figured explicit conversations with parents could change that. So a second group of families got the videos, and Vittrup told these parents to use them as the jumping-off point for a discussion about interracial friendship. She provided a checklist of points to make, echoing the shows' themes. "I really believed it was going to work," Vittrup recalls.

The last third were also given the checklist of topics, but no videos. These parents were to discuss racial equality on their own, every night for five nights.

At this point, something interesting happened. Five families in the last group abruptly quit the study. Two directly told Vittrup, "We don't want to have these conversations with our child. We don't want to point out skin color."

Vittrup was taken aback—these families volunteered knowing full well it was a study of children's racial attitudes. Yet once they were aware that the study required talking openly about race, they started dropping out.

It was no surprise that in a liberal city like Austin, every parent was a welcoming multiculturalist, embracing diversity. But according to Vittrup's entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race. They might have asserted vague principles—like "Everybody's equal" or "God made all of us" or "Under the skin, we're all the same"—but they'd almost never called attention to racial differences.

They wanted their children to grow up colorblind. But Vittrup's first test of the kids revealed they weren't colorblind at all. Asked how many white people are mean, these children commonly answered, "Almost none." Asked how many blacks are mean, many answered, "Some," or "A lot." Even kids who attended diverse schools answered the questions this way."

Erik Redburn,

My interpretation of what happened, which is based on the article, is that Vittrup attempted to study the effects of multicultural children's videos and parental racial discussion about race on white children's racial attitudes. The control is group is those white children who are exposed to multicultural children's videos only, since a previous study has already shown these videos to be useless. The experimental group is video + race talk. The third group is race talk only, which is useful to see if video + race talk is better than race talk by itself, as it's possible that the videos could be useful if an explicit connection was made to what they were referring to (race).

However, the goal of the original study was aborted, because Vittrup found that white parents couldn't bring themselves to talk about race with their white children. Like the multicultural videos, the white parents did not mention race explicitly. That most white parents could not talk about race even when instructed to was a surprise finding to Vittrup, and not designed into the original study.

The Newsweek article authors said that Austin is a liberal city and every parent is a welcolming multiculturalist, not Vittrup. However, "according to Vittrup's entry surveys, hardly any of these white parents had ever talked to their children directly about race." What's the problem with this, if Vittrup is drawing a conclusion about "these white parents" in her study, based on the surveys?

Why did you bold "colorblind", "commonly", and "many"? Are you contrasting the "commonly" and "many" with the "every" and "ever" in the earlier paragraph? Because Vittrup did not make a claim about every parent in Austin, and there was also a "hardly" in the previous paragraph when the authors were talking about Vittrup's study. Or is it that you prefer to see some hard numbers?

I think what happened here was that the Newsweek article itself did not say or suggest that racism is inborn, but only said that perception of differences in skin colour is inborn. Many Babblers here read the article as saying that racism is inborn, based on the title "Is your baby racist?" I read the article differently, because I wasn't aware of the "Is your baby racist?" angle (and I would probably have ignored it anyway, because I usually assume that editorialists are padding the research with their own irrelevant opinions, and I ignore the padding).

So the article itself just says that perception of skin colour is inborn, but the accusations in this thread are saying that the article/study says that racism is inborn. This is a non sequitur. My first reaction is that people didn't finish reading the article, and my second reaction is that people are not reading it properly. Since the first option was shown to be incorrect for people not Unionist, and people also insisted that they read it carefully, I could only conclude that people who thought the study showed inborn racism believed the hidden premise "noticing race makes you racist". (I did not account for the possibility that the premise came from something that is not actually in the article, but is still associated with the article from something that referenced it.)

I usually follow this forum via RSS, and I know that normally, people who participate in an "anti-racism" forum would not think that "noticing race makes you racist"--since anti-racism requires noticing and talking about race. However, perhaps it's this expectation violation that made me respond incredulously, or perhaps the possibility that Babblers in this forum agree with racial color blindness was the first possibility I dismissed, and I assumed that people must have been reading the Newsweek article disingenuously.

I normally wouldn't use the term "primitive" when talking about people, societies, or culture (because it makes no sense and always (or almost always) refers to a "non-white" culture while assuming that white culture is the evolved form of non-white cultures), but the term "primitive" actually makes sense when we are talking about biological evolution (such as primitive brain structures), not fake linear cultural evolution to whiteness.

But where does the Newsweek article conclude or suggest that "racism [is] natural" or "children are naturally racist?"

And by the "Newsweek article", I am referring to the text that is written by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman.