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Racist Babies
The Arizona Department of Education is tackling the racism of infants as young as three months old.
“We can all sleep more soundly now that the Arizona Department of Education is protecting the nation from the threat of racist 3-month-old babies,” Christopher Rufo of City Journal tells the story in a series of tweets:
The Arizona Department of Education has created an “equity” toolkit claiming that babies show the first signs of racism at three months old and that white children “remain strongly biased in favor of whiteness by age five.”
Let’s review the resources in the toolkit.
This is Arizona, not Berkley or San Francisco or even California or Massachusetts. Arizona.
Published in Culture
Great. They want to teach white kids early that they are hateful racists and white supremacists. Works for me!
“Silence about race reinforces racism by letting children draw their own conclusions based on what they see.”
This is quite a statement. What does this group think that children see which leads them to racist conclusions?
Problem solved . . .
It doesn’t matter what state it is. The Left will go anywhere they don’t get a pushback.
How many times do we hear about a “mob of enraged parents” forcing these buffoons to back down? Not very often. And that’s the problem.
They are inadvertently admitting that there is something natural about “intolerance”. Why wouldn’t children naturally tend to prefer those who appear most like their
parentscaregivers? So Arizona thinks children should be taught to abandon their natural defense mechanisms? There’s something unnatural about this…Holy insanity Batman. These people really are deranged.
You beat me to it. That is a fantastically revealing sentence, just not in the way the authors intend.
“Who are you going to believe? Me, or your lyin’ eyes?”
But it’s science, isn’t it? Everyone says, Trust the science.
What I love is the combination of familiarity bias and racial bias. Preference for your parents / caregivers is completely natural and found in animals. However, according to these psychos, people should have no preferences toward white people at all. I fully expect to be ordered to buy gifts for any black woman I see on Valentine’s day, rather than just for my girlfriend, who is white.
My goodness…
This is evidence. For the future lawsuits.
Thanks for posting this. I’ve dug into it further, showing the links have been scrubbed, probably in response to the reporting, but are all there in the WayBackMachine.
Notice the illustration is by a “Good White” as John Derbyshire calls them.
I have grown progressively less tolerant of this garbage over the years. Now it seems so far over the top that it must be reaching an apogee at which point there will be a great collective shout of ENOUGH!
Of course children notice the difference between people of different races. When I was a kid my cousin who was probably 3 at time asked my aunt why a maid in their household was blue and she was yellow. Such was her understanding of colors. It is absurd to think that kids don’t see differences. Seeing differences isn’t racism. It is discrimination which isn’t in and of itself a negative thing. The ability to discriminate is a definite genetic positive since it aids in surviving.
I worked with hundreds of kids over the course of my teaching career. They were of all races. Just about every one of them exhibited prejudices about other races which they had learned from a very early age at home. Quite frequently they expressed those views about people with whom they had had no contact. I heard African-American kids make snide comments about Jews when it was highly unlikely that they had ever met a Jew in their life, and if they had, it would have been a teacher who treated them with total kindness.
On the other hand, when I worked in Bedford-Stuyvesant I heard and saw pervasive antisemitism expressed by African-American adults. There is even a fascinating book written by an African-American author for the 1968 exhibition, Harlem on My Mind, which detailed and justified Black antisemitism based on the interaction of Jews and Blacks in that neighborhood when it changed from a Jewish ghetto to a Black one.
I had two good friends when I taught at one school who it took me two years to get together. One was Chinese, born in Beijing. The other was Japanese. The hatred between these two was almost at a cellular level even though neither had ever had contact with a person from the other culture. This wasn’t inborn. It had been taught to them by their families. Once I broke the divide they became close friends.
I think what is happening now is creating more and greater hatred between races. Black kids are being told that White people are devils. Black adults are having their own prejudices confirmed. They aren’t fighting racism, they are exacerbating it, increasing it, feeding it. Hating someone from a different tribe is easy, particularly if you are taught to do it. When you can find some easily identifiable characteristic to use as a marker it becomes even easier. Now that characteristic is low melanin content in the skin. If you happen to have been born with that particular “deformity”, it is being taught that you are also a perfect target for hatred and acrimony. This, however, is being called AntiRacism in modern double speak.
The Left is manufacturing white supremacists at breakneck speed. I mean it in both senses: in the Left’s imagination and in reality.
And they are completely oblivious to this fact..
This is probably the most natural explanation. It isn’t racism just simply that people learn to like those that look like them (their family) and extrapolate that out first.
With respect to black and latinos not showing any group preference: that’s probably just because by that age (unless they live in hyper segregated areas) they are probably used to seeing authority figures of multiple races.
I think the Arizona thing is really quite horrible and this whole thing is going to backfire. I’m generally concerned about governments getting used to discriminating against viewpoints, and this is a viewpoint, but I think someone needs to stop this.
These are the people who should be canceled, not because of their political opinions but because they are dangerous, as course children prefer their own, it’s literally the most natural thing in the world a calf will run to a cow, a wolf cub to a wolf.
I had an interesting thing happen with one of my sons when he was about 4 years old. He started to attend a preschool (half-day) at the rec center in our neighborhood. This was at least 30 years ago. We lived in SoCal in a neighborhood that was very mixed…lots of everyone, including Laotian refugees, Hispanic, Black, White, East Indian. In fact, this kid’s first babysitter was one of the Lao families that watched him for me when I worked half-days at our local elementary school as an aide. This boy was only 8 months when he started spending the mornings with them. He even learned some words in Laotian because their grandmother barely spoke English. The main thing that most of us had in common in that part of San Diego was a very small income–my husband was in the Jimmy Carter Navy at the time.
We came out of the preschool one day, and a homeless guy stood up suddenly from the bushes, having just woken up from an alcohol induced nap, and he startled both of us. When we got in the car, my son turned to me and said, “That man was black wasn’t he, Mom?” I agreed, and then my son said, “Do we know any black people?” I almost laughed, but I caught myself. Then I started naming our friends from church, from his preschool class (like the TEACHER!!) and when I named the lady who was our next-door neighbor, he turned to me in astonishment saying, “Really?? She is??” Um…yes…there would no way to think otherwise.
So we drove home, and he insisted on going next door immediately to check. So, I went with him, and I told her why we were there. She was just delighted! He’d spent so much time over at her house playing with some toys she had from her childhood. She was older than our grandmas, and had lived there for quite a while before we moved in. She had no family in town any longer and loved to have our children come over and play. She just laughed and hugged him when he looked at her, and said, “Wow, she is black. I didn’t notice.”
Yes. This is a really quite horrible thing and it is wrong and stupid.
I have bad news for you-this is more “scientific” than 95% of the woke bovine scatology. At least they have the fact that infants prefer their caregivers faces-every parent in the world knows that. As an example- the reparations study which claims the federal government should pay $10-12 TRILLION in reparations to black people.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/12/slavery-reparations-cost-us-government-10-to-12-trillion.html
from the article it is clear this financial estimate has little or NOTHING to do with slavery- it appears they used the current gap in wealth between whites and blacks and ASSUMED it was all d/t slavery and must be eliminated by a federal program. They overlook the fact that many current black Americans aren’t descendants of American slaves and furthermore that some black Americans predecessors OWNED slaves. They overlook gaps in wealth between other ethnic groups- I guess white supremacists love many Asian peoples since those groups earn more than whites- and let’s not look at Nigerians etc. One could go on all night…
Finally, a clue has been revealed about the identity of Omega’s secret girlfriend! So we can rule out @lidenscheng.
I am not on board with the Arizona Department of Education’s program without knowing more about it. Odds are it’s going to be some left-wing malarkey. Tribalism is part of human nature. Some people may think that because it’s “natural” that makes it OK. Well, there are positive aspects of human nature and there are negative aspects. If just following your instincts led to a happy and just society, we wouldn’t have to work to civilize children. We would just encourage them to follow their instincts, which would be little better than having them be raised by wolves.
In the absence of adult instruction on how to be a decent human being, little kids can be monstrous. Kids can gang up and pick on other kids who are different, and the difference doesn’t have to have anything to do with race or ethnicity. I remember in grade school there was one family whom everyone looked down on and made fun of. What was the reason? Beats me. Maybe the oldest kid in the family had something different about him (fat, had a bad haircut, wore ugly clothes, who knows?) and so his classmates made fun of him and then younger kids learned to be mean to the younger siblings of the original outcast.
If the goal of the program were to have all parents teach their kids to treat people decently, even if they are different, good. If the goal is to convince people that white people are uniquely bad and must spend their lives apologizing, that’s awful, of course.