White children in the US are instilled with guilt over their skin color

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The author fights against the system of "anti-racist" education that is fashionable in the United States today. Its supporters are far from simply explaining to children: people come in different colors of skin and hair, and they should be appreciated for other personal qualities. The new fashion is to instill in white children a sense of guilt - in fact, the color of their skin.

The idea that children are born racist sounds like a very bad joke. In fact, the topic has become a hot topic on social media and even in some schools.

These are all part of the racial reckoning currently under way. Across the country, American schools rushed to redesign their curricula to include discussion of the so-called “inescapable racism” of whites and fair-skinned people, including schoolchildren. Books such as "Politically Correct Child" and "Anti-Racism Starts With Me: Kids Coloring Book" and "Letter A is the first letter of the word" began to appear in large numbers on the Amazon platform. activist "(A Is for Activist). Ibram X. Kendi's book Antiracist Baby is # 1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

“Children are taught to be racist or active anti-racist - there is no such option as neutrality,” writes Candy in her cardboard book for children, using the simplified and child-friendly rubrics that have made him famous with his adult book. How to Be an Antiracist.

This binary actually means that racism is not a behavior, worldview, choice, or at least a sin: it is an internal state, a disease, and in order to overcome this disease, white people must work on themselves from birth. For Candy and for the millions of Americans who buy his books, there is no neutral innocent white person, even if he is someone who treats all people with respect, respecting the dignity of black and non-black people. Instead, we must become anti-racists in the way Candy and his supporters say it: that is, we must program ourselves to support policies centered on the issue of race.

Candy's definition of racism most closely resembles the Protestant concept of Original Sin. According to this concept, people are born with sin, they are internally predisposed to evil, they are conceived in sin. According to Martin Luther and John Calvin, birth itself confirms our inner sinfulness, since sin is already manifested in the very sexual act of conception. It turns out that any white child, if not made politically correct (woke), enters the world of racial sin. And this child needs anti-racism education in order to "transform society" - in accordance with the ideas of Candy.

The Calvinist approach to modern racism, in which white young children and adolescents are guilty from the moment they are born and involved in the racist system from the earliest days of their birth, is wrong and harmful on many levels. For the uninitiated, a person's predisposition is created with the help of the environment in which he is. A child born to a racist family will receive racist attitudes and behavior as he learns from them and copies their behavior, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, no one person can be declared sinful in advance: even a person born in a racist environment can be changed and shaped through education and interaction with other non-racist-minded people. However, the most fashionable form of anti-racist education today does not allow this. It's like in radical Protestant sects, where even after baptism and repentance, as well as after periodic confessions, a person is still considered unclean, predisposed to sin. The idea that white people are born racists emphasizes that skin color is something permanent, and that white skin should be a kind of reminder that you must, like a man obsessed, “do the job” in order to improve.

However, this idea is ultimately detrimental to constructive anti-racist work, as it assumes that we have no authority whatsoever to govern our racial behavior. This idea also deprives us of our sense of responsibility. How can we be held guilty and accountable when the sin of racism already exists in our DNA from the start?

The insistence that young children and adolescents pay attention to a person's race comes dangerously close to justifying racism. This demand can revive the processes that allowed the emergence of racism in the dark times, and perhaps we are already in just such new dark times.

To justify the racial reorientation of childhood, woke anti-racists point to research that has found that children notice racial differences at a very early age and even express their preference for children who look like themselves. Three-month-olds are able to distinguish between faces by skin color, while three-year-olds are already able to form their preferences based on the "in-group bias" existing within their closed group.

However, this bias is not necessarily or inherently racist. The very existence of closed (in-groups) and open groups (outgroups), based on apparent differences, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status or shared interests, is a fact of life. The same fact of life is that a person is inclined to get closer to those people who, in his opinion, are the same as himself. Even the most assimilated migrants need support from communities of the same nationality or ethnicity. We all need closed groups. Their existence does not automatically imply that they are racist.

Take gender, for example, another factor that tends to lead to the creation of closed groups. At three years old, boys are drawn to other boys during games, and girls to girls.

“The division of boys and girls into separate play groups is one of the most striking, well-documented and culturally universal phenomena of middle childhood,” one study stresses.

Is this kind of preference sexist? Of course not. Numerous studies show that many internal preferences are harmless.

Racial preferences can, of course, be a little more complex, and closed groups can become toxic if their members are hostile to those around them. And, of course, the influence of racist behavior in the family, school or in the media contributes to this kind of attitudes.

However, for Candy and his supporters, any preferences are inherently insidious. “We know that by the age of two, children are already capable of accepting racist ideas,” he said in an interview. "They already decide who to play with based on the color of the child's skin, and if we wait until they are 10 or 15 years old, they will be hopeless by that time, just like some of us."

Children are able to see differences, that's right. However, this does not make them racist. There are many opportunities to talk with children about these differences, which take into account their desire for closed groups, but also create positive associations with those who are outwardly different from them.

Teaching people, especially children, that certain groups of people are born as racists cannot do the same. Candy's worldview is simply an additional strengthening of a worldview with an emphasis on race in children, while they themselves are not able to see this due to the meaninglessness of this whole story. People who really want to live in a more equal society will do the right thing to keep their young children and adolescents away from anti-racism.

Let us strive to ensure that children are not racist, and then they can become non-racist adults, and at the same time let us immediately point out to them that the language of some professional anti-racists is flawed.