NEWSWEEK: Is Your Baby Racist?

It is appalling that the weekly Newsweek would publish an article, “See Baby Discriminate” (14 September 2009) suggesting that very young children are apt to be racist.  The report is based upon experiments conducted by Brigitte Vittrup at the Children’s Research Lab at the University of Texas.  The proof that the article was so very ideologically motivated is that the weekly was very much interested in pointing out the so-called biased assessment of white children—as if non-white young children are biased free.  Needless to say, only a fool would think that non-white young children are biased free.  Alas, there are fools claiming to be doing scientific research.

We are told that “Kids as young as 6 months judge others based on skin color”.  But alas what is really meant here is this: “White kids as young as 6 months judge others based on skin color”.  And once one bears this in mind the very article becomes so incredulous as to be comical.  This is because it would be truly stunning if something analogous could not be asserted of Asian babies and black babies and Arabic babies.  And so on.

Then there is this problem.  What exactly is the judgment that a 6-month old or a 3-year old even a 6-year old is making?  Whatever else is true, no child is making the kind of visceral and supposedly rational judgment about ethnicity that an adult is making.  Why?  Because it is not possible for a child to do such a thing.  So even if a child claims that “Those kind of people are not nice”—which the Newsweek article claims that white young children say about blacks—it is simply not possible for such a claim on a child’s part to have the same moral gravity that a like claim on an adult’s part would have.

We can readily see this by looking at an example that has nothing to do with race.  We can easily imagine a young child saying to an adult with big ears whom the child has just met: “You have big ears!”  Contrast that with an adult making the exact same claim under exactly the same circumstances: the two adults have just met.  It goes without saying that this utterance on the part of the adult constitutes a level of mean-spiritedness that simply cannot be attributed to the child.

So a white adult saying that “Blacks are not nice” and a white 6-year old saying “Blacks are not nice” are hardly tantamount to the adult and the child meaning exactly the same thing.  In terms of the vast differential in the psychological development between the child and the adult, it is simply not possible that the two could mean exactly the same thing.

The child most certainly is not harboring anger and resentment over a single unfortunate experience with one black which the child then takes to be indicative of how all blacks behave.  And if one form of racism is this kind of unwarranted generalization, then it absolutely inappropriate to suggest that this is what a 6-year old is doing in claim that “Blacks are not nice”.

As I have already noted, it is particularly revealing of an ideological bias that the experiment did not involve Asian children; for I am as confident as the night follows the day that any number of Asian children might have said “Blacks are not nice”, just as any number of black children might have said that “Asians are not nice”.  Oh right, I forgot: Minorities cannot be racist.  Only whites can.  For reasons that escape me, I cannot seem to hold on to this ideological truth.

A researcher is none other than a fool or a despicable hypocrite if she or he would suggest that racial attitudes in a child, whatever the child’s ethnicity, are the moral equivalent of racial attitudes in an adult, whatever the adult’s ethnicity.  What is more, Vittrup’s results defy ordinary experience.

For one thing, many a white child has had a black nanny.  And there is no evidence at all that the child suffers from any psychological scarring or trauma owing to being cared for by a black.  And on airplane flights from one side of the part of the globe to another: I have played with and talked to children of virtually every ethnicity.  There have been black children who do not want to have anything to do with me.  There have been non-black children who have adored me.  I recently walked into a friend’s home and his three year-old asked: What color are you?  That question was about as racist as a leaf falling on my nose would be.  And without discussion or commentary or reflection between us adults, we all took the child’s question to be cute.  There was simply no malice on the child’s part.

What, pray tell, would Vittrup say?  Do children notice differences?  Absolutely.  Black babies do.  White babies do.  Yellow babies do.  Red babies do.  And so on.  Do children attach significances to these differences that can be rightly characterized as racism?  Absolutely not.

What is more, children do not naturally define themselves by their ethnicity in the way that adults do.  Children are much more likely to define themselves by the activities in which they engage than their ethnicity.  It is we the adults who make the ethnicity of children a defining feature of their identity.  From an evolutionary perspective, it would disastrous for helpless infants and young children to be too motivated by ethnic differences and differences in physical appearances generally.

At the website RoyalGenes.Com, I found the following remarks:

White babies raised in white environments spent an average of 63 percent
more time looking at white faces, the study found. Their African-raised
counterparts spent 23 percent more time looking at faces from their own
race than the other. Black babies raised in mixed-race environments
spent roughly equal amounts of time looking at both types.

This suggests that ³significant exposure to other-race faces can block
the development of own-race preference,² Bar-Haim and colleagues wrote.
Kelly¹s team found the preference for own-race faces doesn¹t exist at
one month of age, so it is not innate, they noted. They conducted a
study similar to Bar-Haim¹s, but tested only white babies, viewing
photos of four different ethnic groups, at the ages of one and three
months.

It is most appalling and disconcerting that people are so determined to see mere glances of an infant into matters of racial significance.  For there is no reason whatsoever ‑‑ absolutely none ‑‑ to think that the glances of an infant have any bearing whatsoever to the infant being marvelously responsive to a loving adult, whatever color the adult might have.  Yet, one would not know that from the way in which people are talking.  This is ideology standing in the way of commonsense.