Clarissa's Blog

Academics and activists teamed up to create a guide to teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT) to young children, arguing that kids exhibit racial bias from as young as three years old. . . EmbraceRace, the organization behind the guide, claims that “children’s racial sensibilities begin to form in infancy” and that kids “develop racial and other biases by kindergarten.”

https://www.dailywire.com/news/academics-call-for-critical-race-theory-to-be-taught-in-kindergarten-warn-of-racist-3-year-olds

All true. Children exhibit a strong preference for people of their own race since birth. And it’s a great thing. It’s an evolutionary mechanism in service of biological survival. Babies associate safety and comfort with their parents and react well to people who look like them. (Except, of course, when parents are abusive, and kids can show preference for a daycare teacher of a different race who is kind and non-threatening).

My friend from Africa has 3 small children. I’m the only white person who comes by the house, so they don’t see many white people. In the first years of their lives, they detest me and are terrified of N. The 8-month-old squeezes his eyes shut to avoid seeing me and twists his whole little body away for me. The 2,5-year-old has moved out of the fear and repulsion stage and is now in the curiosity stage. I came by on Saturday, and she brought over a napkin and started rubbing it against my cheek. She analyzed the situation with her little brain and decided that I must have poor personal hygiene habits to be this strange color. It’s so cute! Only an absolute moron would be upset over something like this and decide that the kids need to be re-educated out of this normal, healthy reaction.

We all want our kids to feel comfortable in our multi-racial society. The only way to achieve this is simply to be normal around people of different ethnicities. There’s no need to talk about it, lecture, hector, and educate. Just be normal. Interact with people normally. Nobody has workshops or teaching guides about people of different heights, and it works out fine.

Look at how utterly stupid the graphic created by EmbraceRace is:

At birth, babies don’t “see”. Their sight is unfocused, blurry. It’s precisely by 3 months that they start distinguishing different people with different features instead of perceiving vague, colorless blobs. Also, it’s not “caregivers” that they prefer. It’s mommy. Mommy has a comforting effect on a baby without the baby needing to “see” her.

And no, silence about race doesn’t reinforce racism. But endless stupid prattling about it does.