Frank Furedi, columnist for the British magazine Spiked, expresses concern that, in the cultural wave of obsession with race and other aspects of the collective identity of individuals, even babies can now be considered racist because they have “unconscious bias”. ” in favor of some race. “The main proponents of this opinion today are not the racists of the old guard”, comments Furedi, “they are proclaimed anti-racists”.
To exemplify the reality of the phenomenon, the columnist cites a campaign of the month past of the British Labor Party that controls the government of London’s Islington borough. The campaign distributed a poster that says “at three months, babies look more at faces of their caregivers’ race” and that “children are never too young to talk about race.” The same party, which also controls the city council of Nottingham, implemented a program there to “decolonize” the kindergarten, with an “anti-racist training consultancy”. Similar party programs at the national level have been running since 2008.
There are two academic sources for this type of program. One is studies that, since 150, have actually indicated this preference in babies from three months of age, such as a study first authored by Yair Bar-Haim of the Department of Psychology at Tel-Aviv University in Israel. Evaluating a small sample of 36 babies evenly distributed into three groups: white Israelis, black Ethiopians, and black Israelis of Ethiopian origin, Yair and colleagues found that the babies they looked at the faces of adults of their own race for more seconds. However, black Israeli babies did not show this difference. Other studies have used babies from other groups, such as Chinese, and even investigated which part of the face seems most indicative of race for babies (suspectedly the nose). There is a common problem of small samples.
In her doctoral thesis of 2012 at Harvard University, child development psychologist Talee Ziv investigated the issue in one-trimester babies and found that racial preference appears to only happen with male faces, not female faces. This suggests that the mother’s contact is the reason for these preferences in the time of the babies’ gaze at faces.
Ridiculous tests for the unconscious
The other source of the claim that babies can be racist is revealed by the vocabulary of these shows, which speak of “unconscious bias”. Rather than viewing racism as a conscious belief of individuals in moral error who think that groups with the superficial human phenotype are morally superior or inferior to others, as was classically the case, there is a collaboration between research and identity activism to alter the meaning of racism for any kind of statistical disparity between these groups, even the disparity in babies’ eye preferences. Disparities are also searched for in adults’ reaction time in tools such as the “implicit association test” (IAT), which presents racial, sexual or disability characteristics and positive or negative words, seeking to “reveal” something to others. respect for the unconsciousness of the test subject to these characteristics.
The IAT, which was even adopted in racial sensitivity courses given by human resources departments of several American companies, suffered blows in the replication crisis results of studies in psychology. Furthermore, it is far from clear whether the test actually captures any aversion to a certain race, group, or disability. American deaf mathematician and blogger Holly “Math Nerd,” who presents herself as “anti-identity” and does not reveal her last name, has experience with the IAT. “I am proud to walk the world as well as any hearing person. I’m not a burden to anyone. Because I was very aware of the ‘disability = burden’ stereotype, I was quick to associate with negative words when I first took the disability IAT. My first grade indicated a very strong negative attitude towards disability, when my true attitude is the exact opposite . Not only do I have no negative emotions about my deafness, (…) I wouldn’t trade it for perfect hearing even if I could.”
Holly teaches her readers to get better grades. on the IAT: “when black faces and negative words are paired, be slow to respond”. Just train yourself to associate disabled people, women and blacks with positive words, as identitarianism dictates. She says that during graduation, she was required to take the test four times. In the last few times, “I got perfect identity notes in all of them”. “Yes, it’s ridiculous,” concludes Holly. “Now go ahead and keep your jobs. You’re welcome.”
Anti-racist baby
Children’s literature has been the target of culture war disputes. Academic Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Center for Anti-Racist Research at Boston University, launched in 2020 the children’s book “Antiracist Baby” (free translation for “Antiracist Baby”). “Babies learn to be racist or anti-racist — there is no such thing as neutrality,” decrees the book with a double-page color illustration of a baby writing “race” with blocks of letters. The booklet gives nine pieces of advice on what an anti-racist baby should do. The third piece of advice is to “point out that the problem is politics, not people”. With rhyme, the advice is explained: “Some people earn more, while others earn less… because policies do not always guarantee equal access ”. The seventh piece of advice to the anti-racist baby is that he “confess when he is being racist”. “Nothing disturbs racism more than when we confess the racist ideas we sometimes express.”
Kendi introduces some of the ideas against racism that have been commonplace since the post-Apartheid era , such as that “we are all human”. But it is in the details that the academic line he follows, the “critical theory of race”, reveals itself. For example, he attacks the idea that we should treat color as irrelevant, which is summed up by Americans with the term “color blind”. color). That would be “denying what is before your eyes”. The anti-racist baby should “use his words to talk about race”. Another relevant part is the sixth piece of advice: “bring down the pile of cultural blocks”, accompanied by a drawing of a baby knocking over blocks.
The author’s efforts to follow his own advice to “ babies” reveal themselves on social media. Commenting on the character of then-President Trump-appointed Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett in September 2020, rather than being “color blind” of the two children of Haitian origin who she adopted Ibram Kendi stated on Twitter that “some white settlers ‘adopted’ black children. They ‘civilized’ these ‘wild’ children into the ‘higher’ ways of white people, while using them as props in their lifetime images of denial, while cutting these children’s biological parents out of the picture of humanity.”
Netflix, after suffering internal pressure from employees aligned with the identity, offended by works published by the service exclusively, in particular the comedy specials by Dave Chappelle (which they accused of “transphobia” even with face-to-face protest outside the company headquarters), and after losing 200 a thousand subscribers in the first quarter of this year, it laid off 2% of its employees (about 150 people) and canceled an animation that would adapt Kendi’s children’s book. Competition from new streaming services such as Star+, Disney+ and Paramount+, in addition to the end of the pandemic confinement measures, explain a large part of Netflix’s losses and your decisions in reaction to them. However, the participation of the cultural factor in the decisions is suggested by an update in the internal statute of the streaming service, which started to say that, if employees are unhappy with free speech and breadth of content, Netflix is not for them.
Is Morgan Freeman right?
For Brazilians, it is almost becoming a tradition to circulate an excerpt from an interview by award-winning actor Morgan Freeman on Black Consciousness Day, especially among critics of the date or critics of race identity activists. In the interview with the American television program 150 Minutes in 2005, Freeman laments the existence of a “Black History Month” and says that the problem with racism is the emphasis on racial identity (present, for example, in the habit that people have of present him as a black actor). Furthermore, he advises that we “stop talking about it”. Supporters of the identity message of thinkers like Kendi are hostile to this message, and point out that not talking about racism does not solve the problem of racism. However, as stated, Freeman seemed to be talking about the emphasis on racial identity, which replicated studies of psychology suggest may actually exacerbate racism rather than being the solution these activists think it is.
In the constellation of activism concerned with generally unchosen identities, British historian Helen Pluckrose and American mathematician James Lindsay propose that a difference be drawn between those who follow the civil rights tradition, which is liberal and seeks to remove undue restrictions on people. to their freedoms for being black, women, LGBT, etc., imposed on them by prejudice and unfair discrimination; and movements that make identity politics or identity, that drink from other intellectual sources of academic radicalism and preach, in fact, differentiated treatment and revanchism, in addition to unilateral resignifications in words like “racism”.
Identitarianism also tends towards what conservative philosopher Roger Scruton calls “oikophobia”, an irrational aversion to one’s own home, that is, to one’s own culture or country, which identitarians see as especially vicious and immoral compared to other regions of the planet or to a utopian ideal that only exists in her head—hence identity scholar Bell Hooks’ description of the West as a “heteronormative white supremacist patriarchy,” which contrasts with the fact that there is hardly a more tolerant region in the world for women, blacks, and LGBT. . Civil liberties activism is associated with figures like Martin Luther King, and identitarianism with figures like Malcolm X, in his most separatist and bellicose phase, exacerbated by musings from schools of thought associated with Marxism, critical theory and postmodernism.