Have you taken a good look at the September 14 issue of Newsweek magazine? That’s the one with the close-up cover photo of the innocent-looking, “butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-its-mouth” little white baby and the headline: “Is Your Baby Racist? Exploring the Roots of Discrimination.”
I have absolutely no doubt that, in the midst of our self-proclaimed “post-racial society,” that issue of the magazine will sell even better than hotcakes. I’m convinced, in fact, that the seven-page story with the controversial title will be widely read, faxed, downloaded, e-mailed and blogged about.
And because it is in Newsweek, its content will be believed and repeated as if it were the 11th Commandment.
The problem is that much of this stuff, no matter how “scientifically researched,” is irresponsibly written and downright dangerous, and will simply fan the flames of racial separatism and antagonism that we see reflected every day in the news. In fact, the story’s basic premise, that adults grow up to be racists "honestly," that they can’t help but have racially separatist views, because such attitudes are with us, naturally, from birth, is explosive and will probably be added promptly to most white supremacists’ handbooks.
Among the key points drawn from the two authors, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, are the following: Children, at a very young age, absolutely do see racial differences and it takes “remarkably little” for them to develop "in-group preferences." Anything a child doesn’t like…belongs to those who look least similar to him, and there is a "spontaneous tendency," by children, to assume that their own group shares characteristics such as “niceness” or “smarts.” The writers went on to say that when kids in a study turned three years old, and were asked to select from photos of kids they’d like to have as friends, "86 percent of white children picked children of their own race.”
The article also shoots down the validity of school desegregation and, maybe, that is appropriate, and long overdue. The concept that black children will necessarily receive a better education just because they sit next to white children in school, has, in my opinion, always been suspect. What we should have always wanted, instead, is to ensure that schools in predominantly black neighborhoods had equal access to quality teachers, books and learning formats. In any event, the article goes on to point out that the social benefits of desegregation, based on something called the Diverse Environment Theory, have, in recent studies, been proved to be substantially lacking. “Going to integrated schools,” the article continues, "gives you just as many chances to learn stereotypes as to unlearn them.”
Also cited was a study by Duke University’s James Moody, which included 90,000 teenagers in 112 different schools. Among other things, Moody found that "the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school.”
Drawing from Moody, the authors, somehow, concluded: “More diversity translates to more division among students. The increased opportunities to interact are also increased opportunities to reject each other.” Is it a stretch to assume that this same logic will soon be used, by some, as justification for across-the-board reductions in diversity initiatives in American workplaces? We're fooling ourselves, if we think not.
Also disturbing, according to the article, is that the odds of a white high schooler in America having a best friend of another race, even today, is only eight percent. On the other hand, 15 percent of blacks claim a "best friend" who is not black.
Don't get me wrong. There's nothing fundamentally improper with blacks and whites "being friends" in this society. At the same time, there are apparently thousands of black kids – and black adults – out there who think that their white friend is their “best friend,” but that sentiment, in a substantial number of cases, is clearly not shared by the white person. That confusion, that excessive desire by blacks to be considered a part of a “best friend” relationship with whites, who are simply their friends, is a sad and dangerous delusion, and one that, unfortunately, may extend far into adulthood.
As always, the people who will most believe this newly packaged “racism is natural, pure and inevitable" data will be those who consider themselves most highly educated, because publications such as Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report, newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and radio networks, such as NPR, are where they learn everything they think they know.
Over time, the highbrow sources of information to which they turn have become accepted as being “safe” and “worthy” to read and to quote, wherever other “well-informed” people gather. Once members of this “intellectual elite”--black or white-- hear or read what is reported by those outlets, they simply accept the data as the irrefutable truth, and that “truth” trumps any "other truths" found in “less prestigious” media outlets. The "Racist Baby" article will, almost certainly, be treated in that way.
When I was in the service, I had an African-American friend who attended law school at a prestigious Ivy League university and he had, at a very young age, “bought the whole package,” in that regard. I asked him one day why he still had to depend on me in my “hoopty" to pick him up and drive him to our weekend Army Reserve meetings. He told me that, according to all the information he had read, the only automobile worth having was a Mercedes-Benz, and since he couldn’t afford one, yet, he simply wouldn’t buy any car until he could. (Shortly after that conversation, of course, I stopped picking him up).
This is the same guy who would tell me he wouldn’t go to see a certain, new movie because the person who produced the movie reviews at Esquire Magazine had written that the new film wasn’t very good. It didn’t matter, of course, that my friend had been born and raised in North Philadelphia, and that he and the middle-aged, Caucasian, Esquire editor who wrote the review came from two different cultural and artistic worlds. For him, if Esquire, a magazine that he respected without question, said it, that was good enough.
That was all very sad to watch.
At the same time I found it extraordinarily informative. It let me know, early on, the awesome power that media have with regard to all of us, every day, in almost every way.
In my opinion, there is a major problem with the Newsweek cover story, which is obviously designed to capitalize on the rise of more negative, more directly confrontational and race-based activity and politics in our country.
The problem is that it makes no mention, whatsoever, of the role that the economic marginalization of African Americans and the lack of control, by blacks, over image- creation tools, such as mainstream media, play in the perceptions that children and adults have about them.
It’s true, even a three-year-old can see that black folks, on average, are more unemployed, have older cars (or none at all), own smaller homes, and don’t, with rare exception, have positions of authority and respect in the United States. That doesn’t make white babies racist, it makes them observant.
The only way to change the negative perceptions that whites have about blacks, and that blacks have about themselves, is to finally include and engage African Americans in the domestic economy.
Having 1.2 million black-owned businesses, as African Americans now have, doesn’t mean a thing if those businesses, collectively, generate just .4 percent of the country’s gross receipts, as they do. Until that and other economic disparities are corrected, let’s be really careful about highly promoted, misleading cover stories that explain the pervasiveness and inevitability of racism.
The argument in this case, especially, is poorly made, and it’s very dangerous.
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