Last week proved quite revealing. It began with the conservative hysteria surrounding President Obama’s education speech to the children of America, and it culminated with the extreme right wing 9/12 Tea Party March on Washington this weekend, billed as a gathering of “freedom loving patriots.”
And just when you thought things couldn’t get any more outrageous, U.S. Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina called the President of the United States a liar during his highly anticipated health care address to a Joint Session of Congress. Wilson has since called his outburst “spontaneous” and regrettable.
President Obama has graciously accepted Wilson’s apology, saying that “everyone makes mistakes” and we should not assume the “the worst in other peoples’ motives.” That’s the expected presidential position, but in view of all that has transpired since the election of President Obama, I think we are in need of what John McCain would call straight talk.
Let me start with news of a just-released book that goes a long way toward explaining the force I see at work here: racism, plain and simple–notwithstanding all the talk of Obama’s “post-racial,” “colorblind” America. I have never bought into either notion, but NutureShock: New Thinking About Children, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman goes a long way toward dispelling both notions–and I think–explaining the persistence of White supremacy.
The book presents research findings indicating that children recognize differences in skin color by the time they are six months old. More importantly, the researchers found that, were White parents to even slightly adjust the way they introduce the concept of race to their children–by the age of three– real long-term change is possible, “one future citizen at a time.”
No sooner than had Newsweek excerpted the book, a blog thread on Stormfront.org, the website that celebrates “White pride, worldwide,” declared that the magazine has launched a “war on White children.”
Specifically, the book highlights the 2007 dissertation findings of Danish researcher Birgitte Vittrup, who recruited, from the database of volunteers for scholarly research at the Children’s Research Lab at the University of Texas, Austin, 100 Caucasian families with children 5-7 years old. Vittrup found that even the most liberal White parents–unlike 75 per cent of “nonwhite” parents–were unwilling to openly discuss race with their children, some even going so far as to withdraw from the study when it reached this critical phase. Among the six families who completed the one week-phase of talking to their young children openly about race, there was “dramatic” improvement in their racial attitudes.
