You don’t have to be carefully taught, says British equality honcho

“Toddlers may already be racists, nurseries told”

That’s a headline in the Telegraph. Some stories defy the ability of the human mind—or at least of this human mind—to say anything about them.

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I’m informed that Lord Herman Ouseley, the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality and author of the article that the Telegraph is quoting, is black. On that basis, I was about to suggest that his claim of racism in small children echoes Tony Morrison’s racist claim that racism is the central though unacknowledged fact of whites’ entire being. However, Ouseley apparently says that this childhood racism is present in children of all races, so the comparison with Morrison breaks down.

Michael Jose writes:

I’m not certain why the idea that toddlers are “already racist” should be so shocking, unless it is because liberals are inching toward admitting that biology matters and we are not all blank slates who are corrupted by our culture.

Young children tend to notice that someone is different from them and from those they are used to. They haven’t developed the same inhibitions that adults have about pointing this out.

What this indicates, it would seem to me, is that a preference for one’s own kind is a natural drive, and that bigotry and flaws related to bigotry are natural human failings that culture must teach us against, rather than corruptions that culture has imposed upon the poor innocent state-of-nature man. Certainly history would suggest that racism is man’s natural state, given the amount of racial/ethnic conflict that has gone on throughout history.

Indeed, this supports the conservative idea that rather than blast whites for their racism, they ought to be applauded for suppressing the natural drives enough to have genuine concern that they not be racist. Certainly very few tribes in the world worry overmuch over the morality of having an unfair advantage over another tribe.

Good point. However, my speechless shock was not at the idea that toddlers may have race consciousness, but at the idea that the state finds this problematic and will want to start subjecting small children to diversity brainwashing to cure them of their “racism.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 08, 2006 01:05 AM | Send