Science Says: Blacks and Whites are Born Racists
But that's no defense.
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We hear a great deal of bloviating about the evils of racism, particularly from liberals who think that any and all criticism of Mr. Obama is due solely to racism. Nobody could possibly criticize him for his policies, they being so self-evidently all-wise and all-benevolent, so all these complaints we hear must be due to racism. Time for yet more sensitivity training and more affirmative action!
Racism is Genetic
Newsweek dropped a bombshell into this mix of charges and counter-charges with an article "See Baby Discriminate." New research indicates that children as young as six months judge other people based on skin color.
Birgitte Vittrup, a researcher from the University of Texas, recruited about a hundred Caucasian families with children 5 to 7 years old. With the parents' permission, she administered a Racial Attitude Measure asking such questions as:
How many White people are nice?
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)How many Black people are nice?
(Almost all) (A lot) (Some) (Not many) (None)During the test, the descriptive adjective "nice" was replaced with more than 20 other adjectives, like "dishonest," "pretty," "curious," and "snobby."
The families were located in Austin, a liberal city where most parents are multiculturalists who embrace diversity eagerly. To the researcher's surprise, the kids weren't colorblind at all. They said that very few white people were mean and that either "some" or "a lot" of blacks were mean, for example.
When given the results of the test, most parents stated that they didn't want to make their children race-conscious. They avoided discussing race, skin color, or other attributes which could be subject to racism. They had told their children generalities such as "Everybody's equal," or "God made all of us," but they'd avoided explicit talk about racial differences.
More disturbing, Vittrup also asked all the kids a very blunt question: "Do your parents like black people?" Fourteen percent said outright, "No, my parents don't like black people"; 38 percent of the kids answered, "I don't know." In this supposed race-free vacuum being created by parents, kids were left to improvise their own conclusions-many of which would be abhorrent to their parents. [Out of the mouths of babes! emphasis added]
The article went on to explain that the "politically correct" practice of not talking about race contrasts with our explaining other color preferences to children. Most parents teach that pink is for girls and that blue is for boys despite the entreaties of feminists, but children are left to figure out black and white on their own.
It turns out that differences in skin color are just as visible as differences in gender and that Caucasian children tend to believe that people who look the same as themselves more likable and are more trustworthy. Such group preferences are visible wherever people of mixed races come together - people tend to sort each other out by race.
Moody found that the more diverse the school, the more the kids self-segregate by race and ethnicity within the school, and thus the likelihood that any two kids of different races have a friendship goes down.
It's no surprise that white children would prefer white people to black people because white people are more like themselves. What surprises some people, however, is that black children also show strong preferences for white over black.
Back in the 1940's, Dr. Kenneth Clark studied what he thought were the psychological effects of segregation on black children. Black children were given a white doll and a black doll and asked which was nicer. Black children overwhelmingly chose the white doll. Liberals immediately blamed white racism, saying that racists had communicated the message that blacks were inferior so strongly that even black children believed it.
The test was repeated in a Harlem school in 2005. After decades of "black is beautiful," affirmative action, efforts by all and sundry to proclaim that black people are equal in every way to whites, much yelling and screaming about the evils of racism, and a lifetime of seeing black athletes outperform whites in nearly every professional sport, 15 of the 21 black children said that the white doll was good and pretty and the black doll bad.
It appears that a preference for white over black is built into the genes of children of all races: both white children and black children have an inbuilt preference for white over black. Color-consciousness, which is another word for racism, is built into our genes!
What About Gaiety?
We shouldn't expect the fact that racial preferences are genetic to make liberals any more tolerant of color preferences: being a liberal means you twist any scientific fact to support your views, no matter what. In recent years, we've noted a large number of articles proclaiming the discovery of a "gay gene" which makes homosexuals prefer to bond to their own gender rather than to the opposite gender. Liberals all over the world are throwing this "scientific" evidence at conservatives, saying, in effect, "They're that way because it's in their genes. They're here, they're queer, get used to it."
Now that Newsweek, no less, has reported that babies come from the factory pre-equipped with strong color preferences regardless of what their own parents might wish, should we expect liberals to accede to this reality? Logically, we should expect liberals to accept the scientific-proven genetically-caused fact that most people prefer to associate with people who're like themselves and that people in general find white skin preferable - in other words, that racism is every bit as natural and inevitable as homosexuality, and should receive the same deference and respect. Right?
The accompanying photograph illustrates our opinion regarding the exact moment when liberals will accept the same sorts of scientific evidence they demand that conservatives accept.
Of course, it could be that despite being genetically caused, both racism and homosexuality are morally wrong and should be opposed - but that would be a religious moral view, and we can't have those in modern America, now can we?
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What does Chinese history have to teach America that Joe Biden doesn't know?
I'm a White man. I didn't ALWAYS prefer Black women to White women. There was a time when I more or less exclusively dated White women, not that I avoided Black women specifically (one of my first girlfriends in high school was half Cape Verdean).
After taking a job working with people, where I'm often the only White person in the room, and working there for a few years, I began to notice myself being attracted to more and more Black women outside of the workplace. Today I much prefer the look of Black women to that of White women. Not that I find White women unattractive, but I'd probably tend towards looking for a Black woman if I were looking for a serious relationship (I'm already in a serious relationship now, and it's with a woman who is neither Black nor White, but she is considerably darker than I am).
There were probably a number of reasons for this shift in attraction, but one of the most important, I think, was just a simple increase in the frequency of Black faces I saw in the course of a typical day.
Black children (and other non-White children as well) living in the US are living in a sea of White people. They see White faces every day, outside of their houses as well as on television. I think that rather than a "genetic tendency" towards preference for White faces, we humans may simply have a tendency (genetic or not) towards preference for what we perceive as "typical" or "normal" faces, given the environment in which we live.
An interesting study would be one involving White children growing up in an area dominated by another racial group. Which dolls would they choose?
- Ron ^*^
Lfon -- I'm not sure that the concept of discrimination being an inborn human trait would really rock the worlds of many Liberals or libertarians ("discrimination" being at its core just a form of categorizing). More to the point, I'm not sure that many in either group actually believe that anything and everything programmed into the human behavior genome is acceptable and should be tolerated in modern society. In fact I'd be very surprised to find anyone who actually subscribes to that idea. The question is what is acceptable, what isn't, and how one makes the distinction.
After reading the actual article in question, it seems to me that the real conclusions of the researchers were simply that there was an ideal window of opportunity to begin teaching young children about race, and that this window might come earlier than most had expected. Even with the doll experiment mentioned later on, I think Offensicht is taking a bit of a leap when he claims that all children have an "inbuilt preference for white over black".
If Offensicht really wants to cause a stir over racism by commenting on research that may have implications beyond what the scientists involved intended, might I suggest his learning more about the work of Dmitri Belyaev.
- Ron ^*^
The point of the article is that liberals pick and choose which behaviors are excused because of "genetics" and which ones aren't.
It's a matter of consistency. It's also something that of which liberals are incapable.
Could this have anything to do with why they find one acceptable and the other not, regardless of genetics?
If I were in a room filled with white and black people, all of whom were dressed exactly alike I would most likely go talk to the white people. My brain will latch onto anything that makes it believe I have something in common and will go there first.
However, if I saw a black guy with a shirt that said "There are only 10 kinds of people in the world, Those who understand binary and those who don't" I would go and talk to him well before I would talk to a white guy waring a polo.
Children that are shushed when they talk about something want to know -why-. Part of the reason the terrible twos are 'terrible' is because the children know only enough to know they don't understand and they want to understand. If children can't talk about it with adults they'll talk about it with other children.
Who ever presents the first answer wins. To notice that a person has a different skin color is no different than noticing that a person has a different eye color or a different accent. The difference is how parents react to them.
Yes children notice differences. That does not make them racist. I would be curious to know if that white/black doll experiment was done in Kenya or Somalia what the answer would be.
I am not surprised that white children prefer white dolls, after all as with being put into a room with no markers of where to go your brain will latch onto whatever is most similar. I would be surprised if black children naturally prefer the white doll. I find it more likely that the black children are being taught that white is better by their parents telling them that whites have all the power.
Has anybody stopped to think that this 'color preference' is still a product of social bearings? As children we are taught good vs evil, right vs wrong. In fact, growing up, I was always told to accept people as they are... and yet my parents sill enforced the association of the color white with G-d, purity, innocence, beauty and youth - equating black to evil, darkness, confusion, and death. (Which has nothing to do with the difference of a black woman and a white woman, it's just the cultural belief.)
If you give a child a choice of a white doll vs the black doll, they will be draw to the lighter one simply due to the fact that they have been taught white = pure. It would be the same as putting them in a white room, then a black room, and asking which one they liked better. White. Why? Because they're born racist?? No. Because white is supposed to be good, and black is supposed to be scary.
I don't buy for a second that 'color-consciousness' means a person is born racist, just as I don't really believe a person can be born with the 'gay gene'. These are learned or developed behaviors, just as we learn to prefer say red over blue (men over women). So go ahead, let's chop some people up and examine their brain - I'll volunteer. Any structural differences between a racist or a person who loves all people? Any unidentifiable chemical differences? Nooo? Who would have guessed. :I
Whites are racist blacks are self haters. Black's also bleach their skin.
Morality does not come from religion.