TV Is Too White, Woke Professor Claims — and It Intensifies White Kids’ Racism
It was less than a year ago that journalist Piers Morgan published his book Woke Is Dead. “How Common Sense Triumphed in an Age of Total Madness,” the subtitle reads. If it has triumphed, though, some critics may wonder, why are woke bullets and bombs still raining down?
Just consider an eyebrow-raising new story about how shows such as Sesame Street can intensify white kids’ “racism.” As The College Fix reported earlier this week:
Could “Doc McStuffins” and “Dora the Explorer” be turning white kids into racists?
A professor from the University of Illinois thinks so.
“White children in the United States begin developing racial biases in early childhood that threaten the well-being of children of color and serve as the developmental roots for racial prejudices that persist into adulthood,” a new Psycnet study from Professor Michael Rizzo says.
The study reviewed the TV watching patterns of white kids as young as four and asked them about their willingness to play with a hypothetical person who was white, black, Asian, or Hispanic.
“With age, children whose favorite media portrayed fewer Black characters — and especially in high-status contexts and roles — were less likely to choose to play with a Black child, held less positive attitudes toward Black children, and were more likely to attribute Black-White racial inequalities to intrinsic racial differences,” the study found.
This is not, mind you, the first warning we’ve heard about “racist” white tykes. Way back in 2008, in fact, Britain’s National Children’s Bureau cautioned teachers to be alert for racist incidents among kids. An example?
One could be a three-year-old saying “‘yuk’ in response to being served unfamiliar foreign food,” wrote The Telegraph. Whether it’s racist when a non-white child says “yuck” in response to British food was not reported. (Though I could in that case sympathize.)
The Real Bias?
Oh, and why is only white children’s alleged racism mentioned? A 1996 study finding higher “aversive prejudice” among blacks explained it. “The prejudice of White Americans has been extensively studied,” noted the authors, “but that of African Americans has been comparatively ignored in the social sciences.” Gee, you don’t say.
This hasn’t changed much, either. As the recent entertainment study’s authors themselves wrote:
We focused on White, U.S. children because White children are the dominant and majority group in the United States and are the most likely to develop racial biases….