Cultivating ignorance

Recently, during a lively discussion with a group of preschoolers about polar bears, I asked them a nonrhetorical question: Is a polar bear black or white?

Both the kids and the adults accompanying them looked puzzled, especially since I was holding a small iridescent artifact of polar bear fur. One little boy said, “That’s a trick question.” Several others shouted, “White!”

It was a trick question, I told them. Polar bears have shiny white fur, but underneath their skin is black. An age-appropriate discussion of melting ice and polar bears followed. These kids didn’t seem to care that I am Black and they were not. Parents worried about the teaching of exaggerated critical race theory should remember that. The assumption that white children will start to feel guilty if slavery is discussed in class is illogical and insulting to children’s intelligence.

I wrote my first book report on “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in eighth grade. I wrote a different one on that same book in high school, and a third in college after maturity revealed new themes. Not once did I internalize the fact that Huck’s friend Jim was an escaped slave; he was simply a character in

Janet Y.

a novel. The same was true with my favorite tale, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” both the book and the 1962 movie released when I was 12. Segregation existed throughout the nation in those years, so I certainly identified with the Black character, Tom Robinson. But I didn’t internalize his plight, any more than a child reading about race would internalize that now.

Children are not colorblind. In fact, various child psychologists argue over the age babies can differentiate skin color — some saying as early as three months, others theorizing six to eight months. Following a 2022 Yale study, Dr. Sheila Modir, a child psychologist with the Children’s Hospital of Orange County, California, consolidated these scientists’ varied milestone theories and summarized that children don’t start to assimilate their parents’ attitudes about race until they are about 5 years old. So, there is a period of time between infancy and the start of school when parents can discuss any negativity their child may have witnessed or experienced regarding race or religion.

Still, considering that more kids today attend integrated schools (especially those in public schools) it becomes more obvious that the vehement rhetoric objecting to the discussion of race (by couching it as critical race theory) should be labeled for what it is: a political gambit. Racism is there all right, but it’s promulgated by parents, not the children, and not by books teaching Black history.

One of the actors from the current Broadway play “Leopoldstadt” (about the Holocaust) was interviewed on NBC’s “Today” show last month. He said that after every show he is approached by people saying, “I had no idea.” Was the Holocaust not taught in school, or was it just glossed over as our teachers are being instructed to do when mentioning race today? This is the sort of cultural ignorance we foster by pretending that racial or religious injustices didn’t happen in the past, or that they don’t continue in the present. If parents worked to instill self-confidence and racial pride in their children, much of these questions could be answered before these kids ever start school.

Last week, state Rep. Andrew Koenig said, “It’s pretty racist to tell my Black kids that they can’t make it in the world because they are somehow oppressed by white people. And it’s equally as racist to tell my white kids that they are oppressing my Black kids.”

See JACKSON, Page 5

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