One of the enduring evils of the regressive insistence that all of society’s ills are rooted in racism is their repeated attacks on children. The latest is a relatively innocuous study that finds that infants are more friendly toward those races with which they are familiar and with which they associate a positive and loving experience.
The flip side of this study erroneously concludes racism is at the root of these infants’ inability to bond with or otherwise respond positively to people of races other than their own. Note that it’s not clear how the researchers determine what race the babies in the study believed themselves to be.
The New York Daily News reports:
University of Toronto researchers found that infants as young as 6 to 9 months show racial bias — contradicting the popular view that it first emerges in a child’s preschool years. Still, bias is believed to be learned behavior.“What this means is that we’re not really born with some kind of racial bias,” said lead researcher Kang Lee.Lee said he believes the phenomenon is not a result of parents teaching their kids to discriminate. Instead, it’s a function of the homogenous environments in which most children grow up.
The study used “sad” and “happy” music to help identify with which race the babies most identified.
Researchers at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and the University of Toronto recently released two studies claiming to show six- to nine-month-old babies are biased in favor of people of their own race.“The results show that race-based bias already exists around the second half of a child’s first year,” said Dr. Kang Lee, a professor at OISE’s Jackman Institute of Child Study, according to a report in the Daily Mail.The researchers found in their first study babies associate positive-sounding music to people of their own race and negative-sounding music with people of another race. In the second study, the researchers say babies were more likely to follow the gaze of people of their own race than people of another race, suggesting babies are more willing to learn from people who look like them.
Following the “happy” and “sad” music test, it seems to have been decided that the baby clearly discriminated against races other than their own (again, it’s not clear how the babies are presumed to know their own race).
The New York Daily News continues:
The babies were shown videos of six Asian women and six African women, paired with either happy or sad music. Infants less than 6 months old didn’t associate happy or sad music with members of any particular race, the study showed.But at nine months, the babies gazed at their own-race faces paired with happy music for a longer time. They did the same for other-race faces paired with sad music, researchers found.“This suggests that when children see an other-raced person, they already have negative associations,” Lee said.
Racist six-month-old babies were the topic of a recent Tucker Carlson interview with one of the researchers involved in the study.
The Blaze continues:
On Friday night, Lee joined Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” to discuss the findings, and Carlson was highly skeptical of the racist-baby theory.“Now, I’m not a social scientist or a researcher, but it seems unlikely that you could measure the racial attitudes of a three-month-old, beyond like my diaper is dirty kind of thing, or I want some milk,” Carlson said to Lee.“The way to do it,” Lee said, “is to see what kind of things we associate with or whether or not we tend to learn—the babies like to learn from own-race individuals [rather than] other-race individuals.”Lee then explained in one of the studies the researchers conducted, they found babies prefer to learn from people with the same or similar racial background. Lee also said he believes this could be the basis for racist attitudes developed later in life.“From a non-expert point of view, this suggests that these attitudes are not learned behavior but a product of evolutionary biology, but I guess you would know,” Carlson said to Lee. “As someone who would cover politics, though, I’m pretty certain that your study is going to lead to new government programs and government control over babies.”
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