“Even Babies Discriminate,” wails the headline of an article in Newsweek Magazine. “Kids as young as 6 months judge others based on skin color. What’s a parent to do?”
What’s a reader to do when editors play this fast and loose with the English language? About the only thing a child that young can “judge” is the superiority of a full tummy to an empty one. And as long as Mommy’s the one filling that tummy, the kid probably couldn’t care less what color she is.
Indeed, three pages into the article, we find the basis for the headline’s histrionics. “[Phyllis] Katz[, formerly a professor at the University of Colorado,] found that babies will stare significantly longer at photographs of faces that are a different race from their parents, indicating they find the face out of the ordinary.”
“Significantly.” One man’s “significant” is another man’s “I didn’t even notice.” But let’s assume this study from about 10 years ago wasn’t as subjective as the current reporting is, that Ms. Katz backed up that “significant” with details and data (“Infants approximately 183 days old maintained visual fixation on full-color photographic representation of parental modules an average of 3.45 seconds and on adult members of racial categorizations varying from the parental an average of 7.87 seconds”). The article — and presumably Ms. Katz, who as director of the Institute for Research on Social Problems in Denver no doubt discerns “social problems” where the rest of us see gas or diaper rash — still leaps an illogical chasm to assert that babies gazing at pictures are racist.
And that’s the problem with the social “sciences.” They aren’t science at all but the opinions, guesses, and prejudices of academics with too much time on their hands — time that’s usually bought with our taxes, by the way. These flibbertigibbets hope to solve the miraculous mystery of human personality, reducing us to a formula that they and their patrons in government can control.
Meanwhile, they condemn the almost universal craving for the known and familiar as racist. Some folks enjoy exotic experiences and people, but many find solace in those with whom they share a similar outlook and background. And since culture closely correlates with color, most of us choose friends and spouses who look like we do. This is neither good or bad: it simply is. Nor is it anyone’s business, let alone government’s, whether you and your friends are exclusively white, black or Asian, or whether you’re a blend thereof.
But the race-baiting hierarchy excoriates choices that don’t conform to its decrees. And now this article asks whether racism is genetic. If so, if it’s cursed the world since hominids noticed that under all that hair, some of them had pale skin while others didn’t, why, we’ll need even stronger laws against it.
But loathing a man for the shade of his skin — which, biologically speaking, matters no more than eye-color: we are truly “of one blood,” as the Bible says — boasts a more recent pedigree. Some trace its start to 1492, when Europeans finished reclaiming Spain from the Moors. That herculean effort had taken 800 years, during which conquerors and conquered intermarried; the new government required their descendants either to prove that they were Spanish (Christian and white) or endure expulsion or enslavement as a Moor (Moslem and black). Others say racism was born in the 18th century, when naturalists like Carl Linnaeus and the Comte de Buffon first grouped humanity by color.
Previously, most societies and even governments had divided people by nation, religion, culture, clan, or another criterion besides looks. There were a few exceptions; India’s Hindus, for example, prized pale skin so much that they despised dark Dalits as untouchable. But generally, neither the ancient nor the medieval world seems to have cared about skin. Even African slavery, the bête noir of modern demagogues, burgeoned from the 1600s to the 1800s as a continuation of the “industry” Moslems had cultivated since the 10th century in the areas they captured. Dark skin may have become a handy way of distinguishing enslaved men from free ones, but it wasn’t the reason Africans became slaves.
In the 19th century, the naturalists’ categories acquired a sinister cast. The credit for that belongs primarily to Charles Darwin.
Our atheistic age needs his theory of mankind’s beginnings, so it conveniently ignores Darwin’s racism. But his bigotry makes the Aryan Nation seem liberal. Not only did he subtitle The Origin of Species as The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, he emphasized and described racial differences at length. He designated white Europeans “civilized” while denigrating men from primitive cultures; his insistence that only the fittest — as he defined them — survive meant that the favored few would eventually exterminate the rest.
From this sprang such hellish concepts as Nietzche’s Ubermensch, the justification of might as right, and eugenics. Karl Marx praised “Darwin’s work” as “most important … [it] suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.” He later quibbled with some of the theory; that inspired his disciple Josef Stalin to reject Darwinian details, though he enthusiastically agreed that men are mere animals, that no God created them in His image, and that they therefore merit neither respect nor even life. Hitler hectored his superior Aryans to rid themselves of inferior races and even inferior Aryans, i.e., handicapped folks. Germany became a laboratory for Darwinian eugenics.
You might think that Americans would vehemently reject so murderous a construct. But politicians in general and those on the Marxist left in particular cultivate racial nonsense to fertilize their power. “Minorities” rightly fear racism since it excuses whites for eliminating them; our rulers exploit that, encouraging their prey to believe that only laws as sweeping and dictatorial as the Civil Rights Act can save them from the discrimination that other laws, ironically enough, inflicted. Yet those same rulers require schools to teach Darwin’s satanic theory with its contempt for human dignity and the infinite value the Creator endows on every individual.
Freeing the world from racism means freeing it from politicians.
