babble » blogs » Strollerderby
Strollerderby
With all the tension in Arizona over immigration law, wouldn’t it be crazy if some local politician with a radio talk show started a campaign to have the faces of black and Hispanic children on a school mural lightened so that they looked white? That would be totally insane, right?
Right.
Which is why all hell broke loose this weekend in Prescott, AZ. Wonkette first reported Friday that “a group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school. The project’s leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children’s ethnicity.” Ordered by the principal of Miller Valley School, no less, because of pressure led by Prescott city councilman Steve Blair.
Prescott residents were riled by Blair’s inflammatory comments about the appropriateness of depicting a black student in the center of the mural. Blair said on his radio show, “I am not a racist individual, but… to depict the biggest picture on that building as a black person, I would have to ask the question, ‘Why?’” Continue reading »
This week on CNN, Anderson Cooper and Soledad O’Brien are co-presenting a series called Black or White: Kids on Race. According to their admittedly unscientific pilot study at the heart of the piece, “white children have an overwhelming white bias, and black children also have a bias toward white.” University of Chicago professor Margaret Beale Spencer, who designed the study, says that white bias is not as strong among black children as it is among white children.
The study is basically a recreation of the famous “Doll Test” of the 1940′s. The results of that test were used to argue for desegregation of schools in Brown v. Board of Education. In the modern version, students ages 4-10 at four schools in New York City and four schools in Georgia were asked to point to “one of five cartoon pictures that varied in skin color from light to dark” in response to commands such as, “Show me the dumb child.” Despite the fact that all the cartoon faces were smiling and dressed in the same blue outfit, children more frequently identified the darker-skinned cartoons as having negative characteristics. (The cartoon characters were all girls, by the way. I wonder if the study results might have changed if the characters were all boys or children of both sexes and/or characters showing different emotions/attitudes.) Continue reading »
Most children naturally form racial and ethnic stereotypes. Nurtureshock made headlines last year with data revealing that even babies as young as 6 months discriminate.
New research in Nature has shown that some children don’t form racial biases. Kids with a rare condition called William’s Syndrome are apparently free of racial bias, though they form the same stereotypes about gender that neurotypical kids do.
“Black children are an endangered species,” read the billboards along Georgia’s highways this month. The signs were paid for by Georgia’s largest anti-abortion organization, Georgia Right to Life. The group’s primarily white staff bought the ads as part of a campaign to woo more black women to their cause.
Georgia’s Right to Life is picking up on a larger effort by anti-choice groups around the country to frame abortion as a racist practice and organizations like Planned Parenthood as part of a vast conspiracy to prevent the births of black children.
Are children’s book authors’ lives as squeaky clean as the tales they crank out to bookstores? The other day, I misplaced my better nature and took to the Internet for some research. As it turns out, even the authors of some of the most endearing and cherished children’s classics kept some sordid secrets that didn’t make it on the bio page.
Aesop
The granddaddy of kid’s lit, Aesop’s Fables (like “The Tortoise and the Hare” and “The Ant and the Grasshopper”), ensured him adoration for hundreds of generations. Too bad everyone back in the 6th century B.C. hated his guts.
Society is finally at a point where we cringe when a teenager beside you in line at the grocery store declares something is “so gay” or “so retarded.”
But that hasn’t stopped it from happening all too frequently. And as a recent Double X post regarding an article that described Barack Obama’s action in Afghanistan as a “a case study in presidential schizophrenia” points out it may be time we start expanding the list of taboo words for teenage insults. Continue reading »
Separating kids based on the color of their skin wouldn’t fly in any American school, so it’s no surprise parents were angry when a Texas middle school split up kids based on their eye color.
Then came the explanation: this was a lesson in racial equality – and differences – for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Continue reading »
Lori Garcia 
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
The Walt Disney Company supports Babble as a platform dedicated to honest, engaged, informed, intelligent and open conversation about parenting. However, the opinions expressed on this site are those of individual parents/writers and do not reflect the views of Disney. In addition, content provided on this site is for entertainment or informational purposes only and should not be construed as medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or safety advice.
14