White Antiracist Enlightens His 8-Year-Old: 'You're Racist'
Raising the next generation of guilt-ridden allies.
At an “antiracism” website called EmbraceRace.org, a proud white activist recently shared his personal experience guiding his daughter Aya, 8, toward the uncomfortable self-awareness that because she is white, she is racist even if – or perhaps especially if – she believes she is not. It is a disturbing look at the mindset of white antiracist “allies” who believe they are participating in the grand project of socially engineering a utopian future, starting with inculcating a racial consciousness and a corrosive guilt into their own innocent children.
“Explaining to My Eight-Year-Old That Yes, She Too, is Racist” is a heartfelt confession by Jonathan Osler, whose brief bio states that for more than 20 years, he “has worked to advance educational equity and racial justice as an educator, nonprofit leader, and parent organizer.” He is the curator of WhiteAccomplices.org (where it reminds you that “as White people, whether as an Actor, Ally or Accomplice, we are still part of the ‘oppressor class’”) and the “co-founder of several equity-centered parent organizations in Oakland, California.” This is a man committed to liberating non-whites from the oppression of America’s systemically racist, white supremacist boot heel.
Osler writes about a family road trip during which the topic of racism arose and his young daughter Aya, who is white like her parents, declares from the back seat that she is not racist, that she plays with kids of other races at school and doesn’t care what they look like. For most people, this seems like a fair objection; after all, if you think nothing of other people’s skin color, and treat no one differently on that basis, you are not racist. It is as simple as that.
Not for the antiracist. The race-obsessed Progressive today believes that racism is not only “baked into” every structure, policy, tradition, and value of our oppressive society, but that it is also inherent in the unconscious biases of white people. Whites who reject this frankly racist accusation are simply in denial, according to antiracists. Bestselling race hustler Ibram X. Kendi even calls denial “the very heartbeat of racism.” So Jonathan Osler had to disabuse his daughter of her naïve self-defense.
Aya’s parents had already immersed her in antiracist social activism, such as “teach-ins about White privilege,” even before she could read. Her dad writes that the family talks with each other regularly about “racial inequities” at school, “police killings of Black people,” and “the horror of immigrants being separated from their families.” But her parents have assured her that “her White privilege will protect her from experiencing many of these harms.”
It isn’t “white privilege” that protects her from those experiences; simply obeying the law will shield her from all but the most unusual circumstances or bad luck. But antiracists bristle at the suggestion that those in approved victimhood categories have any agency to control their own circumstances. In an oppressive society, their thinking goes, the oppressed are always innocent and any racial disparities, such as a disproportionate representation in the prison population, are the result of systemic racism, not the behavior of oppressed People of Color™.
In any case, Jonathan Osler explained to Aya that racism isn’t just something perpetuated by a few bad apples like the police and Donald Trump (Osler actually named them as examples): “It’s us, too.”
Osler then lectured his impressionable eight-year-old about her skin color being problematic, which seems rather abusive. “Whiteness [sic] is not actually normal for everyone,” he told her, and asked her to imagine “how it might feel to be a person of color in a society always being judged against White [sic] norms.” He didn’t explain, at least in the article, what white norms are and what’s wrong with them. You may recall that, in a notorious example of the racist Left’s condemnation of such norms, the woke Smithsonian Institute was excoriated for displaying a chart labeling hard work, self-reliance, respect for authority, and the nuclear family as “white” traits. Is Osler saying that blacks are unfairly judged against those norms? Because that would be racist.
Osler relates that a few days later he summoned up the courage to confess to his children that he has racial biases. He told them about an incident in which he
walked past a Black [sic] man in my neighborhood. He was shuffling a bit erratically, with only one arm inside a sleeve of his jacket that flapped in the air behind him. I could almost visualize the split-second thoughts traveling across my mind: Is he drunk? Is he mentally unwell? Is he going to mess with me? I wondered how differently I would have reacted if the man was White [sic]. As we passed each other, he gave me a big smile and I nodded back sheepishly.
Actually, Osler was justified in being wary of a stranger of any race passing him who acted and looked sick or mentally unstable; he was right to listen to his instincts in a situation that could potentially have turned violent. That was his common sense – not racism – alerting him to be cautious. Turning off your situational awareness, out of a misguided concern that being distrustful of a suspicious black man is somehow racist, is dangerously stupid, and now Osler is passing this bad advice down to his young daughters.
His daughters admitted that they too had had similar experiences and thoughts. “Despite my naive longing to raise bias-free, anti-racist babies,” Osler writes, “my kids obviously harbor implicit biases and have the capacity to act in racist ways. But unlike me, they’ve discovered this truth at a much younger age.”
He went on to assert that it’s not enough for white families to “dutifully ply our kids with the right books about the extraordinary achievements of people of color, and take them to the right marches to express their righteous outrage against the latest injustice.” (Fact check: it’s a terrible idea to take your young kids to political marches.) It’s critical, Osler writes, that white parents “share that we have ugly, shameful thoughts and reflect aloud about where these racist notions came from in order to model this process for our kids.” Apparently he doesn’t think this advice would apply to parents of other races as well.
After all, he doesn’t want Aya “to become a police officer, pulling over Black [sic] motorists for driving in the ‘wrong’ neighborhood,” or “a teacher who, because of her unexamined biases, is more likely to discipline Black [sic] boys and not refer Black [sic] girls to gifted programs.” He also doesn’t want his other daughter Noa, 11, “to become the type of politician who campaigns on building border walls” or “to unnecessarily call the police on a person of color.”
Osler appended to his article a list of recommended readings, among which are Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped (for Kids), and another article about guilt-tripping your white children, this one by EmbraceRace co-founder Andrew Grant-Thomas, who is black, titled, “Your 5 Year-Old is Already Racially Biased.”
Jonathan Osler is representative of the self-loathing that has warped today’s white illiberals, who believe their cultish, social justice mission requires them to bequeath this unfortunate derangement to their own innocent children. This brainwashing abuse is damaging a whole new generation of kids, both black and white, who otherwise could learn to get along as equals and judge each other not by the color of their skin, as the collectivist Left wants, but by the content of their character.
It is disheartening that this self hating white racist does not see reality when he looks in the mirror of life. Teaching his 8 year old child to think and act according to his warped views is infuriating. Hopefully the child will somehow overcome having such a parent and become colorblind, rather than perpetuate these twisted concepts.
The guy sounds like an absolute cuck. If it wasn’t for the kind of people who love to feel like a victim in order to use it as a power play against others, any self-respecting black person would find it offensive to be condescended to by these “antiracists” - especially a white one. It’s as if milquetoast white men like this guy are betraying their real feeling that blacks are inferior and they’re projecting this feeling onto the rest of the normal non-racist white people as if we all think the same. It’s more or less treating blacks as handicapped people who have no agency to do as they want. It’s pathetic.