Posted on 02/22/2012 12:16:13 PM PST by reaganaut1
Children’s toys: offensive or not? In a moderated discussion on Feb. 8, professor Robin Bernstein posited that racism often exists in unlikely objects and concepts of a culture. Raggedy Ann, a widely recognized stuffed doll of the American childhood experience, is one such unexpected preserve of racism. However, in this recent Writer Series Event held by the Harvard Foundation in conjunction with the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality and the Department of African and African American Studies, Bernstein provocatively challenged the audience to consider the historical context of this seemingly inoffensive childhood object—a subconscious reminder of racism in many childrens’ lives. She engaged in dialogue with organizer and moderator Grace L. Chen ’15 about ideas like this in Bernstein’s new book, “Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Civil Rights to Slavery.” Our modern notion of childhood innocence, Bernstein said, has its roots in an era when entertainment catered exclusively to white children, as evinced by various childhood objects—like Anglo-centric literature and dolls—in the 18th and 19th centuries.
In her introduction, Bernstein described the 2006 controversy in Louisiana’s Tangipahoa Parish where Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell refused to marry an interracial couple. Bardwell explained that he does not believe in interracial marriages—not because of race, but because of his desire “to protect the children.” In his view, representatives from both races in question would not accept interracial children, and thus these marriage would only manage to harm the children in the long term. Bardwell’s statements caused a huge frenzy. He was forced to resign, and the couple married elsewhere.
Yet Bardwell’s entire argument, Bernstein explained, centered on fictitious children. Bernstein maintained that this argument is but one example of the notion that imaginary children deserved protection more than adults deserve constitutional rights.
(Excerpt) Read more at thecrimson.com ...
This stuff is beyond parody.
The big lib schools should “integrate” their racial and sex departments into one big
DPEARTMENT OF PERPETUAL WHINING.
The toys themselves are really very little influence. Peers and teachers...
If racism didn’t exist, it would have been invented.
All this is like a blister on our heel that will not be allowed to heal.
I used to joke about my toddler’s toys being endorsed by the Nevada Gaming Association because so many of them looked like slot machines and other gambling devices. I never saw any toys that looked racist to me.
At least everyone has a window seat.
So this is what they mean by “finding racism under every rock”... I know, that’s probably inherently racist for me to state it...
Really, can we work toward the day when anti-anti-racism is as successful as anti-anti-communists have been at deriding their opponents?
The biggest racists are those who see race in almost every facet of life. They hunt it out, they magnify it, they gather race into their arms and arguments, they are so consumed with the idea of racial difference, they can see no commonality among humankind. It is all division, all judgementalism, all disparagement all the time.
This is one humongous racist.
I would say it has more to too with who buys toys and who doesn’t.Since whites are still the majority in this country they are the ones buying the majority of toys.
WTF??
THIS I like, because it is like those starving children that need taxpayer paid for lunches, the obese children that need healthier (more expensive) taxpayer paid for lunches, laws making Happy Meals unhappy, the 10 million per year children k1lled because of the evil 2nd Amendment, and on and on.
It's for the Children !
If a Genie were to suddenly appear and promise to make racism go away tomorrow, there would be a stampede of black people and Democrats trying to kill the Genie ....
Imagine the repository of knowledge that bunch must represent.
The proper headline should be: “Imagining Racism in Inanimate Objects”, as taught in “Anthropomorphism 101” classes in the minority studies department.
We will be more free when we all stop caring if anybody thinks somebody or something is racist. It’s caring about wanting to not be called racist that makes us vulnerable to such extortion.
Take government money out of universities.
ALL. THE. WAY. OUT.
No grants. No loans. No government support at all. Sink or swim. If a corporations want to support science, fine. Their business. The government will buy the product the corporation sells when it’s ready.
If the universities want to survive, tell them to send in an accountant with a scalpel and cut out every crap course on bitter women studies and transgendered elk, fire every non-performing “professor”, eliminate every expenditure of funds that is not directly related to the advancement of education, and tell the students to buy their own frigging condoms.
Get the standards up, eliminate waste, get the tuitions down to reasonable levels and tell any kid who wants to attend that they better keep their grades up from the very beginning or they will be right out the door. No parties, no protests, no politics. You’re there to study and that’s ALL.
One thing for sure, if any university actually did any of this, they’d have more students they could handle because the employers at the other end of the pipeline would be snapping up the grads like crazy.
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