Our predominantly liberal culture is obsessed with race and wants to place it at the forefront of every single human interaction. But it doesn’t need to be that way, and the country would be better off if it weren’t.
In an interview with AARP, actor and director Tyler Perry explained that he hadn’t talked about race with his 7-year-old son. “I don’t want to tell him that there are people who will judge him because of the color of his skin, because right now, he’s in a school with every race. And all these kids are in their purest form,” Perry said. “When he describes his friends, he never defines them by race. So, the moment he loses that innocence is going to be a very, very sad day for me.”
“When he describes his friends, he never defines them by race.” This is what our country should be aspiring to. Instead, activists, bureaucrats, and politicians want to impose racial ideas on children of the same age as Perry’s son. These people want children (and adults) to be taught that whiteness is inherently bad and “privileged.” If you are black, you must be paranoid at every turn, because the world is out to get you. All interactions must be looked at through the prism of race, along with the supposed power dynamics that come with it.
This includes the Arizona Department of Education telling parents that children can be racist by the time they are 3 months old and that 5-year-old white children “remain strongly biased in favor of whiteness.”
Obviously, none of this is to say that children shouldn’t be taught that racism used to exist and continues to exist among some despicable people right now. But liberal culture-makers are trying to teach children exactly what those racists believe: that race really matters and that it should be the most important thing we think about in daily life. It doesn’t, and it shouldn’t be. Race is meaningless. It tells us nothing about a person’s likes, dislikes, beliefs, qualifications, character, or life.
If the liberal “anti-racists” that dominate our culture truly wanted to fight racism, they would deemphasize race and racial differences and instead focus on our common bonds. We are all Americans or proud members of a shared community or members of the same religion. These ties go far deeper than the skin-deep differences of skin color. Unlike skin color, they matter, and we should work to emphasize those shared bonds rather than promote racial divisions and categorizations.
