Managing Public Opinion: Racist White Lady Flees Brooklyn’s Blacks, then Writes Propaganda Cover Story Insulting Her New White Neighbors, Lecturing Readers on Race Relations, and Seeking to Endanger Their Children; Slate Covers for Her by Rigging Reader Support

 

Propaganda photo by Purestock/Thinkstock [The photo code says, “140326_KIDS_DiversePlayground.jpg.CROP.promo-mediumlarge”; it’s a prefab propaganda pic. Note that there is no room on the “diverse playground” for any white, heterosexual boys. The little white girl must mate with Shitavious or Jesus.]
 

By Nicholas Stix

We all know the type that racial socialist “parenting expert” Melinda Wenner Moyer exemplifies. She’s terrified of blacks, so last summer she moved her family from Brooklyn, which has over one million blacks, to the most black-free hamlet she could afford within striking distance of Broadway: Cold Spring, New York, with 2,000 inhabitants, 89.7 percent of whom are white, and only 0.7 percent of whom are black.

Since she’s a “parenting expert,” we know that, in the grand tradition going back to Rousseau via Benjamin Spock, she earns her daily bread by dispensing the worst possible advice to parents.

However, Moyer is also some sort of petit bourgeois communist, so she feels an acute need to lie about race to anyone and everyone she can reach, and to insult the new white neighbors to whom she desperately fled.

Last summer, my family moved from Brooklyn to a small town in the Hudson Valley. We love our new life, but one thing about the community is not so great: It’s predominantly white.

Liar, liar, pants on fire! The sole reason she moved there, was because the community is predominantly white.

The Boss’ response: She should move back to Brooklyn!

What will it mean in the long run if my white children don’t see and befriend people who come from different racial backgrounds?

It means they stand a much better chance of growing to majority without getting robbed, raped, maimed, or murdered, than if she had kept them in Brooklyn. But of course, she knows that. That’s why she fled Brooklyn for Cold Spring.

And are there steps I can take to instill racial sensitivity and acceptance in my kids despite the fact that they’re growing up in an ethnic bubble?

No.

Eventually, Moyer’s kids are going to realize that their mom is as phony as a three-dollar bill, when it comes to race. How old will they be at that point, and what will her story be then? Or will her kids have completely submitted to racial socialism by then, such that they will be as dishonest as she is?

What is much more important is that no parent take her phony advice seriously, since it will only endanger the welfare of their children. Racial socialists like Moyer wish to harm their lessers. A Moyer can afford to be a hypocrite, by insulating her kids from the lies she tells as a “parenting expert.” However, an increasing proportion of white parents cannot afford such insulation.

Note that the “experts” Moyer cites are racist propagandists; no more, no less. Their “research” is poisonous, anti-white garbage. Joe Feagin, for instance, is one of the most despicable white racists in America. Think, a Tim Wise with tenure. Beverly Tatum is a black racist. One of her literary masterpieces is entitled, Can We Talk About Race? she’s currently the president of racist, black Spelman College for women.

The comments, with the help of Slate’s thread Nazis, were dominated by pc commenters. I left a few comments. I have been censored in recent days at other anti-white Slate postings, so I have no idea if my comments at this one were left in peace. Slate used to have the most open-minded commenting practices on the leftsphere, but that is now changing.
 

MostAwesomeSuperMom
@99problems @Pandacat

[This poster was responding dishonestly as possible to someone who was wondering why some blacks make a point of moving to the whitest communities in existence.]

Why do you think you have to ask them that? Why is that your business? Could be proximity to certain kinds of employment, proximity to specialized health services, because they want to farm, proximity to worship, proximity to a school which offers special services (such as a really good program in ASL), a really good deal on a house and land...or maybe they just wanted to live in the country and have a barn and horses for their children to ride.

N.S.: You’re twisting yourself into knots, in order to come up with the least likely explanations. The most likely is: Middle-class blacks are obsessed with living among whites (and getting away from their own kind) … and ruining whites’ lives.
 

IdaBWells

This comment section will be filled with every possible permutation of ignorant comment to justify white people being racist towards black people, every racial slur, probably some folk posting pro-KKK opinions and arguing to bring back lynching and slavery. They'll argue that even mentioning white racism is bigoted, and shift all the blame for racism to black people - they'll explain that slavery never happened as claimed, that it helped black people, and on and on.

There will be weeping and wailing and outrage at how DARE anyone suggestion that racism is an issue white parents should speak to their children about, and that it is racist to even bring up this falsehood that racism towards black people exists. Then there will be long stories of how one day a black person criticized someone for being racist and that action was just so horrible that it was unbearable for white people.
 

N.S.: It’s fit and proper that a smug, racist liar and pseudonymous coward like you would choose as her handle the name of a notorious race hoaxer. Ida Wells wrote pamphlets, in which she spread the blood libel asserting that there was no such thing as black-on-white rape, and telling people to assume that every white rape victim was a liar.
 

IdaBWells

The majority of white people cannot do this - they either deliberately raise their children to be racist or can't/won't challenge (reduce, eliminate) their own racism. They absolutely cannot. The should try, many will, most will struggle who even try - and ultimately though the racism is their fault, their sin, the final outcome depends upon the refusal of black people (and other people of color so included) to not tolerate racism at all. No excuses for it, no attempts to 'be better people so they don't deserve it' - because it isn't about how they are, it is about the racists.

I don't even have to read the comments to know they are filled with white people saying racism didn't exist, never existed, isn't the fault of white people but the fault of bad black people, that racism exists because black people talk about racism as a problem, that black people are inferior and therefore don't know when they face racism or not, and blah blah blah.
 

Teaching Tolerance
How white parents should talk to their young kids about race.
By Melinda Wenner Moyer
March 30 2014 9:45 P.M.
Slate
[Re-posted, with a running translation, by Nicholas Stix]

Last summer, my family moved from Brooklyn to a small town in the Hudson Valley. We love our new life, but one thing about the community is not so great: It’s predominantly white. What will it mean in the long run if my white children don’t see and befriend people who come from different racial backgrounds? And are there steps I can take to instill racial sensitivity and acceptance in my kids despite the fact that they’re growing up in an ethnic bubble?

To find out, I dug into research on the causes of racial bias and talked to developmental and social psychologists, race-relations researchers, and Africologists. [“Africologists”: Black supremacist b.s. artists.] The good news is that the answer seems to be yes—there are things I can do to keep my kids from harboring racial prejudice. Namely, I can talk to them about race.

First, a caveat: I’m writing this article as a white parent with white kids living in a mostly white neighborhood. I know that my experiences, perspectives, and considerations differ markedly from those of parents with different ethnic backgrounds living in different situations, and I also realize that I know nothing about the racial landscape that minority parents have to navigate with their kids. For many minority parents, talking about race is not an option—it’s essential in helping their children move through a world that sees a “black kid” and not just a kid. [Pathetic: In the real world, black parents and their children lead lives of racial privilege, and the parents teach their children to hate and harm whites.] Although I talked to researchers with diverse [pc, dishonest] backgrounds while reporting my piece, I’m guessing that my findings and advice will apply predominantly to white parents like me. Still, I would love to hear from all readers on the issues discussed in this column, so please, send your thoughts, advice, and feedback to melindawmoyer@gmail.com.

“White parents seem very, very resistant to talking about race—even really liberal ones.”
Kristina Olson, University of Washington

[Of course. Every white parent knows that anything he tells his kids about race could potentially be used against him.]

In their book Nurture Shock, journalists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman told the story of Birgitte Vittrup Simpson, a University of Texas at Austin Ph.D. student who in 2007 recruited 99 white families to participate in a study—the basis for her doctoral dissertation—that involved asking them to talk meaningfully about race with their kids. [“Meaningfully” is vague, and at the mercy of the “researcher’s” ideological prejudices.]* Five families immediately dropped out when they heard what they had to do. [they were the smart ones.] Nine out of every 10 of those who stuck with the study admitted at the end that they did not have truly in-depth conversations with their kids on the topic. [It’s ridiculous. The researchers want the parents to slavishly follow the former’s ideological script, but the parents are supposed to guess at the right thing to say. This isn’t social science research, it’s totalitarian eavesdropping on families’ private lives. Parents have very good reason to fear that if “researcher” Birgitte Vittrup Simpson doesn’t like the content of their conversations about race with their kids, she might contact Child Welfare, and get their kids taken away from them.]

Why? I’ve avoided talking about race with my kids mainly because I’ve thought that racial bias is learned by direct instruction and imitation—and that if I don’t talk about race or act in explicitly racist ways, my kids won’t pick up prejudices. My sources [?] told me that this notion is pretty common; research suggests that nonwhite parents talk about racial identity much more frequently with their kids than white parents do, but that even minority parents often avoid talking about racial differences. [Bull.] “There’s this idea that if you do call attention to race at a young age, you’re poisoning kids’ minds,” says Erin Winkler, [white] chair of the department of Africology at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

[Winkler and Moyer leave out the biggest reason why white parents avoided talking about race for the last couple of generations: They’d been conned, propagandized by the so-called civil rights movement, that whites were supposed to be “color-blind” towards blacks, and act as if race meant nothing, while the same movement propagandized blacks to make race everything.]

This theory makes sense. In fact, it’s what social learning theorists believed for a long time, and why so many parents strive to make their children “color-blind.” But over the past 15 years, research [propaganda] has supported a different idea: that children start assigning meaning to race at a very young age. When researchers presented 30-month-olds with pictures of children of various races and asked them to pick who they would want to play with, the toddlers were more likely to pick kids of their race. Likewise, when sociologists [racist propagandists] Debra Van Ausdale and Joe Feagin observed kids in an urban day care center for 11 months, they found that children [black kids?] as young as three excluded other kids from play based on their race and used race to negotiate power in their social networks, as they described [asserted] in their 2001 book The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism.

Why does this happen? Kids actively try to understand and construct rules about their environment. As they do, they engage in what is called transductive or essentialist reasoning, which means that they simultaneously categorize people and objects according to multiple dimensions—so they might believe, wrongly, that people who have the same skin color have similar abilities or intelligence. They also notice class-race patterns—for instance that white people tend to hold privileged jobs or positions (or play them on television).

[That’s a flat-out lie. Black kids grow up today surrounded by black authority figures—incompetent, racist, black school principals, social work bosses, police persons, preachers, “activists,” politicians, TV news readers, etc. And on TV, blacks are invariably judges, doctors, etc. I recall alan Kors remarking during a speech at the 1999 National Association of Scholars conference in Chicago, that if Martians watched American TV, they would think that all judges are black. ]

One study found that by age 7, black children rated jobs held by blacks as lower in status than jobs held by whites. [This sounds like Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s fake “doll study.”]

In other words, as Winkler wrote in a 2009 paper, “children pick up on the ways in which whiteness is normalized and privileged in U.S. society.”

[Since whiteness is the mark of Cain in American society, you now know everything there is to know about the “scholarship” of Erin Winkler.]

Beverly Tatum, a race-relations scholar and the president of Spelman College in Atlanta, has referred to this pervasive cultural message as a “smog in the air,” noting that “we don't breathe it because we like it. We don't breathe it because we think it's good for us. We breathe it because it's the only air that's available.” Ultimately, kids may infer that the patterns they see in privilege and status are caused by inherent differences between groups. In other words, they may start to think that whites have more privilege because they are inherently, somehow, smarter or better.

[If Moyer studied any real scientific research, she’d know that whites are on average 15-22 I.Q. points smarter than blacks, and that blacks’ crime rate—a proxy for morality—is seven times as high as whites.’ Then again, we can be sure that she does know all that, or she wouldn’t have fled Brooklyn for her life.]

Other aspects of psychology come into play to promote racial biases, too. Children (and adults) exhibit a type of bias known as “in-group” bias, which basically means that we tend to prefer people who are members of groups we also belong to. [Odd; somehow she only sees this as a white problem.] Researchers have elicited strong in-group biases in children as young as 3 by assigning them to color-coded groups in their preschools; after a few weeks, the children said they preferred the other kids in their group more than kids outside their group and even preferentially chose toys that they were told their groups liked. Starting at around age 4 or 5, kids also start to develop what is called “high-status bias,” in that they show implicit preferences for individuals who are members of high-status groups—in our culture, whites. [In Jim snow America? Gimme a break!]

So if children as young as 3 develop racial prejudices when left to their own (cognitively biased) devices, it may help for parents to intervene and, you know, actually talk to their kids about race. “Don’t you want to be the one to suggest to them—early on, before they do form those preconceptions—something positive [about other races] rather than let them pick up something negative?” asks Kristina Olson, a University of Washington psychologist who studies social cognitive development and racial bias. “White parents seem very, very resistant to talking about race—even really liberal ones—and they have this attitude of ‘I wouldn’t want to talk about it because it would make it real to my kids.’ [Wait a minute: Tenured racial socialists have for years denied the existence of race, but now they are insisting that white parents ignore everything they’ve said?] But inevitably, it’s their kids that show these really strong race biases.” In fact, Olson says, when parents don’t talk about race, kids may infer from this silence that race is especially important, yet highly taboo—basically, the last thing you want them to think.

[But that would be the logical inference for the kids to draw!]

In her University of Texas dissertation, Simpson reported that the children of parents who actually did talk meaningfully with them about race had better racial attitudes at the end of the study than they did at the beginning. The kids whose parents glossed over the issue or didn’t discuss race did not improve.

[This is all normative, and not at all the stuff of social science. “Meaningful,” “better racial attitudes,” “improve,” in what way?]

But how should white parents talk about race with their kids? “It depends,” Winkler says, “on who the kid is, where they’re living, what the context is, how old they are.” [She doesn’t want the public to know her racist biases.] But, generally speaking, be upfront and specific. If little Henry makes a mortifying comment in the grocery store about someone’s skin color being “dirty,” don’t shush him and change the subject or say something vague like don’t say things like that; it’s hurtful. Use the moment to explain what skin color is. An appropriate response might be, “Honey, that little girl is not dirty. Her skin is as clean as yours. [How do you know? Maybe she is dirty.] It’s just a different color. Just like we have different color hair, people have different skin colors,” as Tatum explained her book Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race. You can also use examples from television or books to start race [monologues] conversations. As Howard Stevenson, a University of Pennsylvania professor of education and Africana studies and the author of Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools: Differences That Make a Difference explained to me, “I’ve always been in commentary with my sons while they’re watching TV, saying, ‘What do you really think about that?’ You may see an issue in diversity that bothers you that you want to comment on, like, ‘How come there are no black Santa Clauses on television?’ ”

Stevenson, who develops strategies to help parents, teachers, and kids cope with racial conflict [to help blacks get over on whites], also points out that when children say racially insensitive things, parents should take a moment to consider, before admonishing them, where they are coming from. “Rather than challenge them about their words, get a sense of what they understand it to mean from their perspective,” he explains. “Where did they hear it from? How is it being used in the social context they’re in? Then, you have a better angle as to how you can speak to it.”

White parents can also make kids’ in-group biases work for them: Point out that even though Lily has darker skin, she, too, seems to really like playing with dolls. [Yeah, Lily likes beating you up, and robbing you of your dolls, so she can play with them alone and keep them!] The more similarities young kids see between themselves and children of other races, the more they may embrace them. [We’re all alike. Black kids beat up and rob white kids, and white kids take beatings and get robbed by black kids.] That said, for older kids, it may be smarter to encourage kids to embrace racial differences, rather than to downplay these differences. [Here comes the total switcheroo!] A Northwestern University study found that when kids aged 8 to 11 were taught about diversity as a value, they were better able to detect [non-existent] evidence of [fake] racial discrimination than were kids who had been taught a “color-blind” message. [Here is where white kids are supposed to become completely schizophrenic in racial matters.] Pointing out how much diversity exists within races may help foster diversity acceptance, too. As Deborah Rivas-Drake, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, suggests, you could say to your children, “Within our own group, we don’t all act and look the same, we don’t all think the same—so if we ourselves are really diverse, can you imagine all the different kinds of diversity that exist among other [non-white] groups?”

It may also help to broach the subject of our country’s racial history. In 2007, Rebecca Bigler, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, conducted a two-part study—the first among white 6-to-11-year-olds at a Midwestern summer school, and the second among black 6-to-11-year-olds.* All of the kids were read short, positive biographies of famous Americans, half of whom were black and half of whom were white. Half of these kids were also taught about discrimination the famous Americans experienced; the other half did not get this extra lesson. At the end of the six-day study, Bigler and her colleagues assessed the children’s attitudes toward black and white people in general. The kids who had been taught about discrimination [i.e., pc stereotypes!] had higher opinions of black people than did the children who had simply been read the positive biographies. Van Ausdale and Feagin warn, however, against blaming racism and discrimination on “bad people” or “bad behavior,” because doing so may dismiss inequality as something that’s the fault of an “evil few” rather than being an institutional problem. [In other words, all whites are guilty of racism.]

So, for any parent, [lying] talking about race with your kids is incredibly important. Even more essential, though, is making sure that your kids get to know children of other races. “Friendships are a major mechanism for promoting acceptance and reducing prejudice,” Rivas-Drake explains. Kids should “have direct contact with people from different groups—to learn about them without relying on stereotypes.” [But she just argued for the essentialness of teaching pc stereotypes!] That said, simply sending your kid to a diverse school may not do the job. One study reported that in highly diverse schools, students self-segregate more by race than they do in moderately diverse schools, and the likelihood of cross-racial friendships goes down. But the study also reported that when diverse schools ensure that their extracurricular activities are racially mixed, interracial friendships become more common.

You know what else helps? When parents have a diverse network of friends. “We have some hints that parents’ friends and the diversity of the people they hang out with matters a lot,” Olson says. If we’re telling our kids that they shouldn’t judge people based on race [but she’s arguing for judging people based on race—blacks as victims, and whites as oppressors!], but our kids only ever see us hanging out with other people of our race, our words may not go very far. This notion has big implications for families like mine who live virtually cut off from other ethnic groups—for most white families, in fact, since research suggests that the average U.S. white family lives in a neighborhood where [unfortunately only] three-quarters of all other residents are also white. (This New York Times infographic on the distribution of racial and ethnic groups in New York City is, for instance, jaw-dropping. [Unlike the distribution in Cold Harbor!) If we truly want our children to accept and befriend people of other races and ethnicities, we need to address the institutional problems that keep us all apart from one another—and we need to remember that, as parents, the choices we make shape the world that our children see, and may limit the choices that they are able to make for themselves.

Correction, April 2, 2014: This article originally misstated that Ph.D. Student Birgitte Vittrup Simpson recruited 93 families for her study. She recruited 99 families. (Return.) Due to a copy-editing error, the article also mischaracterized Rebecca Bigler's study of 6-to-11-year-old children. She did not study a mixed group of black and white students. She studied a group of white students and a group of black students, but they never mixed in the study.

Melinda Wenner Moyer is a science writer based in Cold Spring, N.Y., and is DoubleX’s parenting advice columnist. Follow her on Twitter.