Someone Did A Study And It Looks Like Babies Are Racists
If you’ve always suspected that their was something a little more sinister behind the adorable, long-lashed eyes of babies, or wondered if babies were just a tiny bit evil (why else would they barf on your last clean shirt as soon as you put it on?) it turns out that you aren’t as crazy as people probably insist that you are. In fact, it looks like babies are racists. Tiny, adorable racists.
A study done by the University of Washington that set out to learn about how fair toddlers are took a dark turn when it was discovered that while babies are more likely to prefer people that they had observed playing fairly, all bets were off if that person happened to be of a different race.
Oh, my stars and garters!
Actually, this isn’t so bad, so there really isn’t any need to start side-eyeing your toddler just yet. Well, I’m sure you can find a reason, but it doesn’t have to be racism. It can be for cutting the cat’s fur or flushing socks down the toilet or something.
You could extrapolate, as a lot of people are rushing to do, that this points to some kind of evolutionary psychology that says we’re hardwired to stick with our own “clans”. Maybe that’s valid. Personally, I’m not particularly fond of evolutionary psychology because you can basically make it say whatever you need it to say. It’s probably more likely that children gravitate towards the people that look familiar, because that’s what they’re used to doing. For a white toddler, that’s probably going to be white people.
But even if babies are hardwired from an evolutionary standpoint to be racist little bastards, so what? We’re probably hardwired to do all kinds of unspeakable things with our poop, but we don’t unless we’re performance artists. I feel that sometimes people use this kind of research to excuse the bad behavior of some idiot racist teenager by throwing their hands up and being like, “Well, what do you expect? Clogging up the internets with racial slurs is just something we’re all hardwired to do so that we wouldn’t be eaten by outsiders back in caveman times!”
Ultimately, it’s up to you to have a meaningful conversation with your kids as they grow up to insure that you aren’t raising the next weirdo who always says vastly inappropriate things at parties and perpetuates racial stereotypes in their high school young Republicans meetings. It won’t have anything to do with who they shared blocks with while they were still in diapers.
(Image: Elena Stepanova/Shutterstock)
