“Antiracist Baby,” Page 4:
Ibram Kendi's Antiracist Baby, page four. Quote,
"Open your eyes to all skin colors. Antiracist baby learns all the colors, not because race is true. If you claim to be colorblind, you deny what's right in front of you."
Kendi is explicitly arguing against the idea of teaching children and adults to be colorblind. Being colorblind means ignoring someone's race and just looking at them as a person. Kendi wants you to train your children to constantly be aware of people's skin tone and race.
In “How to Be An Antiracist,” he writes, quote,
"The common idea of claiming 'colorblindness' is akin to the notion of being 'not racist'—as with the 'not racist' the colorblind individual, by ostensibly failing to see race, fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity. The language of colorblindness—like the language of 'not racist'—is a mask to hide racism"
For Kendi and others, if you're colorblind, that means you're not noticing racism all the time. And in order to be antiracist, you must be ever vigilant and relentless in finding racism everywhere. That means you cannot teach your children to be colorblind.
If you follow Kendi's advice and raise an antiracist baby, you must raise a baby to be race-conscious.
Watch a compilation of the videos in this series here.
Video shot and edited by Travis Brown | The Signal Productions (Locals, Twitter, YouTube); Motion graphics by Gav Patel (Twitter, Instagram)
I don't get it. Is he arguing that recognition that races exist = racism? In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, "You keep using that word. I dinna think it means what you think it means."
This book is outrageous and dangerous. That anyone would laud it is reprehensible. Thank you for exposing its contents — I had no idea.