Teaching a Child to Be “Black” —
On the Raising of a New Generation of Racists
by Alexander Zubatov
Today’s Washington Post features an inane and truly frightening story, excerpted from a still more inane series entitled “About Us,” described as “a new initiative by The Washington Post to cover issues of identity in the United States.” The story is about a four-year-old child whose mother (who is also the story’s author) is Chinese American and whose father is black. The ball gets rolling when the child horrifies his mom by telling her that he’s not black. When she promptly lectures him that he’s both black and Chinese, he still refuses to be branded, prompting this exchange:
Sadly, the innate wisdom of this child who insists on being simply and uniquely himself and rejects his overbearing mother’s Orwellian attempt to clamp on a dog tag pegging his breed is destined to be bled out of him, drop by drop. In fact, the child’s destiny to grow up an identity-mongering racist has been predetermined. Even before he was born, his parents had sealed his fate:
This incident of the child daring to deny his race is a micro-aggression triggering the child’s mother, who’s made a career writing about race, so much that the couple is prompted to consider homeschooling to “save” the child from the kind of oppressive and distorted history taught in our white supremacist schools that, the mother fears, will result in further cementing the child’s decision to forswear simplistic and atavistic racial identifications. This leads the parents to visit the Sankofa Homeschool Community, a race-segregated collective created to give parents all the resources they need to make their children into good little anti-white racists.
The founder of this black nationalist collective relates the story of how
until her eldest son, Zion, turned 6, she read to him only books that featured brown characters, such as African folk tales, because she expected to eventually send him to school, “where his reflection would be nonexistent.” She was hoping “to fill him up on everything good about Africa and about being black before he learned about how we were slaves,” she said. But she decided to home-school her two sons after visiting a slew of private and public schools that lacked diversity in either the student body or the curriculum.
“Once you understand your history, you’re not able to be brainwashed,” this now-grown-up, hopelessly brainwashed, thoroughly racialized child is ironically quoted as saying, while describing how his education makes him feel good about himself … which is probably an educational philosophy Hitler would’ve endorsed for raising insufferably smug, dangerously aggressive Aryan children in the thousand-year-Reich.
In yet another delicious irony, while the race-denying four-year-old’s mom expresses, at the beginning of her article, the notion that her interest in homeschooling is likewise driven by a desire to have her child’s “Chinese American influences…be more than just a footnote to a largely white and black narrative, more than a mention of Lunar New Year every winter,” the rest of her article contains not a single word about her Chinese heritage or the influence that any Chinese or even Asian culture might have in the boy’s upbringing, especially if he winds up indoctrinated in the ways of Sankofa. It is, rather, all black, black, black, black, black. This is, of course, the reality for biracial children in America. The biracial Barack Obama is “black.” The biracial Colin Kaepernick is “black.” This poor biracial child is going to grow up blacker than “black.” Blackness is such a coveted status in American culture and identity politics that no other identity group could possibly compete with the allures it offers of being a universal arbiter of “cool” and ultimate, entitled victim of history.
The moral of this sad story is simple and familiar: racists are bred, not born. And we are now living in a land where many well-meaning idiots are hard at work breeding a new generation of racists who are being taught alternative English (hip-hop English, as the story describes), alternative history, alternative politics and all manner of alternative “facts” one must know to claim one’s birthright citizenship in the coming alternative racist African-American fantasy-land.
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, The Imaginative Conservative, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
