Professors Teach Preschoolers to See Color as Childhood Innocence Gets 'Debunked'

(AP Photo/Yuri Kageyama)

There’s now relief for those concerned about the racism of Asian 4-year-olds.

As reported The College Fix, two secondary-education teachers have been awarded $11,000 to develop a preschool curriculum to teach tykes still eating their boogers not to be raging racists.

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The American Educational Research Association (AERA) gave the grant to University of Texas at San Antonio Professor Zhongfeng Tian and Boston College instructor Alisha Nguyen.

Per a press release, here’s how it will work:

[Zhongfeng and Alisha will] collaborate with teachers and families in two dual language immersion preschools in the Greater Boston Area to design and implement an eight-week antiracist biliteracy program in three classrooms.

The foreign languages involved: Vietnamese and Mandarin.

It’s a three-fold goal:

  • Teach preschoolers to possess “Asian pride”
  • Support teachers in promoting “racial and linguistic justice”
  • Forward bilingual and biliteracy education by challenging “hegemony of English in the curriculum”

They also aim to further Asian-American literature in early childhood schooling.

The effort is “antiracist,” but it appears intended to topple anti-Asian attitudes.

And it was birthed by the pandemic:

[Zhongfeng] says the project was born out of conversations with [Alisha], a Ph.D. fellow and instructor in the Department of Teaching, Curriculum, and Society at Boston College. With the spread of COVID-19, [Zhongfeng] says both researchers saw a corresponding rise in and response to anti-Asian racism.

“This is not a new problem, anti-Asian racism, it’s part of US history,” [Zhongfeng] explained. “It’s just that COVID-19 awakened people’s awareness that we need to stand in solidarity with different minoritized communities to fight against systemic racism together.”

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They aren’t the first to attempt an undoing of pernicious prejudice among those presently peeing their pants:

‘Antiracist’ Infant? Childcare Chain Says Babies Should Learn ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’

Scholars Insist Preschoolers Must Be Taught ‘Antiracism’ ‘Throughout the Day’

Red State Spends Millions so Disabled Preschoolers Can ‘Deconstruct Whiteness’

University Performs an ‘Antiracism’ Experiment — on Four-Year-Olds

Education for Little Children Gets Updated: Introducing the ‘Antiracist Scientific Method’

It seems to me that, if America is so racistly rotten that we have to penetrate the preschool psyche, then there’s no hope of youngsters not becoming racists.

Curiously, AERA’s method of attack is “antiracism,” which emphasizes everyone’s race.

According to UCLA law professor Kimberle Crenshaw:

“Antiracism is the active dismantling of systems, privileges, and everyday practices that reinforce and normalize the contemporary dimensions of white dominance.”

Per CNN, antiracism maims “microaggressions” such as the following:

“I’m colorblind; I don’t care if you’re white, black, yellow, green or purple.”

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Gateway to discrimination’s demise?

Either way, the project’s helmers are qualified indeed.

As indicated on his resume, [Zhongfeng] previously led a workshop on “Anti-Racist Language Teaching” — “crafting translanguaging spaces in a third grade Chinese Language Arts class.”

And Alisha has published at least two papers on racial education and kids:

  • “Children Have the Fairest Things to Say: Young Children’s Engagement with Anti-Bias Picture Books”
  • “Childhood Innocence and the Racialized Child in a White Space”

Courtesy of The College Fix, she’s discovered innocence is inane:

“[I]nnocence has always been a racialized and gendered concept” that prevents teaching children about social justice and issues like race and sex, Nguyen wrote in her “Childhood Innocence” paper.

“For children of color, childhood innocence is neither presumed nor entitled,” she wrote. “Many researchers have raised serious concerns about the criminalization of Black boys and adultification of Black girls in U.S. classrooms.”

Moreover:

“Childhood innocence, hence, is a burden and a contested privilege that needs to be debunked. [This will reclaim] child rights of civic engagement, participation in critical conversations of social justice issues, and access to important knowledge.”

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Let the anti-innocence, antiracism begin.

-ALEX

 

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Find all my RedState work here.

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