A #1 New York Times best selling author has released a new children’s book to help parents and their babies fight racism.
The book, titled Antiracist Baby, was penned by award-winning author Ibram Kendi to “empower parents and children to uproot racism in our society and in ourselves.”
The book sets out nine steps which, if followed, promises to “improve equity, such as opening our eyes to all skin colors and celebrating all our differences.”
These steps include “naming racism” and prompting toddlers to “confess” their own racist guilt.
“Nothing disrupts racism more than when we confess the racist ideas that we sometimes express,” the book says.
“Point at policies as the problem, not people,” the book goes on to say.
“Some people get more, while others get less… because policies don’t always grant equal access.”
Katie Miller at The Federalist said, there’s just enough vagueness in the book to “plant the seeds for upcoming generations to push for the utopian, false ‘equity’ [Kendi] seeks.”
In her piece, Ibram Kendi’s Board Book Teaches Even Babies to Hate White People, Miller notes also the message communicated through the illustrations, such as a brown baby reaching for the butterflies that are being captured by a little white-privileged arm.
Another image shows a white girl scaling the ladder of success and receiving a trophy, while a brown girl is stuck on a broken ladder with little chance of making it to the top.
In an interview with Harvard Gazette, Kendi, the director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, DC, said he aims to remove the concept of “not racist” from America, saying instead people should recognize they’re either “racist or antiracist.”
“The heartbeat of racism itself has always been denial, and the sound of that heartbeat has always been ‘I’m not racist.’
“What I am trying to do with my work is to really get Americans to eliminate the concept of ‘not racist’ from their vocabulary and realize, we’re either being racist or antiracist,” he said.
Antiracist Baby was last week added to NPR’s top 100 favorite books for young readers.
You must be logged in to post a comment.