Pollak: CNN Wants White Children to See Race, Not to 'Be Kind to Everyone'
CNN published an op-ed on Thursday that advises the parents of white children to begin educating them to notice racial differences at an early age — “constantly going out of our way to name differences” — rather than teaching them simply to “be kind to everyone.”
Parents of white children must also bring them to social spaces “where they aren’t in the overwhelming racial majority,” and teach them about “more people of color freedom fighters than the few they hear about at school” to encourage “antiracist behaviors.”
That is just some of the advice from Drake University professor Jennifer Harvey in an article titled, “Raising white kids to be racially sensitive — and proactive.” The obvious implication is that white children have a unique racist burden that others do not.
CNN often accuses President Donald Trump of racism and of dividing Americans by race, often on the basis of its own imaginings, such as the (false) claim he only refers to black people, e.g. LeBron James, as “dumb.” (Trump uses the insult without prejudice.)
Chris Cilizza, defending James, wrote: “In some ways, it doesn’t matter whether Trump is actually a racist. What matters is how his actions both provide cover for those who hold bigoted views and also serve as a sort of encouragement for these sorts of noxious views to be aired publicly.”
By that standard, CNN is guilty — not just offering a “sort of encouragement” for racism, but actively publishing racist content like Harvey’s article, which explicitly urges indoctrinating white children with left-wing racial consciousness.
Harvey also presumes that arguments like “Donald Trump is keeping us safe” have an inherently racial message that parents must counteract so that white children will properly understand that the reason people want border security has to do with “dark skin.”
So it is not just race that she wants to drum into white children’s brains, but also the idea that political differences are inherently racial in nature. There is nothing more divisive than that. It is calculated to perpetuate racial division into the next generation.
The next time CNN tries to impute racial views and racial motives to Trump and his supporters — particularly this weekend, on the anniversary of Charlottesville — remember they are guilty of exactly what they accuse the president, falsely, of doing to America.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.