An Islington council poster announced that babies as young as three months old can be racially biased,
The Labour council’s sub-5s section shared the graphic.
According to the poster, “at three months old babies are more likely to look at faces that reflect their caregivers’ race.”
Because babies are too young to speak and likely to not have interacted with other children, this is a problem.
The report stated that children as young as 2 years old use race to understand people’s behavior and by 30 months most use it to pick playmates.
This graphic stated that expressions of racial bias often peak around the ages of four and five years old and that by five years of age, children of color are biased towards whiteness and can associate with certain groups of higher status than others.
This was sent to the Islington Early Years account on Twitter late last year. Parents were surprised by the actions of the nursery’s ‘activist educators’.
The graphic came from the Children’s Community School, a radical US website and remains up today.
The poster by the Children’s Community School was shared on Islington Early Years twitter page
Website cites several contested studies that were done before 2010 for each claim about race and children.
One of seven angry comments about the tweet from nurseries was to call it “Bonkers”.
Parents were alarmed after The Telegraph found at least four Labour-run councils have used ‘Maoist’ diversity consultants to ‘decolonise the mind sets’ of nursery staff.
The Black Nursery Manager is a diversity consulting firm that has been used by the Nottingham City Council, Islington Council and the Welsh Government.
The firm previously called out ‘the violence that whiteness causes’, and the Government was called an ‘agent for white supremacy’.
The Telegraph received a statement from MPs stating that they must investigate the training as it was ‘the most poisonous, divisive type of dogma.
The Early Years Alliance hit back by saying critics were ‘incredibly short-sighted’ and the National Day Nurseries Association said the training ‘should be encouraged not criticised’.
However, campaigners claim that the reaction from early-years groups shows just how mainstream radical race theories are in nurseries.
Schools, parents, and local councils can disagree on how to educate children about race.
Because it doesn’t focus on differences between races, many organisations disapprove of the “colourblind” approach.
Adrian Hart is a Don’t Divide Us parent and the author of The Myth of Anti-Racist Kids. He stated that ‘Fundamentally many of the studies supporting these ideas about children or race just conflate rejection of one group and acceptance of another.
The results of artificial experiments on children’s toys preferences, doll and toy preference tests do not reveal if the child is able to take into consideration race when interacting with others.
Nursery staff are not required to mention any racism.
Development Matters is a guidance that the Government has created to encourage impartial teaching about diversity.
Some early years sectors released their own guidance last year which mentioned the idea of ‘white privilege’.
Spokesman for Islington council said that they are working to create an equal Islington. We will challenge the complex and subtle ways in which people are prevented from pursuing their dreams and deny them opportunities.
“Structural inequality prevents too many people from reaching their full potential in our borough, so we will continue challenging inequality to ensure that all of our children, youth, and families can prosper.”