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LETTER: Most racist biases are learned and not innate

‘The earliest years are typically the best time to instill and even solidify positive social-interaction life skills’
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Re: “Anti-Racism Data Act aims to dismantle systemic racism,” Points of View, June 24, 2022.

Racist sentiment is typically handed down generation to generation, regardless of colour or creed.

If it’s deliberate, it’s something I strongly feel amounts to a form of child abuse: to rear one’s impressionable very young children in an environment of overt bigotry – especially against other races and/or sub-racial groups (i.e. ethnicities).

Not only does it fail to prepare children for the practical reality of an increasingly racially/ethnically diverse and populous society and workplace, it also makes it so much less likely those children will be emotionally content or (preferably) harmonious with their multicultural and multiracial surroundings.

And while there is research through which infants demonstrate a preference for caregivers of their own race, any future racial biases and bigotries generally are environmentally acquired. Adult racist sentiments are often cemented by a misguided yet strong sense of entitlement, perhaps also acquired from one’s environment.

Maybe this social/societal problem could be proactively prevented by allowing young children to become accustomed to other races in a harmoniously positive manner. The earliest years are typically the best time to instill and even solidify positive social-interaction life skills/traits into a very young brain thus mind.

Frank Sterle Jr.

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