Salon is running a story about a video that has apparently gone viral. (I only know about it because of the Salon piece; maybe its virality is self-fulfilling. Maybe I've just not been paying enough attention to YouTube. But I digress.)
The video is only a minute or so long, and it shows two little girls receiving the gift of a doll. I'm not good at guessing people's ages, but I'd guess that they're somewhere around 7 or 8 years old. The doll happens to be black; the girls are white. One girl looks as though she's disappointed with the gift, but trying to be diplomatic about it; the other bursts into tears.
"Their reaction shows how much a doll can tell us about race", says the byline. The article concludes that, "[t]hough obviously not an official social experiment, their reaction is a comment on just how early in life racial bias forms".
Well, it might.
But it might not. We don't know that from the video - not the version that Salon shows, anyway. All we know is that two girls look let down by a Christmas present. Race might have something to do with it, but there's really no way to tell. They might have been asking for, and been promised, something else entirely. That might explain the disappointment without any recourse to racism.
On this much, I'm speculating - though I'm in good company, because speculation is what Salon is inviting from its readers (with a particular inference not so much hinted at as stated as fact), and might well be doing itself. But there're elements of the video about which noone needs to speculate. Notably, the girls' faces aren't blurred. So right away, we've got a situation in which two seven-year-olds are being shamed as racist, and in which they're identifiable. Irrespective of whether or not they are, that is not a good thing. Even if the idiot who uploaded the video doesn't realise that there's a problem here, Salon sure as hell should.
And let's allow for the sake of the argument that the girls really are upset because their doll is black. Well... so what? They're seven. Even assuming that public shaming really is a vaguely good way to deal with this sort of thing - I'm not convinced - then the wrong people are being shamed here. it simply doesn't make sense to call seven-year-olds racist, even if they display racist behaviour, because they're too young, really, to have the faintest idea of what's what. More importantly, whatever ideas they might have about race can hardly be called autochthonous. At that age, one might have all kinds of attitudes, but one is almost entirely, if not entirely, the product of one's socialisation - and socialisation means, overwhelmingly, family.
For sure, someone brought up in a racist household is likely to imbibe racist attitudes; and if that person doesn't begin to question those attitudes by, say, their mid-to-late-teens - by the age, that is, in which we might expect them to have interacted with the world a fair bit, and to have the neurological capacity to think about things critically - then there would seem to be grounds for moral criticism. For kids who're of an age really to care about dolls, though? Surely not. It doesn't seem to make much sense to call people out on their politics when they're still of an age at which the existence of the tooth fairy is a matter of equipoise.
In sum: there might not be racism on display; if there is racism, it's not obvious that you can leap easily from racism to racist; if there is a racist in the room, it's not obvious that online shaming is desirable; if online shaming is desirable, it's not at all obvious that the right people are being shamed.
Apparently, none of this crossed Salon's editorial mind.
The link to the article on Salon's twitter feed has been retweeted (when I checked) 149 times. Not all that many, especially considering that Salon has the thick end of 600 000 followers. But, still. That's 149 people who've decided that they're going to signal their virtue by telling anyone who'll listen that they're more morally and politically sophisticated than a seven-year-old. That in so doing they demonstrate that they might not be is an irony that I suspect would be lost on most of them.
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