Important: Researcher Says that Berenstein Bears, Franklin the Friendly Turtle Perpetuate "Racist," "Socially Dominant Norms" to Children

These are the people who populate our EPA, IRS, and of course our DoJ, too.

Parents who read their kids stories about happy, human-like animals like Franklin the Turtle or Arthur at bedtime are exposing their kids to racism, materialism, homophobia and patriarchal norms, according to a paper presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Most animals portrayed in children’s books, songs and on clothing send a bad message, according to academics Nora Timmerman and Julia Ostertag: That animals only exist for human use, that humans are better than animals, that animals don’t have their own stories to tell, that it’s fine to “demean” them by cooing over their cuteness. Perhaps worst of all, they say, animals are anthropomorphized to reinforce “socially dominant norms” like nuclear families and gender stereotypes.

Franklin the Turtle: Menace or Nazi?

“[M]uch of young children’s media reproduces and confirms racist, colonial, consumerist, heteronormative, and patriarchal norms,” Timmerman and Ostertag write in their paper ‘Too Many Monkeys Jumping in Their Heads: Animal Lessons within Young Children’s Media,’ presented at Congress Wednesday.

Arthur the Aardvark and his "perfect" family.
Not pictured: Rape

But all of this is, of course, perfectly obvious. Now let the authoress put more information inside you.

She thinks we should have more children's books about ants -- not anthropomorphized ants, but straight-up ants, because ants are fascinating -- to teach us things like "ants work together" and "the workers in ant colonies are females."

Ants are also mindless, thoughtless, without identity or personality, and only interested in eating, resting, and serving the collective and its God-Queen. Which I suppose is another great lesson for children.

"It’s just problematic when it’s the only way children see animals portrayed in the media and “when we don’t realize that an animal also has its own complex embedded ambiguous life and it exists outside of our own use or interpretation,” she said.

Yes, that's what children love reading about, the complex embedded ambiguous lives of animals.

The Golden Treasury Book of

The Complex Embedded
Ambiguous Lives of Animals

by

Rick Tempest,
Child Development Theorist*

* Unmarried, no children.

posted by Ace at 04:48 PM

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