Researchers get $40k to study why kids like White men
The Department of Health and Human Services granted New York University over $40,000 to conduct a three-year research project on why children 'favor Whiteness and maleness over other identities.'
The university has a history of emphasizing 'whiteness' in its research and instruction.
In February of this year, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) granted New York University (NYU) over $40,000 to conduct a three-year research project on why children “favor Whiteness and maleness over other identities.”
The project, according to the grant description, is intended to “uncover the development processes by which children acquire the belief that white males represent the default person—a pattern rooted in ideologies of androcentrism (centering the experiences of men) and ethnocentricism (centering the experiences of white people) prevalent in the United States.”
The NYU grant comes as part of a larger HHS initiative to inject ‘equity’ at every level of the department, with a strong emphasis on race and gender.
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In a series of talks convened by the White House this April, HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra stated that “[w]e at HHS treat advancing equity not just as a job, but our mission, here at the department…We’re going to do everything we can to make sure equity is always a focus.”
NYU has a history of emphasizing the problem of “whiteness” in its research and instruction, an emphasis dating back to NYU Press’s 1997 publication of the book Whiteness: A Critical Reader.
The collection of essays explores how “Whiteness proves to be perilous and paradoxical.”
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In February of this year, Campus Reform reported on an NYU music course that used Taylor Swift to discuss “whiteness and power” in the pop music industry.
NYU presently has a variety of ‘anti-racism’ initiatives, including an online module for “Understanding and Mitigating Racial and Other Microaggressions”, offering “Microgrants” to faculty for anti-racism research that “decenter[s] whiteness”, and an official NYU “Anti-Racism Education Resource List.”
Campus Reform reached out to NYU and HHS for comment, but did not receive a response.
