(Headline USA) The Biden administration awarded a $40,000 grant to New York University researchers to study why children “prefer” white people, according to federal records.
The grant, awarded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, an office within the National Institutes of Health, will go towards the anti-racism project, which aims to “uncover the developmental processes by which children acquire the belief that white males represent the default person.”
This preference is “a pattern rooted in the ideologies of androcentrism (centering the experiences of men) and ethnocentrism (centering the experiences of white people) prevalent in the United States,” the description of the project says.
The reason this project is necessary, according to the government, is because “white men remain vastly overrepresented across a host of domains within the U.S., from media, to politics, to clinical research.”
“Such overrepresentation poses severe costs to the rest of society—women of all races, men of color, and gender-nonconforming individuals—particularly within the domain of health, where clinical trials have historically prioritized the experiences, perspectives, and health outcomes of white men,” a description of the study continued.
“To address this issue, we must understand when and how the tendency to view white males as default people develops across childhood, as well as the environmental factors that underlie this phenomenon.”
The researchers hope to discover through their taxypayer-funded research the “developmental trajectory” by which children’s default representations of people “begin to favor Whiteness and maleness over other identities.”
NIH defended the project in a statement to Fox News, saying the purpose of the training grant is “to help postdoctoral students gain the research skills needed to eventually become independent.”
“This research will address the developmental trajectory of children’s beliefs that often tend to select Whiteness and maleness over other identities when thinking of who represents a typical person,” the NIH added.
