Graham Linehan Substack about Aida H.Dee a year ago.
grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/can-people-just-chill-with-all-the
This was on that same Graham Linehan’s Substack about Aida H. Dee. It is about indoctrinating children with Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory. I have used bold for the queer theory parts. The writer is evidently American, but this all comes from America and it is enlightening for the U.K. context too.
James Lindsay, most badass intellectual
July 2023
This seems like it's coming out of nowhere, but it's based in a conversation I had with someone earlier explaining an important aspect of Woke culture that many of us perceive but few understand. One of the targets that Woke culture wants to dismantle is the innocence of children
The most obvious way Wokeness goes after the innocence of children is in the Queer variant of trans activism, especially by having trans strippers perform for children in schools, for example. Why would they do this?
The belief is that the innocence we encourage in children is part of the systems of power (specifically generated through performativity) that enforce heteronormativity and cisnormativity and thus lead to dysphoria or oppression of gay and potentially trans kids
The logic isn't terribly complicated: there might be gay or trans kids in the class, say, who would be more comfortable in their sexual identity (if that makes sense for a kid -- it doesn't) and gender identity if they saw disruptions to the usual "binaries" being celebrated.
The disruption is simple: exhibition of sexuality, especially Queer sexualities and trans people demonstrating sexuality. The (cultural) prohibition on this behavior is usually put as "childhood innocence," which is viewed as a dominant discourse that enforces normativities
Sexualizing children's spaces is therefore a "logical" consequence of queering both spaces and childhood in order to "liberate the potentialities" of children's identities, and it requires the disruption of childhood innocence. That is, it's righteous Queer activism.
This applies in Critical Race Theory too, though not quite so coarsely. There, white privilege allegedly contains something called "white innocence," which is taken to be something white (and white-adjacent and white-passing) children are socialized into.
The (racial) innocence of children is therefore taken to be a kind of social breeding ground for a culture of "white supremacy." It's where children are allegedly socialized into Charles Mills' very conspiratorial "racial contract" that maintains white supremacy.
As Critical Race Theory asserts that anything that maintains white racial comfort is "suspect," the racial innocence of childhood (in not-racist environments) is considered to be a serious problematic that makes room for white supremacy culture. It must be intervened upon.
In this case, intervention is through projects like "Anti-racist Baby" and the likes, i.e., teaching the Critical perspective on race as early as possible, i.e., teaching children not to be racially innocent (a white privilege) and more "racially aware." There's no time to lose.
Of course, CRT is more insidious here while Queer Theory is more flagrantly inappropriate. CRT insists that racial innocence is, because of the operation of whiteness, only available for white (passing) people, though others will covet it and act white or take up white adjacency.
That is, CRT argues that racial innocence (in young children) is a privilege afforded only to white (passing) people, and therefore, rather than aiming to expand it (which it deems impossible), it seeks to obliterate it to put everyone on equitable footing.
As a last point, the innocence of children, thus the opposite of that in adults, sets up its own power dynamic that the Critical Theory of education sees as illegitimate and in need of disruption. Children cannot be innocent if they are to be co-equal with instructors or...
more to point, able to use their "oppressed" status as children (in an adult's world) to be elevated to instructor status over the teachers ("I learned more from my students than they learned from me"). It's less overt here, but childhood innocence is problematic here too.
This last point becomes an additional soft spot through which Queer and trans performative activism and "racial literacy" racist activism makes its way into obliterating childhood innocence in the name of "Social Justice." This is better known as "child abuse."
In sum, you're not wrong to perceive that there's a Woke war on the innocence of childhood, which is seen as an enculturating tool of oppression by dominant and hegemonic discourses and structures. These must be disrupted. Children can't be innocent; they must be activists
(my bold)