Would You Like an Antiracism Book With That $60 Onesie?
The temptations and hypocrisies of pairing luxe with righteousness
A store near me in Toronto specializes in upscale baby and kids’ clothes and antiracist children’s literature. There is a Resort section of its website, where even the discounted bathing suits are pricey. The store’s Books page includes children’s literature about Nelson Mandela, Fredrick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and, in a nod to progressive concerns from news cycles past, Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg. It looks like a very nice store.
Which is, in a sense, the problem.
Are antiracist baby books part of a luxury lifestyle? If the pairing of high-end goods with antiracist messaging has started to seem natural, it’s because it’s of a piece with a pattern I’ve noticed in my new neighborhood (which, pandemic and all, I am now deeply familiar with), where the high-end, curated boutiques will have signs supporting Black Lives Matter, while the less fussy establishments have signs up about, like, whether they sell hand sanitizer.
There’s also the baby-stuff angle, which is famously politically fraught, if for reasons more related to gender than race.
As I will be the trillionth to remark upon, children’s clothes, even infant onesies, tend to be very gendered these days. Princess attire for girls, dinosaurs and adventure for boys. Parents can know the sex of their offspring prior to birth, so anyone wishing to avoid the travesty of putting their deep-voiced, heartily bearded newborn boy into pink footie pajamas can do just that.
But it’s not just fragile masculinity. A baby is “he” unless otherwise specified, and specify you must, if you care about such things, by putting a bow on your baby girl’s head.
That’s at big-box stores, or, lately, their e-commerce equivalents. At the other end of things are the purportedly ethically produced clothes, in muted tones, explicitly marketed as gender-neutral. These are not by and large aimed at parents raising children without assigned gender, but rather at those who find frills or football motifs — and the gender extremism the options imply — some hard-to-disentangle mix of crass and upsetting.
Items marketed to parents and other givers of gifts to kids tend to fall into one of two extremes: hyper-traditional or impeccably Aware.
On one side, the stories where the protagonist is a white boy, or (more troublingly?) an anthropomorphized animal who goes by he/him (I’m looking at you, Little Fur Child, species unspecified but apparently a dude), leading some feminist parents with hand-me-down classics to switch it up with the pronouns at story time.
On the other, books like Baby Feminists, Feminist Baby, Antiracist Baby, and my all-time favorite title-wise, Woke Baby. (The subtext of every book read to a baby is that the baby might consider going to sleep!) Why not just show children people of different backgrounds and family structures without turning it into a thing? Some books do, but it’s harder to find then you might think.
The confluence of luxury and social justice is not unique to the children’s retail realm. As my Feminine Chaos podcast co-host Kat Rosenfield has observed, social justice has become a kind of self-help for many rich white women, encouraging them to focus their energies (further) on themselves. Ours is a moment in which the Goop website — the place where Gwyneth Paltrow sells dresses that look like beach coverups for north of $500 — now (also) has a post called, “Moving beyond Performative Allyship.” It is a thing. So too, as Bonny Brooks has written here on Arc, and Helen Lewis has written in The Atlantic, is “woke capitalism,” wherein “brands will gravitate toward low-cost, high-noise signals as a substitute for genuine reform, to ensure their survival.”
The specificity where children are involved is that, rather notoriously, rich white parents want their kids to do well. Or rather, all parents want this, but only some have the means and connections to make it happen. This is reinforced by the fancy baby store concept: money spent on eco-friendly greige hoodies could have gone to the less fortunate (I can already hear the sellers of such goods countering that they donate some of their proceeds), but the parent wants only the best for that baby and frankly who can blame them?
The problem is that society doesn’t provide an adequate check against the reality of just about every parent thinking their own kids deserve to come first. Unchecked, it allows inequality levels to skyrocket. But the blame does not lie on parents themselves and their stubborn commitment to … parenting.
Since society falls short, parents of means attempt to have it both ways. Is it guilt? Is it about weaving social justice into upscale etiquette, and thereby helping the rich get richer? Whatever it is, it’s the retail version of expensive private schools with curricula that emphasize social justice. It’ll be like, it’s nice and all that you teach radical inclusivity, but where does that leave those without $40k a year?
Here as there, the hypocrisy angle’s the juiciest, but not necessarily the most important. More concerningly, there’s the way that antiracism as luxury good contributes to culture-war polarization. If it seems upscale and unattainable to be antiracist, this will attract some, yes, but risk repelling far more. To be clear, it isn’t fancy or complicated to oppose racism. It doesn’t require plowing through enormous reading lists, let alone a decade of higher education, and certainly not a $60 onesie.
See also: the way that the placement of trans topics in the “lifestyle” category, covered in mainstream media alongside fashion, seems to encourage the on-the-ground bonkers idea that the typical transgender person is a liberal arts grad with a trust fund. I could hold forth on how this relates to upscale greige gender-neutral baby-wear, but will stop while ahead on the digression front.
My point is that we are not in fact living in some bizarro universe where The True Privileged are black trans women. Nor is there anything inherently posh about replying to every tragedy by invoking the still-more-downtrodden. And it’s better, for sure, than if upscale baby shops were also selling racist paraphernalia.
The issue is that once a righteous cause gets cast as elite, some will interpret anti-elitism as involving opposition to the cause in question. And it’s never a good thing when populism goes the anti-anti-bigotry route.
