Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list. — Denis Leary

Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list.

Author: Denis Leary

Insight: When we're born, we come wired with pretty basic preferences: we like food, comfort, familiar faces. A two-year-old's hatred list is genuinely short—naps, maybe vegetables, the occasional bath. That simplicity is actually profound, because it means prejudice isn't some default setting in the human brain. It's something we have to learn, piece by piece, from the world around us. This matters because it shifts where the blame and responsibility actually land. If racism were inherent, we'd be stuck with it like we're stuck with needing oxygen. But if it's taught, then it can be untaught. That sounds optimistic to the point of naivety, except we have evidence everywhere: kids who grow up in diverse environments, exposed to different people and stories, develop different assumptions than kids raised in isolated or reinforcing communities. The prejudices they might absorb come from specific sources—family comments, media images, peer group attitudes—not from something innate. The tricky part is that teaching happens invisibly too. Kids absorb messages from who gets centered in stories, whose neighborhoods get investment, which groups show up as doctors versus criminals on TV. Nobody needs to sit a child down and lecture them into bias. Which means undoing it requires more than just good intentions—it takes actively different inputs, different conversations, different examples of who people actually are.