If You Wouldn’t Read “Baby’s First Nazi Book”…

…then why is it acceptable to put a book teaching kids that whiteness is evil in public libraries?

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In the summer of 2020, the Cincinnati children’s librarian smiled as she read from Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness, by Anastasia Higginbotham. In the lilting tones common among those working with preschoolers, she uttered, “In the United States of America, white people have committed outrageous crimes against black people for 400 years.”

A bold statement to offer children, without a shred of evidence.

The picture book describes white people as exploiters and oppressors. White parents are characterized as lying to their children about this dynamic while tacitly condoning it to maintain the benefits. The book’s climax shows a devil holding up a “whiteness contract,” binding kids to stolen land, stolen riches, special favors, and the freedom to exploit anyone with darker skin.

Five years later, our political polarization has reached lethal intensity—so much so that even an assassination can trend on TikTok as entertainment.

Digging must be done into how we got here, but most attention needs to fall on the education system. It is time to ask questions, like, why is this message being presented to children in taxpayer-funded public libraries?

Watch the full video below.

Not My Idea, What It Says and Why It Matters

The book’s message is simple: white people are bad because they oppress everyone else, and white parents lie to their children about this “reality” to preserve their own privilege.

Framed around the story of a black man shot in a struggle with police, it follows a little girl grappling with racism that her parents have been hiding from her.

The message is clear: the injustice is so obvious that even a child can see it.

Police brutality is set off by lines like, “Racism is a white person’s problem and we are all caught up in it – mostly by refusing to look at it.”

Kids are encouraged to lean in:

Understanding the truth takes courage – especially a painful truth about your own people, your own family. Even people you love may behave in ways that show they think they are the good ones.

Readers are directed to learn about racism and find the truth in their local library. There, the girl reads how white people denied black people opportunities, housing, and voting rights, and also underpaid the black women caring for their white babies.

The story culminates with the little girl “opening” herself to her inherent racism, even though it breaks her heart. Why? Because that is how she can be “caring.” The girl confronts her mom for hiding her racism, and the police on TV are called out as wrong.

The book emboldens kids to “Go with your instincts on this one. Racial justice is possible. But only if we’re honest with each other and ourselves.”

Her journey concludes with a trip to a playground where she is shamed and prompted to reject her whiteness with the lines, “Your history’s not all written yet. What do you want it to say?”

Aimed at children aged three to nine, or five to eight, depending on the source, it’s clearly not intended for a critical audience, who would question concepts or the unspoken implications that all white people are racist.

While it does discuss some aspects of history in a broad sense and mentions historical figures like Nina Simone and early abolitionists, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, the book isn’t teaching what happened; it is explicitly teaching kids how to think and feel, while sowing distrust between kids and their parents.

Not An Isolated Case.

A quick internet search of public libraries shows that this book is available in towns and cities across the country, including Nashville, Tennessee; Sitka, Alaska; Jacksonville, Florida; Montgomery, Alabama; Dillsburg, Pennsylvania; Louisville, Kentucky; and there are a full six copies available in Memphis.

The Chippewa Falls Public Library Kids YouTube channel released a reading that got over 30k views. The YouTube channel Seriously, Read a Book’s reading got 103K views. Even the First Congregational Church of Houston released a reading.

There are many other reading videos available, and looking at the glowing reviews on Not My Idea’s Amazon page, it’s not surprising. This book received recommendations from Publishers Weekly, the Huffington Post, The New York Times, and O Magazine, which said, “For white folks who aren’t sure how to talk to their kids about race, this book is the perfect beginning.”

Many others also lavished praise. The School Library Journal deemed it, “a much-needed title that provides a strong foundation for critical discussions of white people and racism, particularly for young audiences. Recommended for all collections.”

Premade lesson plans are available from Parents Defending Education, Teaching Books, Schooling Delaware, and many others.

This is what has been passing as mainstream children’s literature across the country for over half a decade.

Hate Disguised as Virtue, Why This Harms

Few would expect a picture book touting jew hate or condemning blackness to turn up at their local library. But this story comes cloaked as virtue. Framed as confronting hidden biases, people were eager to accept their own culpability if it meant they were in the camp of ‘good’ people.

The focus on white skin color as the distillation of evil is racist. This book manipulates with the intent to indoctrinate.

Young children, and even many teens, lack the developmental capacity to parse nuance. Instead of seeing distinctions between historical norms and modern propaganda, kids internalize the guilt, shame, and division this book is projecting out.

Teaching children to see themselves as oppressors forces kids to focus on outward appearances at a cost of noticing actual caring behavior. This draws attention away from building character with forgiveness and grace. It recenters on conforming to a racialized worldview.

From Academia to Storytime, The Bigger Trend

When the little girl is presented with the “truth” that she and her family have been complicit in racism and living off the backs of others, she is drawn with a large, cracked heart across her chest.

This pain is characterized as both necessary and productive, because feeling bad about yourself and your race as a white person means you are marginally not as bad as all the other white people. Feeling this pain is how you show you are caring.

This mirrors the pedagogy of discomfort, a teaching method designed to break down college students through guilt, shame, and forced vulnerability, now repacked for the under-10 crowd.

Even though it is not explicitly named, you see the same steps. Make kids uncomfortable, assign them guilt, then frame their emotional pain as growth.

When applied to children, it is a potent brew, shattering intrafamilial trust and indoctrinating kids into a worldview that condones manipulating others into feeling pain if it serves the greater good. The underlying message being fostered in the cradle of these grade school picture books? The end justifies the means.

It should go without saying, this is wildly reckless.

Much hay is made about the mental health effects of kids having smartphones and social media. How about being taught from a young age that your parents and other relatives have been hiding the truth that all white people, including you, are inherently racist, with no way out but to internalize your culpability, and the end justifies the means in rectifying this injustice?

The Question of Free Speech

As someone who strives to be a free speech absolutist, I’d never call for even this vile turd of a book to be burned, and it should be entirely up to the publisher to decide whether sales warrant a reprint. I could even make a case for tracking down a used copy to put on the bookshelf of shame. It is a great example of how children’s literature can be sculpted to radicalize toddlers.

The better we learn to recognize similar tainted slop, the sooner we can teach our kids to recognize it too.

Hopefully, we can still agree that in the U.S,. adults can publish and read what they want.

That said, there is a distinction between the freedom of private adults making personal choices and what the government publicly endorses with taxpayer-funded institutions, particularly those aimed at educating young children.

As we stand at this collective crossroads, contemplating who we are as Americans, we need to ask ourselves, is it the role of schools and libraries to promote divisive ideologies to children?

Why Language Matters

Over the last decade, many have noticed how words have been redefined. Not My Idea works in the new meaning of racism as a specifically white person’s problem, harkening to no less than Toni Morrison to give that idea credibility.

But when you redefine a term like racism, white supremacy, or whiteness so that it becomes moral to blanketly label others thusly, not only have you cheapened the meaning of the terms, you have cheapened human life.

These words once described real horrors that were documented, observable, and tangible. Now they are toys in ideological turf wars with children caught in the crossfire.

Conclusions, Warnings, and a Wake-Up Call

Not My Idea is not about history, kindness, or justice. It is a picture book intentionally aimed at kids, sowing division and guilt in the youngest of minds. We have allowed this kind of material to normalize psychological abuse when it’s cloaked in “anti-racist” language. This has eroded both our concept of truth and the value of human dignity.

The evidence for that is all around us.

If we want to remain one nation, we must reject trends that normalize canceling livelihoods, excusing riots, crime, and vandalism, or even celebrating assassination. The place to start is with what we teach our children.

Yes, we must police children’s libraries and K-12 curriculum. We must teach kids what manipulation looks like. We need to question pedagogy that greenlights abuse. We need to demand accountability for the history and stories being told to kids in the public’s name. And most importantly, we need to be mindful of the methods we employ as we venture into this future.

Our kids are watching our example.

What are we going to teach them?

Housekeeping

What a couple of weeks it has been. I thought I’d mostly be spending this time settling into my new schedule.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is proving to be a huge inflection point for many. The videos of people celebrating are evidence of the depth of our cultural divide. I have started several pieces, trying to address both my own feelings and what I see pouring out of so many others, but they remain unfinished.

I wasn’t a big fan of Charlie Kirk. His channel wasn’t even in my queue. At the same time, I was aware of the role he played in pushing college kids to think critically, exactly as universities should have been teaching them. That work was both a service and a gift to those he interacted with, even if they disliked the process.

The murder of political figures is the inevitable result of polarization, where people stop talking to each other. It is heartbreaking to see my country in this place, and I’m angry at those who wantonly drove us here.

On the Bookshelf

Yeah…. about my reading list… It’s gotten longer. I’ll try and update that next week, kay?

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About

Diogenes in Exile began after I returned to grad school to pursue a master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Tennessee. What I found instead was a program saturated in Critical Theories ideology—where my Buddhist practice was treated as invalidating and where dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy was met with hostility. After witnessing how this ideology undermined both ethics and the foundations of good clinical practice, I made the difficult decision to walk away.

Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to exposing the ideological capture of psychology, higher education, and related institutions. My investigative writing has appeared in Real Clear Education, Minding the Campus, The College Fix, and has been republished by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. I also speak and consult on policy reform to help rebuild public trust in once-respected professions.

Occasionally, I’m accused of being funny.

When I’m not writing or digging into documents, you’ll find me in the garden, making art, walking my dog.