No one is born racist

[ApostateAbe]

Children are not born racist. I think rational people can comfortably agree on that point. The trouble is that children are born with the ability to learn some behaviors easier than others. For example, we are taught how to skip rope, but it is much easier to learn skipping rope on your feet than to learn skipping rope on your hands. Similarly, it is much easier to learn racism than to learn racial egalitarianism.

It follows from evolutionary theory. All humans have a very long line of ancestors who were born, lived and died in tribes. Not nuclear families, daycares, public schools and offices, but tribes, and tribal survival meant that everyone must cooperate with each other and stand with each other, right or wrong, to defend against and to conquer other tribes. If you did not stand with the tribe, you were likely to be kicked out or killed. If a tribe did not unite, then they tended to be conquered by their neighbors. Members of outside tribes were identified by different dress, different jewelry, different paint, different hair styles, and different styles of speaking. Even the most nuanced differences were relevant, if it is different from your own tribe. If you meet a member of an outside tribe, then you had best prepare an attitude of caution and distrust (at best) or a fight-or-flight response (at worst), in defense of your property or your life. This is the us-vs-them mentality, a common theme of human psychology. It applies not only to races but to any arena of competitive human groups. Democrats-vs-Republicans. Creationists-vs-evolutionists. Hatfield-vs-McCoys. Montagues-vs-Capulets.

And this is not merely evolutionary theory. The "minimal group" experiments put it to the test (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3513287/). Young children are given arbitrary but visible identifying features for two groups, i.e. red shirts and blue shirts, with no external indication that one is better than the other. When the children are left on their own, they tend to morally PREFER the members of their own group. The red-shirters prefer red-shirters and the blue-shirters prefer blue-shirters, whereas the blue-shirters tend to see the red-shirters as not so likable, and the red-shirters tend to see the blue-shirters as not so likable.

This does NOT make such tribalism good and moral, nor is murder of sexual competitors a good and moral behavior even if it is natural. It just means a more realistic perspective of the tendencies of human psychology, and we know best how to deal with the problems if we are aware of their causes. The authors of the "minimal group" studies suggest that anti-racism must be ACTIVELY TAUGHT from a young age, because it would be ineffective to try to shield children from racist thought in the hopes that it will naturally result in color blind children. Children are NOT color blind, not even the ones who are literally color blind.

 

[rousseau]

Similarly, it is much easier to learn racism than to learn racial egalitarianism.
It is much easier to be racist than non-racist, when being non-racist will outcast you from your entire society.

I really don't see why lack of prejudice would be any more difficult to learn than prejudice, but rather prejudice is what we started with because that's how our brains work. We are animals who fear that which is different, above all, because hundreds of millennia ago something 'different' could mean sudden death.

 

[Keith&Co.]

Similarly, it is much easier to learn racism than to learn racial egalitarianism.

The very young fear the first bearded man they meet if their immediate caregivers do not have any.
They fear the first person they meet who wears eyeglasses if everyone in the family has contacts.
Fearing the different, preferring the similar, morally judging people superior for being superficially 'correct' is not racism, though.

Actively taking the next step to JUDGE people for skin color, eyeglasses, beards, baldness, etc, with associated stereotyping, takes an active teaching.
I wouldn't 'know' about black people and watermelon just from observing them.
And the first Jew i met was pretty generous. I wouldn't have known he was stingy or 'frugal' without being taught the stereotype.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I've met a racist bird. It was much more scared of me than of Chinese people. It was unlikely the bird had ever seen a white person before it saw me.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Tribalism is hardly a shocking revelation. However, tribalism made systemic in the Legal System is a bit further away from saying Boston Bruin fans are dumb.

Racism is about willful ignorance. You have to work at being a racist.

 

[fromderinside]

Difference makes the world ground. Recognizing it is likely our Prime Directive.

Why? Because we're here and most other living things suffer by that fact.

 

[ronburgundy]

We only are not "born racist" because we are not born with any ideas. However, we are born with various cognitive and emotional systems that inherently bias us toward developing some ideas over others and/or reacting in ways toward others independent of any conscious ideas that would motivate such actions.

IOW, we are born with a predisposition toward prejudicial self-centered bias of which racism is just one type.

The factors that contribute are much more than just fear of the less familiar. We like ourselves. We have a bias toward defining what is good and important as being associated with things and qualities that we possess. Our own skin tone (and hair color, and height, etc.) are not only more familiar to us, they are a part of us, our identity, the thing (us) that we most hold dear and value. Our bias in favor of ourselves over others transfers a bias in favor of others like ourselves over those less like ourselves. And "like ourselves" isn't limited to innate physical traits. It can include how people dress, how the speak, their basic demeanor, the subtle ways people vary in how they carry themselves, react to situations, etc.. However, these more subtle behavioral factors are often covarying with the more obvious physical traits, so they tend to combine to enhance our biases related to physical traits.

In addition, once we associate a person with ourselves (regardless the reason) we are biased in favor of it. Your friends who act the same way as a stranger get more benefit of the doubt, and less negative judgment form ethically dubious actions. This occurs beyond the degree to which we are aware of it or trying to knowingly favor our friends for pragmatic reasons. People who think they are being fair and reasonable regarding a conflict between their friend and a stranger are not.

Racist ideologies are deliberate political efforts to take advantage of these natural tendencies and to enhance them to create levels of fear and hate, or particular ideas toward particular groups that would not arise naturally on their own. Naturally occurring bias will tend to be limited to situations where there is lots of objective uncertainty, ambiguity and little direct info or evidence. Sort of a bias of the gaps, if you will. Politically enhanced racism allows the bias to be employed even when their is more clear and direct evidence that would work against the bias, creating the more irrational, reality denying forms of bigotry, which are to natural bias what young earth creationism is to deism.

 

[skepticalbip]

You have to work at being a racist.

It is well understood that anything worthwhile takes effort...

 

[ApostateAbe]

Tribalism is hardly a shocking revelation. However, tribalism made systemic in the Legal System is a bit further away from saying Boston Bruin fans are dumb.

Racism is about willful ignorance. You have to work at being a racist.

If it is about ignorance, then it doesn't have to be willful. Even if there were no differences between the races except looks, nothing else biological, not even any cultural differences, then the evidence seems to suggest that racism would still be a natural psychological outcome. The difficulty is exacerbated by the objective systemic cultural differences (differences in styles of speaking, music, politics, religion, income, educational achievement, crime and so on). It really does take a lot of work to correct the natural human inclinations. Anti-racism is among the strongest social forces in the white world for that reason, I believe. Any perceived racist is a commonly excessive target of social correction or silencing.

 

[Keith&Co.]

You have to work at being a racist.

It is well understood that anything worthwhile takes effort...

Or that Bastard in "Papa's Delicate Condition."
Jackie Gleason asked the pharmacist why he was such an utter rotter.
"Because I enjoy it. A man can't be good at something unless he enjoys it."

 

[ApostateAbe]

A strong indication of the natural human inclination toward racism is the cross-cultural universality of it. Here is a lesson from an American teacher in Japan. Japanese schoolchildren tend to believe that racism is strictly an American problem, because of the messages against racism that radiate out of America using examples within America (slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.). They don't see racism as a Japanese problem. But, from my perspective, Japan is one of the most visibly racist nations in the world. After this teacher published this video, he received all manner of horrible threats from Japanese nationalists who believed he was disrespecting Japan.

 

[thebeave]

Here's an article from Time magazine addressing this issue:

You always suspected babies were no good, didn’t you? They’re loud, narcissistic, spoiled, volatile and not exactly possessed of good table manners. Now it turns out that they’re racists too.

The latest evidence for that decidedly unlovely trait comes from research out of the University of Washington that actually sought to explore one of babies’ more admirable characteristics: their basic sense of fairness. In the study, 15-month-old toddlers watched an experimenter with a collection of four small toys share them either evenly or unevenly with two other adult volunteers. When allowed to choose which experimenters the babies wanted to play with later, 70% of them preferred the ones who had divided the toys evenly.

Nice, but there was an exception: when the two adults who were receiving the evenly or unevenly divided toys were of different races and the race of the one who got more toys matched the babies’ own, the 70% preference for the fair distributor dropped and the share of babies wanting to play with the unfair one rose. The implication: unfairness is bad, unless someone from your clan is getting the extra goodies.

http://time.com/67092/baby-racists-survival-strategy/

 

[ApostateAbe]

Racism in Japan Part 2

 

[ApostateAbe]

Here's an article from Time magazine addressing this issue:

You always suspected babies were no good, didn’t you? They’re loud, narcissistic, spoiled, volatile and not exactly possessed of good table manners. Now it turns out that they’re racists too.

The latest evidence for that decidedly unlovely trait comes from research out of the University of Washington that actually sought to explore one of babies’ more admirable characteristics: their basic sense of fairness. In the study, 15-month-old toddlers watched an experimenter with a collection of four small toys share them either evenly or unevenly with two other adult volunteers. When allowed to choose which experimenters the babies wanted to play with later, 70% of them preferred the ones who had divided the toys evenly.

Nice, but there was an exception: when the two adults who were receiving the evenly or unevenly divided toys were of different races and the race of the one who got more toys matched the babies’ own, the 70% preference for the fair distributor dropped and the share of babies wanting to play with the unfair one rose. The implication: unfairness is bad, unless someone from your clan is getting the extra goodies.

http://time.com/67092/baby-racists-survival-strategy/

Interesting and unsettling! Here is the full text of the study:

Burns and Sommerville - I pick you- the impact of fairness and race on infants’ selection of social partners 2014

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Tribalism is hardly a shocking revelation. However, tribalism made systemic in the Legal System is a bit further away from saying Boston Bruin fans are dumb.

Racism is about willful ignorance. You have to work at being a racist.

If it is about ignorance, then it doesn't have to be willful.

Ignorance and willful ignorance are two different things. One is not knowing better, the other is preventing yourself from knowing better.

Even if there were no differences between the races except looks, nothing else biological, not even any cultural differences, then the evidence seems to suggest that racism would still be a natural psychological outcome.

Tribalism, perhaps. Racism, no. As a species, we've learned to form societies due to the inherent benefit of larger populations. Racism is taking tribalism to an absurd level.

The difficulty is exacerbated by the objective systemic cultural differences (differences in styles of speaking, music, politics, religion, income, educational achievement, crime and so on). It really does take a lot of work to correct the natural human inclinations.

So the racists are the true victims in all of this? We aren't talking about sociopaths or psychopaths, people that are born with outdated mental constructs that are better for the cave man world than the societal world. We are talking about normal people who just refuse to believe what is true, because they choose to refuse to believe it. And that takes work.

Anti-racism is among the strongest social forces in the white world for that reason, I believe.

What in the world is a social force? And if there is any force in the "social world" that is the strongest, it is inertia. Which, technically, not a force in of itself, it is a pain to undo.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Jimmy Higgins, do you agree or disagree that the us-vs-them mentality very commonly seen among competitive human groups results from an evolution of tribalism?

 

[ApostateAbe]

I have been following the news of the riots in Baltimore. It is all about an us-vs-them mentality: blacks see themselves as systemically targeted and victimized by whites. It speaks to a deeper widespread social misdirection, in my opinion: that "racism" is the central problem of racial conflict. Racism is a problem, but, even if you take away the racism, the us-vs-them mentality remains among all races. The white supremacist forum of Stormfront is throwing a party with this ongoing news, as expected, hoping that the crisis will wake up whites to the black problem. The white supremacists are plainly racist, the black rioters of Baltimore are NOT plainly racist, but the white supremacists are not the ones smashing windows, beating up cops and setting fires.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Jimmy Higgins, do you agree or disagree that the us-vs-them mentality very commonly seen among competitive human groups results from an evolution of tribalism?

Ignorance v Willful Ignorance.

 

[veclock]

From what I've read, we are born racist, or at least xenophobic. Babies show more thrust towards people that look and sound like their parents.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Jimmy Higgins, do you agree or disagree that the us-vs-them mentality very commonly seen among competitive human groups results from an evolution of tribalism?

Ignorance v Willful Ignorance.

Yes? No? Partial agreement?