What is the scientific basis behind racism? Is it surmountable?

[rousseau]

Anybody who's been paying attention knows that biological evolution moves at a much slower pace than social evolution. The genetics that we've come to, and hold now, come from a time when we were hunter gatherers living in primitive conditions. And if there's anything I've learned about science it's that everything about our biology and behaviour is there because it had survival value at one time. So let's talk about the scientific basis that leads to our modern concept of racism.

Hundreds of millions of years ago some animal that is a distant relative of ours doesn't notice that another animal is different from it. It gets eaten. It's sibling on the other hand, notices that the other animal is different, and runs away. Repeat this process over the course of hundreds of millions of years, and most, if not all, animals, have inherent mechanisms to notice and avoid things that are different from them, because those things signal danger.

Fast-forward to today and you have droves of people with an instinctual mechanism to notice and fear things that are different from them. Racism, then, stems from genetics, and can only really be unlearned.

So is it surmountable? The genetic aspect is not unless racial harmony becomes an evolutionary driver. Outside of that all you can really do is try to convince people to not be scared ass holes, but racism is the default, and we should expect it more often than not, until people believe that races other than their own are not different to themselves.

 

[NobleSavage]

Anybody who's been paying attention knows that biological evolution moves at a much slower pace than social evolution. The genetics that we've come to, and hold now, come from a time when we were hunter gatherers living in primitive conditions. And if there's anything I've learned about science it's that everything about our biology and behaviour is there because it had survival value at one time. So let's talk about the scientific basis that leads to our modern concept of racism.

Hundreds of millions of years ago some animal that is a distant relative of ours doesn't notice that another animal is different from it. It gets eaten. It's sibling on the other hand, notices that the other animal is different, and runs away. Repeat this process over the course of hundreds of millions of years, and most, if not all, animals, have inherent mechanisms to notice and avoid things that are different from them, because those things signal danger.

Fast-forward to today and you have droves of people with an instinctual mechanism to notice and fear things that are different from them. Racism, then, stems from genetics, and can only really be unlearned.

So is it surmountable? The genetic aspect is not unless racial harmony becomes an evolutionary driver. Outside of that all you can really do is try to convince people to not be scared ass holes, but racism is the default, and we should expect it more often than not, until people believe that races other than their own are not different to themselves.

I do think there is a biological component to it. I don't buy that it's 100% taught. When I was 4 I lived in rural Kentucky and had never seen a black person. When I was 5 I was living in the city of Detroit where I saw LOTS of black people. They scared me. My parents left me with a black family for babysitting and I was frightened to death! I was not taught racist behavior by my parents. It didn't take long for me to warm up to black folk though. The neighbor on my right was a white family with kids my age and they were devil spawn. The neighbor on my left was a black family with really nice kids my age. By the time I was 6-7 I came to the conclusion that people are people, but that initial fear had to be hard wired in. That is why I tend to have sympathy for some racists. It's a symptom of poverty and lack of life enriching experiences. I'm lucky.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Anybody who's been paying attention knows that biological evolution moves at a much slower pace than social evolution. The genetics that we've come to, and hold now, come from a time when we were hunter gatherers living in primitive conditions. And if there's anything I've learned about science it's that everything about our biology and behaviour is there because it had survival value at one time. So let's talk about the scientific basis that leads to our modern concept of racism.

Hundreds of millions of years ago some animal that is a distant relative of ours doesn't notice that another animal is different from it. It gets eaten. It's sibling on the other hand, notices that the other animal is different, and runs away. Repeat this process over the course of hundreds of millions of years, and most, if not all, animals, have inherent mechanisms to notice and avoid things that are different from them, because those things signal danger.

Fast-forward to today and you have droves of people with an instinctual mechanism to notice and fear things that are different from them. Racism, then, stems from genetics, and can only really be unlearned.

So is it surmountable? The genetic aspect is not unless racial harmony becomes an evolutionary driver. Outside of that all you can really do is try to convince people to not be scared ass holes, but racism is the default, and we should expect it more often than not, until people believe that races other than their own are not different to themselves.

I don't think we know that racism has been selected. I doubt it has been as I don't think a genetically determined racist could unlearn racism as I'm sure some racists eventually do. A genetically determined racist could perhaps find ways to adjust to a multi-racial society but he would still "feel" racist inside so to speak. I can also think of other mechanisms. For example, I don't think racism is really so different from various instances of learned hatred (or even mild dislikes) where you come to associate some unpleasant or even threatening behaviours and some specific and apparent morphological and physical characteristics occurring in the same people.

Also, most current human beings have a substantial share of genetic material coming from Sapiens groups. Europeans have four percent of their genome coming from Neanderthal. Would genetically racist people mate with people very different from them? And I guess that descendants of a Neanderthal possible rapist father would have been conspicuously different. If human beings had that racist gene, these descendants would have been eliminated too. Also, it is quite conspicuous, certainly in France for example, that people frequently marry people with a different skin colour or morphology... Not though in culturally racist societies such as White Supremacist South-Africa and to some extent America... and just about everywhere to some degree.

Of course, differences in phenotype, i.e. in the external aspect of people, and in some of their behaviours can be due to genetic differences. Not a secret this I think. But is that necessarily a trigger for hatred? I don't think so since not all people are racists. I remember a guy I worked with who would go on and on about Arabs being bad and perfectly immune to all my arguments to the contrary. Then, one day, we got a sweet girl coming to work with us. And Arab too. The guy turned out to be perfectly charming with her from day one.

So I think you are mixing the two aspects. Objective genetic differences are used to correlate with bad behaviour and our genetically supported inductive reasoning just extends the correlation to everybody displaying the same objective differences. But you can reverse this, as NobleSavage just explained, by having a really good experience with people from the same genetic group. Which shouldn't be so difficult in fact.

To explain the continuation of racism in the U.S I think it is enough to notice that many African-Americans are maintained by their social condition in deprived areas. Part of the mechanism is probably that there will always be smart enough African-Americans in these area who will choose crime because they realise there's likely no other possibility for them in White America and to do that they just have to take advantage, around them, of some stupid people, equally without a future anyway. None of them would have stakes in a brighter future. Here again, it would be culture, hand in hand with socio-economic pressure, that's enough to perpetuate the situation. The fact that many African-Americans, if only representing a small percentage, are in fact successful in America just shows that genetics is not essential in this mechanism.

The greatest genetic diversity is among peoples in the south of Africa (the most ancient groups of people are still there) and it decreases as Sapiens spread from there to the rest of the world over a long but in fact comparatively short period of time. Even some large Asian groups have Neanderthal genes (<2%).
EB

 

[Perspicuo]

The innate components of racism may not be racist at all.

First of all, races don't exist. So there you have an impossibility from the onset.

Then, consider humans have a great capacity for envy, hatred, pettiness, ignorance, jumping to conclusions and fear (fear + jumping to conclusions = paranoia and violence) and ingroup exclusivism.

The ingredients are there. Just add some cultural training in nonsense, and you've got it.

 

[ronburgundy]

As with almost all biological impacts on psychology, those that impact racism are far more generalized than racism itself and were not selected specifically for racism. One major contributor is simply our extremely useful tendency to categorize the world around us. "Stereotypes" are really just mental categories. Your notion that one object is a chair and another a table are mental categories and when we see a specific object we use its perceived overlap with those categories to infer its properties.

Whether races objectively "exist" is irrelevant. Chairs and tables do not objectively exist at categories. Categories are mental constructs. Racial categories exist and are just as real as gender categories or categories like furniture, tables, chairs, utensils, etc..
The mind operates on mental categories. Outward visible features of people are among the most easily and quickly perceived aspects of them, so they of course will play a central role in the way we categorize people. This will be especially true if those features of people are not randomly distribute among all the various people we encounter in each aspect of our lives. The more those features tend to covary with other things (either aspects of people or aspects of the context in which we encounter them) the more our minds our naturally drawn to those features for their predictive and informational value.

In sum, it is an evolved and extremely useful property of our minds that we notice variance in features and especially those that covary with other features of the world. Once formed, these ideas will automatically impact our judgments and actions, unless we exert very deliberate and resource demanding effort to override their impact, and even then the odds are we will either under-correct or over-correct most of the time rather than be right on target. Also, we often lack the available cognitive resources to override these automatic category-driven judgments. Other info impinging on us at the time increases stereotyped responses, and some people are just generally less able to handle complex information processing and they go with stereo-typed responding. Yes, despite unscientific claims all over this site denying general mental capacities, there is a mountain of undeniable evidence of their existence and high relevance to everyday cognition, including how we view and judge and act toward other people. For example, working-memory-capacity (somewhat of a misnomer) related to the general ability to and be able to process currently incoming info while you maintain and update memory for recently processes info. There are general mechanism that impact how well people can do this, regardless of the specific type of info that it is. And as you can imagine, it is a skill that applies to a huge of the situations we are in everyday.
Here is just one study looking at this working-memory and prejudice. It showed that when jurors were not under heavy mental load (having to process other info) they actually showed anti-white bias in making more guilty verdicts for a white than a black defendant (evidence of over-correction for stereotypes). But when under mental load, the jurors with low working-memory ability showed an anti-black bias in their verdicts (uncorrected application of stereotypes).

In sum, the formation of racist ideas and their occasional impact on our judgments and actions are an inherent byproduct of very general and basic and useful features of how we understand the world. This is why claims that only whites can be racists are absurd and wholly unscientific. However, we can exert some degree of control over this inherent disposition and correct for it, if we acknowledge our own inherent tendency toward it. Note that caveat means that efforts to spread the notion that some people cannot be racist are guaranteed to increase racism and its impact.

 

[AdamWho]

It isn't racism that is selected for, it is tribalism.

People like/need to form groups, make rules and exclude other people.

It is just that race is one of the easier things to identify.

 

[noble brown]

Short answer is that racism has its roots in economics and cognitive dissonance

 

[ronburgundy]

It isn't racism that is selected for, it is tribalism.

People like/need to form groups, make rules and exclude other people.

It is just that race is one of the easier things to identify.

Short answer is that racism has its roots in economics and cognitive dissonance

I'd argue that while tribalism and cognitive dissonance are relevant, they are more context-specific than the more fundamental roots of racism which lie in the most basic and general aspects how our minds organize information and objects into categories (see my post above).

 

[rousseau]

Yea I don't think genetics have specifically selected for racism, they've selected neurological functions that in modern times have made racism a thing.

At it's most fundamental, even the most enlightened person in the world is going to notice the black guy standing amongst a crowd of twenty white people. Our brain naturally discriminates, being anti-discriminatory has to be learned.

 

[noble brown]

I think there is a subtle yet important difference between prejudices and racism. Prejudices are hardwired into our minds as a mental short cut to help us navigate a very fast moving and uncertain environment. Racism on the other hand is ultimately rooted in this phenomena but it's not useful or accurate to conflate the two. Racism is a social construct that assumes racial superiority. Racism is also a very recent thing. Just to notice 1 black guy out of ten white guys is in no way racism. To think that the 10 white guys are somehow of a better stock of humanity simply based on color or some other socio-cultural cues is racist. The ubiquitous nature of racism in contemporary culture should not imply normative universality. Is similar to the common conflation of gender roles with sexism. It's okay to take notice of ethic diversity but a whole other thing to conclude that those differences imply superiority or inferiority.

 

[ApostateAbe]

Humans are a tribal species, where it was imperative for any person's survival and reproduction to stand with the tribe, right or wrong, and to stand against competing tribes, right or wrong. When you have a tribal identity, the us-vs-them mentality naturally follows. We know now that a psychological "tribe" is malleable, and it can be any group of people, such as a group of sports fans, a church, a gang, a group of employees in a business, a nation-state, or a race. If you identify as part of a race, then "racism" may or may not follow, but a racial us-vs-them mentality almost certainly will follow. Opposition to white supremacism has been successful, and an essential part of that success has been not just about opposition to a set of beliefs associated with white supremacy but also about opposition to a white group identity. The racist psychology can set in only by identifying as part of the race and upholding the importance of it. As a white identity can very easily follow from obvious visual cues, it takes training to prevent it, or it would exist spontaneously. Part of the difficulty is that the competing races are commonly allowed to support and defend their own races, being oppressed and all, and it is easy for whites to think, "Hey, if blacks can do it, then what about whites?"

 

[Bronzeage]

Anybody who's been paying attention knows that biological evolution moves at a much slower pace than social evolution. The genetics that we've come to, and hold now, come from a time when we were hunter gatherers living in primitive conditions. And if there's anything I've learned about science it's that everything about our biology and behaviour is there because it had survival value at one time. So let's talk about the scientific basis that leads to our modern concept of racism.

Hundreds of millions of years ago some animal that is a distant relative of ours doesn't notice that another animal is different from it. It gets eaten. It's sibling on the other hand, notices that the other animal is different, and runs away. Repeat this process over the course of hundreds of millions of years, and most, if not all, animals, have inherent mechanisms to notice and avoid things that are different from them, because those things signal danger.

Fast-forward to today and you have droves of people with an instinctual mechanism to notice and fear things that are different from them. Racism, then, stems from genetics, and can only really be unlearned.

So is it surmountable? The genetic aspect is not unless racial harmony becomes an evolutionary driver. Outside of that all you can really do is try to convince people to not be scared ass holes, but racism is the default, and we should expect it more often than not, until people believe that races other than their own are not different to themselves.

There is nothing instinctual about racism. It is a social construct. Humans form social groups because it makes life easier and we hope longer. The structure of these groups makes it easy to see other groups as a threat, and a since a family is the basis of most groups, people will tend to look a lot alike. There is nothing in our biology which makes a person of a different color repellent to us.

 

[noble brown]

I'm not sure why you think "whites" need to defend their race from "being oppressed and all"?

And also can you show some examples of movements in opposition to a " white identity "

 

[ApostateAbe]

Anybody who's been paying attention knows that biological evolution moves at a much slower pace than social evolution. The genetics that we've come to, and hold now, come from a time when we were hunter gatherers living in primitive conditions. And if there's anything I've learned about science it's that everything about our biology and behaviour is there because it had survival value at one time. So let's talk about the scientific basis that leads to our modern concept of racism.

Hundreds of millions of years ago some animal that is a distant relative of ours doesn't notice that another animal is different from it. It gets eaten. It's sibling on the other hand, notices that the other animal is different, and runs away. Repeat this process over the course of hundreds of millions of years, and most, if not all, animals, have inherent mechanisms to notice and avoid things that are different from them, because those things signal danger.

Fast-forward to today and you have droves of people with an instinctual mechanism to notice and fear things that are different from them. Racism, then, stems from genetics, and can only really be unlearned.

So is it surmountable? The genetic aspect is not unless racial harmony becomes an evolutionary driver. Outside of that all you can really do is try to convince people to not be scared ass holes, but racism is the default, and we should expect it more often than not, until people believe that races other than their own are not different to themselves.

There is nothing instinctual about racism. It is a social construct. Humans form social groups because it makes life easier and we hope longer. The structure of these groups makes it easy to see other groups as a threat, and a since a family is the basis of most groups, people will tend to look a lot alike. There is nothing in our biology which makes a person of a different color repellent to us.

We can claim that racism is not instinctive, but it would be misleading at best. It would be analogous to the claim that liking fast food is not instinctive. Maybe, but an instinctive preference for dense calories is largely the reason why McDonald's sells fries instead of raw broccoli, and we had best consider the point that tribalism seems to be closely related to racism.

 

[ApostateAbe]

I'm not sure why you think "whites" need to defend their race from "being oppressed and all"?

I did not actually intend to make such a claim. "being oppressed and all" was assigned to non-whites in my statement, not whites.

And also can you show some examples of movements in opposition to a " white identity "

I think it is acceptable to identify as white, but it would be commonly unacceptable to want to defend the interests of the white race.

 

[noble brown]

I did not actually intend to make such a claim. "being oppressed and all" was assigned to non-whites in my statement, not whites.

And also can you show some examples of movements in opposition to a " white identity "

I think it is acceptable to identify as white, but it would be commonly unacceptable to want to defend the interests of the white race.

OK that first part is clear now.
I think what is seen as problematic is what the " interests of the white race " are commonly assumed to be. I mean if those interests were for a more egalitarian inclusion into societies functions, I doubt that any one would have qualms. But since this would be a ridiculous statement it only leaves a few possibilities to be inferred by "the interests of the white race"

 

[Bronzeage]

Humans are a tribal species, where it was imperative for any person's survival and reproduction to stand with the tribe, right or wrong, and to stand against competing tribes, right or wrong. When you have a tribal identity, the us-vs-them mentality naturally follows. We know now that a psychological "tribe" is malleable, and it can be any group of people, such as a group of sports fans, a church, a gang, a group of employees in a business, a nation-state, or a race. If you identify as part of a race, then "racism" may or may not follow, but a racial us-vs-them mentality almost certainly will follow. Opposition to white supremacism has been successful, and an essential part of that success has been not just about opposition to a set of beliefs associated with white supremacy but also about opposition to a white group identity. The racist psychology can set in only by identifying as part of the race and upholding the importance of it. As a white identity can very easily follow from obvious visual cues, it takes training to prevent it, or it would exist spontaneously. Part of the difficulty is that the competing races are commonly allowed to support and defend their own races, being oppressed and all, and it is easy for whites to think, "Hey, if blacks can do it, then what about whites?"

Because the person who says, "Hey, if blacks can do it, then what about whites?", appear simple minded and poorly socialized when they say stuff like that. It's as if they have missed an important lesson and don't actually understand the problem at all.

 

[noble brown]

We can claim that racism is not instinctive, but it would be misleading at best. It would be analogous to the claim that liking fast food is not instinctive. Maybe, but an instinctive preference for dense calories is largely the reason why McDonald's sells fries instead of raw broccoli, and we had best consider the point that tribalism seems to be closely related to racism.

If this were accurate then racism would've been evident long before chattel slavery, which it is not. It's is a very recent social phenomena. It's easy to assume to much casual correlation without a comprehensive study of the history of chattel slavery and the history of racism as a whole, which incidentally begins with chattel slavery

 

[ApostateAbe]

Humans are a tribal species, where it was imperative for any person's survival and reproduction to stand with the tribe, right or wrong, and to stand against competing tribes, right or wrong. When you have a tribal identity, the us-vs-them mentality naturally follows. We know now that a psychological "tribe" is malleable, and it can be any group of people, such as a group of sports fans, a church, a gang, a group of employees in a business, a nation-state, or a race. If you identify as part of a race, then "racism" may or may not follow, but a racial us-vs-them mentality almost certainly will follow. Opposition to white supremacism has been successful, and an essential part of that success has been not just about opposition to a set of beliefs associated with white supremacy but also about opposition to a white group identity. The racist psychology can set in only by identifying as part of the race and upholding the importance of it. As a white identity can very easily follow from obvious visual cues, it takes training to prevent it, or it would exist spontaneously. Part of the difficulty is that the competing races are commonly allowed to support and defend their own races, being oppressed and all, and it is easy for whites to think, "Hey, if blacks can do it, then what about whites?"

Because the person who says, "Hey, if blacks can do it, then what about whites?", appear simple minded and poorly socialized when they say stuff like that. It's as if they have missed an important lesson and don't actually understand the problem at all.

Right. The spontaneous thoughts can be corrected only with that extra training.

 

[ApostateAbe]

We can claim that racism is not instinctive, but it would be misleading at best. It would be analogous to the claim that liking fast food is not instinctive. Maybe, but an instinctive preference for dense calories is largely the reason why McDonald's sells fries instead of raw broccoli, and we had best consider the point that tribalism seems to be closely related to racism.

If this were accurate then racism would've been evident long before chattel slavery, which it is not. It's is a very recent social phenomena. It's easy to assume to much casual correlation without a comprehensive study of the history of chattel slavery and the history of racism as a whole, which incidentally begins with chattel slavery

There is a myth that racism did not exist before European colonialism, but it fact the pattern of racism plainly existed in ancient history. You see it in the Old Testament, with Jews regarding themselves as God's chosen people.