I heard a theory once that stated that even the most open-minded, non-racist people had an underlying preference for partners and friends of their own ‘race’.
I grew up in the north-west of England, where a white person was pretty much as racist as he was north-western. I considered as friends the muslim asians who delivered my pizzas. Yet I shared a dislike of the arrogant asian community very close to my doorstep.
Many years later, I am a completely different person. I understand racism. I completely lack it. I see other races as being utterly in common with me in that they are human beings. I even find females of any race just as attractive as females of my own (if not more attractive). I also respect and admire people who’s race is different from my own.
I deny the existence of a built-in preference for one’s own race in choosing friends and partners.
I think their is a built in tendancy to like people with similar interests and background to your own. This may be mistaken for latent built in racism if a person is in a situation where people of the same race have more similar interests and background than people of differing races.
For my self in kindergarden was best friends with of Indian decent, and that made zero difference to me as a kindergardener.
I’ve read several articles now about research into human attraction. Much of it is “built in” as you say. Oddly enough, as in depth as these studies seem to be, I can not find one single mention of race and its effect on attraction between mates. So, either it doesn’t exist (I doubt it) or the current state of PC would marginalize any research with an unflattering racial result so it isn’t touched with a ten foot sampling poll.
As I understand it, xenophobia, not necessarily racism, seems to be an innate human trait-- we fear/despise/feel superior to/shun people who are not from our “tribe”. Some people seem to experience this more conciously than others, while some have almost completely supressed it.
If, growing up, you had only people of one skin color who were members of your peer groups, you may identify those of another skincolor as being “outsiders” and thus subject to the xenophobic reaction. People who grow up in multi-racial enviornments have other criteria for exclusivity: socio-economic backgrounds, weight, religion etc. The famous experiment with young children proved that people can quickly be taught to discriminate on something as minor as eye-color.
I think it has much to do with the human yearning to belong, and our insecurity. By publicly rejecting “outsiders” we deflect attention away from our own flaws.
My WAG: If you were brought up in a community where everybody was the same color, anyone of a different color would seem really strange to you and possibly repugnant. (Or possibly exotic and fascinating.) But if you were brought up in a multicultural, multiracial community – like New York or L.A. – you’ll see all kinds of people as just people.
Some customs are seen as acceptable and desirable in one culture, that are abhorrent or just annoying to another.
If you look at the history of humanity, the idea of having a “mosaic” of different cultures co-existing in one area is fairly recent. Before, colonization and assimilation (or genocide) was the order of the day.
So you could argue that our sensibilities just aren’t yet used to sharing our space with people with cultural differences. That may play a part in latent “racism”.
Racism is really, for me, the only type of prejudice that I understand. I mean, sure, I can understand intellectually, that there is the possibility of people disliking others for their religion, sexual tendencies, etc.
It just seems like it takes a concerted, evil, effort to hate people for things you can’t see at first glance. Whereas the human race wouldn’t be around today if we didn’t exercise snap judgments based on visual cues: sadly, it’s easy enough to understand how this can transform into racism.
I agree with this.
I think racism has to do with stereotyping certain groups of people. We tend to associate traits to them, because humans like to classify things into groups. (Visual traits are probably the most common and attractive way to classify things)
And when we grow older, and we learn which traits are good or bad, the associations that we made when we were younger will manifest themselves into a feeling of racism.
The tendency to judge people by their looks is an instinct. It’s an easy way to identify intruders and invaders, and it was useful for the great majority of human existence.
If you don’t have this instinct, it is because it has been conditioned out of you, just like eating salty fatty foods or being lazy.
Wow, that’s an interesting take. It certainly makes sense on a lot of levels. A lot of survival mechanisms from earlier humans would naturally be wary of “outsiders”
So it seems to me that tolerance is probably a new thing that has to be learned. But to me racism and xenophobia are similar in a lot of ways. Take someone from NYC with lots of friends of different races. But I would guarantee you that all of his friends would be from the same “tribe” or socio-economic standing. All of his friends would share commond ideas and values. Take said person (presumable white in my example) to Harlem (I don’t know much about it, but insert any area with poorer people with a higher crime rate, or marginalized population). Sure he would encounter black people, which wouldn’t be a problem considering how he has many black friends if it were simply a racist thing, but he would probably be intimidated. Most likely because people there aren’t part of his “tribe” and don’t share the same values and ideas. I think it honestly is only a matter of xenophobia. Racism is just a problem that stems from that. Racism is used, I think to prejudge people of a certain race based on real xenophobic observations.
In some ways, it may be difficult for me to be friends with a person of Arabic ethnicity who has strong religious convictions who constantly wears his religion on his sleeve, as it would be a white Christian fundemntalist who does the same. We simply don’t share the same culture and values. That is naturally ingrained and it is basically impossible to overcome, I think. But if I were to meet someone who shared a lot of my value and culture who happened to be of a different race, I would have no concern, but if I were racist, I would.
I think that traditionally, these two things have been a little more closely defined. Someone with didn’t look like he was from your area would probably be foreign and have different values. But now we live in a much different world, where someone’s race doesn’t necessarily determine their culture. In the American south, slaves were almost all black and had a DECIDEDLY different culture. These two things were tied together.
Throughout most of human existence, survival and reproduction depended heavily on membership in a group or tribe. We seem to have been highly integrated socially at least since diverging from our most recent common ancestor with the chimps and bonobos. At times of strong selection pressure, survival advantages would accrue to the tribes whose genetic predisposition was to support other members of the tribe (to whom they are more closely related genetically) against “outsiders”, particularly against *groups * of outsiders. This tendency is no longer necessarily a good thing from the standpoint of evolutionary success (i.e., survival to reproduce), but having become fairly deeply embedded in our behavior, there’s been no sufficiently strong evolutionary pressure against it, so it persists.
What’s interesting is how easy it is to create group identities arbitrarily, and how strong they can be. Visit any soccer stadium in Europe or a college football stadium in the U.S. on a game day to see this for yourself. Studies have been done in which groups of individuals have been selected to be as close as possible to one another in intelligence, social status, etc., and then divided into groups according to some arbitrary criterion and set into competition with one another; the researchers in some cases have been stunned by the speed and intensity with which individuals come to identify with their new group and to vilify members of other groups. (For a specific cite, see Judith Rich Harris’ The Nurture Assumption). So we seem to have a strong predisposition to behave this way, and the physical characteristics that mark others as members of a different race are just a convenient and omnipresent way to know who’s a member of which group.
Even more fascinating is the degree to which this tendency seems to be dependent on the group identity of others – when we encounter or consider outsiders mainly as individuals, the hostility and mistrust we apply to members of other groups is largely absent. Certainly, this is born out by the close, even intimate, relationships between southern whites and blacks through the last few centuries. Everyone who’s lived in the south can tell personally of many instances of close friendships and ties between families, even extending across many generations, between whites who are at other times capable of spouting the most heinous racist opinions and blacks who for decades had no choice but to submit to abusive treatment.
This is not to deny that there are individuals who become so obsessed with the issue of race that it becomes the only salient fact they recognize about any other individual. But most of us, of whatever race, aren’t like that. We are, however, predisposed to like and help “our group” and distrust and shun other groups, while often being able to interact with and freely accept individuals, even if they turn out to be members of another group.
This is my view. Racism is just one of the most visible subsets of hardwired tendencies toward self-defensive xenophobia, I believe, for the reasons Ludovic described.
Humans are always “us-and-them”-ing. We can’t help it. Catholics v Protestants, GOP v DEM, Yankees fans v Red Sox fans, country music listeners v rap listeners, Northerners v Southerners, the Judean People’s Front v the People’s Front of Judea…
In short, I think, we don’t have to be racist, but we do have to (consciously or subconsciously) divide the world into people-on-my-side v people-not-on-my-side. It’s a very rare person who is able to transcend this instinct completely, in all areas. I know I sure don’t measure up to what seems like an ideal.
(And is it really desirable, anyway, to eliminate our tendencies toward xenophobia? Humans are a hugely successful species at least in part because we’re constantly on our guard for possible enemies. If there doesn’t seem to be an obvious enemy, we go looking for one, and we usually find one. If we weren’t constantly on the alert, wouldn’t that radically increase our vulnerability to manipulation and/or outright attack? Hmmm. Maybe on this we have to take the bad with the good…)
Very insightful posts from both of you. In fact, it is metaphysically impossible to disagree. Disagreement would constitute exactly the sort of division you’re describing.
If a person (had a bad experience with a member of another race or ethnic group, he/she may forever on think negative toward ALL members of that race or ethnic group for life or many years thereafter. (i.e. robbed by someone or the loss of a job attributed to a certain person.
I prefer to have bright people to hang around, talk to on the phone no matter what color or ethnic group they belong to.
Well, I’d say there are two traits of humans (and many other critters) at work.
The need to define the world in terms of us vs them. Life is a competitive sport. Resources are scarce. There is a value to working together in that you can achieve more than you could alone, but there is a downside in that there may not be enough hot dogs for the whole team. Deep down in the caveman sections of our brains, snap judgements get made about who we’re going to consider an ally or an enemy.
Consider the level of racism you’ll see in the affluent vs the lower class. Sure rich people may not want minorities at the club, but they aren’t going to be the ones setting fire to Japanese cars because Ford can’t compete with Toyota. The thinner the resources get, the more divided people become.
The need to generalize. Stereotypes are unfortunate, but they’re also a necessity. You need to consider that guy with the machete a threat at first glance, even if he’s just a perfectly friendly guy with a machete, because you don’t really have time to sit back and ponder how to react at length. The human mind is built to categorize ideas and then let them go until they’re important again. This is of course one of the most insidious things about racism, because the stereotypes effect thought at such a basic level.
The difference between racists and non-racists, at least in my view, is the willingness to adapt. A non-racist will let go of a stereotype when they find it to be invalid, a racist will cling to one no matter what. And of course this isn’t just an issue in racism, it’s at the root of bigotry, fanatacism, and wrongheadedness in general.
