I don’t think it’s instinct. Kids gravitate toward each other regardless of what they look like or where they’re from in the early grades. About middle school, they start polarizing. In grade school your best friend you walk to school with each day can be someone not of your race; in middle school you have to stay with your own kind or you’re a traitor.
In my kids’ school what happened was that there was some kind of subtle peer pressure from various groups. Some kids resisted it, most of them didn’t. Some of the ones who resisted it got called names. Or worse. And the pressure seems to come from all sides. The “others” and your own group.
That seems to be the height of when you really care what other people think–not your teachers so much, or your parents. But your peer group.
So…either it’s not natural, or it’s only natural once you reach a certain age. And if it becomes natural then, you have to wonder why.
Sometimes the correct or best path is *also *one step away from disaster. Merely saying that “its natural” doesn’t mean you have to then go on to say it can’t be helped or must be useful. You could go on to understand how the “natural” thing happens, and how you can try to make it not happen.
I also think that saying rational behaviour is a capability that we merely fail to give ourselves permission to engage in does not account for the subjective reality of those that are irrational. Saying that those who believe, for example, that all young blacks are criminals have merely not given themselves permission to be rational is IMHO attributing a wilfulness to the irrationality that doesn’t exist. Some knowing trolls aside, most people with irrational bigoted views are sincere and believe their views are rational. They have no sense that they are adopting an irrational view by choice.
To give a slightly more neutral example, most older people have a strong sense that society was better back in the good old days, and that young people of today are silly, chaotic, oversexed slackers - unlike young people from the good old days. But rationality tells us that (a) older people have always had this feeling and (b) if the feeling was based on fact we would generation by generation have descended into the primordial slime by now. Yet even if you explain this to older people, there are only a percentage who can say “yes, I suppose it must just be my perception”. There are a large percentage who just can’t escape their irrational feeling; they will say (for example) “I know what you are saying sounds correct, but I’m sure I’m not misremembering and that things were better back in the good old days etc…”
That may be true, statistically speaking, but having lived in a low-income predominantly (not entirely) black neighborhood, I can tell you that I saw enough on an almost nightly basis that made me break my apartment lease and move to white communities. Having worked in retail businesses that were in mostly in white areas but very close to black neighborhoods, I can also tell you that the majority of shoplifting was committed by blacks, and there were two or three armed robberies, all of which were committed by blacks. So I don’t think it’s helpful to say that whites are irrational to be biased against young African American men – there’s a reason for it.
I do think, however, that with whites the conversation ends there – it shouldn’t. The fact is that a lot of young black men grow up in a completely different society than most whites. It’s a society of economic underclass, one which deprived people of education and economic opportunities, which created a race-based lower caste. More than that, for years they were denied access to welfare benefits, despite being living in communities with crippling poverty. So when whites complain about black crime, we need to remember: white majorities did much to create this situation.
You can’t just destroy an entire society and then say “Okay, you’re free now,” and expect everyone to just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The institutional racism was so pervasive, so deep, it will take decades - maybe a century or more - of constant and steady progress before we begin to see any form of true parity. That would be true for anyone on the receiving end of such institutionalized inequality.
There needn’t be a “but” there. Yes, there are places a white person can live where they are more likely to be victimized (almost always in a property crime) by a black person. But, on average, that is not the case. You could further break down the statistics and look at “stranger” crimes, which are scarier and probably more likely to contribute to social prejudice than things like rape, child abuse, or domestic violence which are often acquaintance crimes. And maybe if you break things down enough, you can make the case for cross-racial victimization narrative. BUT (and I think this but is well-justified), if this phenomenon of cross-racial criminal victimization were the driver of white racism, then we would see higher white racism in the places like the one where you live. In fact, we see the opposite. The white people living in such places tend to be less racist. They demonstrate the kind of nuance on racial issues that the other paragraphs in your post show.
I think it is very helpful to disaggregate two things. One is the kind of arguably in-born fear of “the other” that underlies some degree of racial prejudice. The other is the ideology of white supremacy and its consequences in America. One has biological elements. The other is clearly manmade and traceable to deliberate human decisions. And it is the latter that is 90% responsible for the effects of racism in 21st century America.
When you see white people not being great neighbors, do you have an instinctive reaction to white people?
The root of the problem is when we think “that’s a bad black person” in the same circumstance where if the miscreant was white we’d just think “that’s a bad person.”
Crime tends to be an in race phenomenon for a few reasons that are not really relevant to concerns about random violence.
Relationships tend to be in race (over 1/3 of white murder victims are women being murdered by white men; under 1/4 of black murder victims are black women being murdered by black men), criminals tend to associate with other criminals of the same race (a majority of murder victims are criminals being killed by other criminals, most of this is within the same race).
If you look at who murders whites, its mostly whites (5/6ths of all whites are murdered by other whites). Blacks murder whites at about 10 times the rate that Asians murder whites BUT there are only 3 times as many blacks.
If you look at who murders Blacks, they are overwhelmingly murdered by other blacks (90% of blacks are murdered by other blacks). Whites murder blacks at about 10 times the rate that Asians murder blacks but there are about 20 times as many whites as there are Asians.
If you look at who murders Asians, Asians are murdered by other Asians about 2/3rds of the time (lower than the 5/6ths of white murder victims that are murdered by other whites or the 9/10ths of black murder victims that are murdered by other blacks). Whites murder Asians about 50% more frequently than blacks but there are 6 times as many whites as there are blacks.
This black/white gap may diminish if you factor in socioeconomic status. But if you are concerned about random violence from strangers, its not entirely clear that whites have more to fear from white strangers than black strangers.
Those are good points but greater exposure makes it less convenient to stereotype. People probably over estimate the frequency of stranger on stranger crime but there is a difference in risks along racial lines 9the differences might disappear if you factor in socioeconomic factors
The whole premise is painfully wrong. Humans are horrible at assessing risk. People are scared of many things that present little risk while ignoring much bigger risks on a daily basis. People gravitate to folk and “natural” remedies that are literally useless or actually cause harm. Most people don’t even think twice about the danger of getting in a car even though it’s probably one of the most risky things Americans do on a daily basis.
Judging by my anecdotal evidence of how my dog is scared of a small portable fan, I suspect animal instincts are also also much less reliable than you think.
Believe it or not, I think I actually do sometimes have negative stereotypical impressions of white people. For example, whenever I think of workplace violence, I almost automatically think of a middle-aged white male who has an obsession with guns. Right or wrong, people can associate certain acts with certain individuals. I think prejudice is learned, but it’s not always taught. Sometimes it’s learned through experience.
Even so, prejudice is still wrong whenever it’s applied broadly. As someone said up-thread, even if a bias is natural, our brain can play tricks on us, as it does in myriad ways from optical illusions to false memories. What’s natural is often naturally wrong.
We have a natural urge to piss after three mugs of beer, but civilized people use one of the stalls, not some planter in some dark corner of the bar.